We have massive breaking news literally right now. Donald Trump just got the ruling from the United States Supreme Court on his mail-in ballot restrictions. This is the ruling he had been waiting for. He instituted mail-in ballot restrictions via executive order. He wanted to shut down your right to vote by mail, making it exponentially harder to get mail-in ballots to states. The Supreme Court seconds ago, I have the ruling for you right now, ruled in a 7-2 vote that it's going to be blocked, at least until the midterms. It's going to be blocked for now. I mean, truthfully, we're going to talk about what this means, what happens next. I spoke with someone who's running to be the next Florida Attorney General, Jose Javier Rodriguez in Florida. You're not going to want to miss the conversation. As always, I'm getting you this first. Make sure to hit that subscribe button. We're on the road to a million subscribers and I need your help to get there.
So seconds ago, the United States Supreme Court issued the following order. The application for stay presented to Justice Jackson and by her referred to the court is denied. The government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge, the preliminary injunction, and the equitable factors for obtaining emergency relief from the court do not favor a stay. In my view, based on the briefing the court has received at this interim stage, there is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service's statutory authority. That's what Kavanaugh says. But applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the election.
So here is what we have. You have seven justices in the majority saying we will not let this rule go forward. Alito and Thomas dissent, and I'm going to show you the dissent momentarily. To take a step back, Judge Talwani in the District of Massachusetts issued what is called a preliminary injunction. The preliminary injunction said that Donald Trump's executive order on mail-in ballots, which would have prohibited states from sending mail-in ballots, or sorry, from the USPS from sending mail-in ballots to states if they didn't hand over these voter rolls. The ruling paused that. The Supreme Court said, 'We can't undo that essentially right now.' The Trump administration really wanted them to. The Trump administration wanted the Supreme Court to go in and say, you know what, no, we have to overturn this preliminary injunction. We have to allow it to be implemented between now and the midterms. And well, this Supreme Court says no.
And what Kavanaugh says is interesting. He says that listen, the rule is likely constitutional. The rule is likely, here's the thing, the rule works. That's what Kavanaugh says. But implementing it between now and election day would be what is called arbitrary and capricious. Arbitrary and capricious. It would cause too much chaos. And we know that. We know that it would cause a ton of chaos. Now you do have two justices in dissent. You have Alito and Thomas. Not surprisingly. They say the court incorrectly denies the government's application for a stay of a universal injunction that bars implementation of a final rule concerning election ballot mail. Some of the plaintiffs lack standing while the remainder are pursuing a claim that this court has recently called a Hail Mary pass that rarely succeeds. So they argue that these plaintiffs don't have standing. The majority rejected that. And then they also argue that it's a Hail Mary. One of the factors in a preliminary injunction is the likelihood of success. If you are likely to succeed on a claim, you can get a preliminary injunction. The majority says the plaintiffs here are likely to succeed to block the executive order. Thomas and Alito say they are not likely to succeed.
But what it means for you is that this attempt by Donald Trump to undermine mail-in voting between now and election day, halted, done, will not work. Now, the fight is not over. Far from it. Actually, this is going to go back through the courts. It's going to take a while, but it's going to get back to the United States Supreme Court. And I guarantee you this will be a fight between now and 2028. But between now and November, it has been paused. Now, I spoke with JJR, former state senator in Florida running for attorney general. He would be one of the ones suing the Trump administration and he tells me a lot because Florida is officially in play. As always, hit that subscribe button, like, comment, share. See you soon. My conversation with JJR. Super excited today to be joined by former Florida State Senator, current attorney general candidate, Jose Javier Rodriguez. Now, I got to jump right in and ask you, people say Florida is a lost cause. What do you say?
Well, Florida's home. It's not a lost cause by any stretch of the imagination. I've been, you know, traveling the whole state on this campaign trail from Pensacola to Key West and I'll tell you, you know, there people are definitely receptive to the need for change in Tallahassee. You know, I've been a Floridian fighting for a very long time on our behalf to change things in Tallahassee. So, you know, I've seen kind of the ebb and flow of politics. And you know, definitely I would agree that folks are ready for a change.
What are you hearing from folks on the ground right now? Because I think we've seen a major shift, especially in the Hispanic communities in places like Florida and Texas where they may have voted for the president, but now we're having a bit of buyer remorse. Is that what you're seeing right now?
Absolutely. It's what I'm seeing. I mean, I think it's not just with Latino voters. It's all across the board. You know, a lot of people have different reasons why they vote and people sometimes switch parties one election to another trying to, you know, look for something better. But I am definitely seeing that, you know, obviously on the campaign trail I'm talking about, you know, trying to improve people's lives through the AG's office. So one of the things I have to do in addition to telling them what I'm going to do is just kind of open people's imagination a little bit because we haven't had a real AG's office for so long. A lot of times people could be forgiven here in Florida for not really having the right set of expectations about what the AG can do for us. And that's not your fault. It's because we've been living in Florida for so long.
I want to ask you about that. You had Attorney General Ashley Moody, now United States Senator. Now you have an attorney general who previously served as the governor's chief of staff, was never actually elected, was appointed in that role. There was a big scandal recently over the charity, Hope Florida, and the attorney general's role in all of that, especially Ashley Moody when she was attorney general. Can you talk a little bit about that scandal and what can you do as attorney general to really uncover some of the corruption we've seen?
Yeah, for sure. So, the attorney general is supposed to be the people's lawyer. That's a campaign slogan, but it's also the job description of the attorney general for Florida and many other states. And so, the job is to represent the interests of the people of Florida. And so, one of the things that attorneys general do across the country is tackle Medicaid fraud. In our health care system, federal dollars are very precious. And so whenever somebody's taking those dollars in one way or another, the attorney general's job is to go and get that money back and to prevent that fraud and prosecute it. And instead there's several problems in Florida. Number one, even the Trump administration said that Florida is a hot spot for Medicaid fraud. And so, not only is my opponent not doing anything about it, as you just mentioned, he was chief of staff to the governor, now he's served as the appointed attorney general. Not only is he not doing anything about that fraud, letting it get to horrifying levels under his watch, and that is quoting the Trump administration, he's also at the center, as you said, of the biggest scandal in Tallahassee, perhaps the biggest criminal political scheme we've seen in modern times here in Florida. My opponent ran a criminal scheme to steal $10 million out of the Medicaid program. $10 million that was supposed to come back to the Medicaid program, redirected it through nonprofits and into political committees that he controlled and then used that money to campaign against popular ballot initiatives, the marijuana and abortion ballot initiatives in 2024. Right? So there's a lot of pieces there to unpack. What he should be doing, you know, which is protecting us from theft, and what he did was theft, but in order to then use public money to campaign against ballot initiatives, which is not something we've seen in, I don't know when the last time we've ever seen that.
