A week after the Supreme Court allowed construction of a ballroom that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. described as “likely illegal” to proceed, the decision is reverberating in ways that are more consequential.

At the time, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the court’s decision to lift a temporary injunction reflected the Trump administration’s “catch-me-if-you-can” attitude.

This week, that same approach appears to be driving unauthorized and seemingly unconstitutional work on Donald Trump’s proposed 250-foot memorial arch in Washington. More importantly, it is also visible in Trump’s push to bypass the usual legal steps so the Supreme Court will approve his effort to stop the delivery of mail ballot applications and mail ballots unless states allow the Postal Service to determine whether voters are citizens through an untested system the government still has not explained or defended.

The Justice Department is apparently trying to frame its request narrowly, focusing on whether to lift a federal court injunction that has halted the process. That approach may be intended to avoid a ruling on whether the Postal Service reviews are also “likely illegal.”

Even so, the pattern is familiar: act first, then seek permission later.

North Carolina’s deadline to mail out its mail application ballots was Friday, before any resolution of the legal disputes, although the Postal Service said it hurriedly approved the envelopes the state is using with individual barcodes. State officials met to confirm that ballots were being sent out without knowing what the legal disputes might mean. The stakes are broad: mail voting has become a major channel for ballots in recent federal elections, with tens of millions of voters returning ballots by mail, so any disruption to Postal Service delivery of ballot materials this close to November could affect a large share of the electorate.

Questions over stopping mail ballots

For those who have not followed the daily back-and-forth over mail ballot delivery, the dispute can be summarized this way.

Trump wants to influence the November elections, and future elections, that pollsters and pundits increasingly see as running against Republicans. He has pushed for early redrawing of congressional districts to create districts that appear more Republican. He has backed unsuccessful legislation requiring documents to vote, which would disenfranchise voters. He is also sending monitors — and possibly Homeland Security personnel or even military troops — to polling places to intimidate voters.

Despite evidence to the contrary, Trump claims there is “fraud” among voters using mail ballots and wants them eliminated. His method is to use the Postal Service to refuse delivery unless states comply with an untested, unexplained process in which the agency would somehow vet the citizenship of every person on voter registration rolls.

Many states, especially Democratic-voting states, have told him that the Constitution assigns election administration to the states, not the federal government and certainly not a president’s executive order. That has led to court battles, including a Boston federal court temporarily blocking the Postal Service from proceeding and, this week, considering whether to make that order permanent. The states’ position draws on the Constitution’s Elections Clause, which gives state legislatures the primary power to set the “Times, Places and Manner” of congressional elections, with Congress — not the president — holding only an overriding authority to alter those rules.

The Supreme Court previously ruled that opponents had mistakenly sought an injunction before the rule had even been written. On the same day, the Postal Service issued its rules, which are difficult to understand even for Justice Department litigators.

Under the new rule, for example, finding even one incorrect voter registration in a batch of 10,000 would allow the Postal Service to stop delivery of all the mail in that batch. No one has explained how a voter registration — not a vote, only a registration — would amount to fraud by a noncitizen who may be eligible to vote in a local election.

The government is assigning scores of agents to review publicly available voter registration databases.

Federal Judge Indira Talwani has now made permanent her order blocking the Postal Service from refusing delivery of mail ballot materials, indefinitely. According to the report, Talwani was frustrated in court by government lawyers who could not explain the Postal Service rules. She wrote that the Trump administration’s argument that this was only a rule change for the Postal Service “rings hollow. The final rule explicitly and exclusively regulates election mail.”

The government immediately appealed, including an emergency request to the Supreme Court. That emergency application now joins a growing docket of election-procedure disputes reaching the justices in the final months before the midterms, with lower courts split or unresolved on several of them.

Where is the emergency?

There is, of course, an “emergency” dimension to the mail ballot dispute: the prospect of election chaos.

That is the kind of chaos Trump appears to want for these elections. It does not take much imagination to see him trying to declare null any results he views as harmful to his personal or party interests. Commentators are already speculating about emergency declarations that could allow military deployment on U.S. streets, a repeat of the unrest of Jan. 6, 2021, and prolonged court fights over “election fraud” without evidence.

By contrast, the same week brought the start of ground preparation for a Trump-backed huge arch in Washington, threats to dismantle the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the completion of the gilded White House ballroom project with public money unauthorized by Congress. None of those developments are being treated as an emergency or as requiring immediate action.

Yet the pattern of doing it now, before questions can be settled, has become the order of the day.

The pace of the law, the role of checks and balances, and even voting rights are now secondary to whatever Trump is said to be acting on in the middle of the night.

“Catch me if you can” is not the way to run government, regardless of policy views. The Constitution to which Trump took an oath calls for congressional review and, in this case, gives the power to the states.

As with children, the attitude calls for a huge turnout in November with an unmistakable “Time Out” message at its center.