The Committees of Correspondence existed because the British Crown controlled colonial mail and used it for surveillance. The first thing revolutionaries built was a secure postal network outside royal control. Benjamin Franklin, fired as colonial postmaster for sympathizing with rebels, became the Continental Congress’s first Postmaster General in 1775. The Constitution puts postal authority in Article I, Section 8, alongside coining money and raising armies. The Post Office Act of 1792 criminalized mail tampering and subsidized newspaper delivery so political information reached every citizen. Mail sanctity was the precondition of the republic.
Kings intercept mail.
Kings destroy mail.
That’s what made them kings.
The entire American founding was organized around the principle that a government which controls who receives information and whose voice reaches the public square is a tyranny.
Trump thinks he will be king.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court sided with his tin-pot crown.
The Ruling
The infamously corrupt Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for a 5-4 majority in USPS v. Konan, held that Americans cannot sue the Postal Service when its employees deliberately steal or destroy their mail.
That’s right, under Trump Americans now have no recourse when their post office targets them and destroys or tampers with their mail.
The case began when Lebene Konan, a landlord in Euless, Texas, alleged that local carriers intentionally refused to deliver mail to her tenants for two years simply because a Black woman leased rooms to white people. She sued under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which waives government immunity for certain lawsuits but bars claims “arising out of the loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission of letters or postal matter.” The 5th Circuit ruled the obvious: that provision covers accidents. Congress wrote it to shield routine delays from litigation, and ONLY routine delays.
Thomas then performed the kind of linguistic integrity breach that would get a first-year law student failed. He tortured language until it served an authoritarian end.
He swapped in a synonym that changes the meaning, then pretended the synonym was there all along. “Loss” became “deprivation.” And since you can be deprived of something when someone steals it, stolen mail has merely been “lost.”
By this logic, a mugging is merely the involuntary transfer of assets. Slavery is simply waking up one day in chains.
Newspaper Archaeology
The “miscarriage” analysis was bolder. Thomas needed to show that ordinary English speakers use the word to describe intentional withholding of mail. The government’s lawyers found zero examples. So Thomas did his own research and produced two citations: an 1893 article from the Carbondale Leader and a 1911 piece from the Kansas City Star. Two newspaper clippings, twenty years apart, at least thirty years before the FTCA was enacted.
As Sotomayor noted in dissent, if this usage were common, better evidence would exist than century-old small-town journalism the justice dug up himself. The opinion reflects a decision made before the reasoning was assembled.
The Quiet Part
Every Republican-appointed justice signed on except Neil Gorsuch, who joined Sotomayor’s dissent. The ruling arrives eight months before midterm elections in which millions of Americans will vote by mail. USPS processed nearly 100 million mail ballots in 2024. Several states conduct elections entirely by mail.
The FTCA created a deterrent: if a postal worker destroyed your ballot, you could sue. The lawsuit was the mechanism of accountability — it uncovered misconduct, generated public records, and created professional consequences. That deterrent is gone. A court will dismiss the case before any investigation begins.
Trump has installed his own man atop the Postal Service. He controls the Justice Department. The federal agencies that would normally investigate ballot destruction answer to a president who has openly telegraphed his intent to undermine the next election. The Supreme Court just removed the one remaining civil remedy available to individual voters whose ballots are deliberately destroyed.
Thomas Against Thomas
Thomas has previously written about the “risk of fraud” posed by mail voting, specifically citing the danger of “stealing absentee ballots.” He identified the correct threat vector. Then in Konan, he eliminated one of the few legal tools designed to deter exactly that threat.
This is a pattern. The same court that treats hypothetical fraud as grounds for restricting voting rights treats actual fraud — committed by government employees against voters — as immunized activity. The risk is only legible when it justifies making voting harder. When it justifies accountability, it disappears.
Margaret Schaack laid this out in the University of Chicago Law Review last year: a ruling for the government in Konan would deny “direct recourse to potential litigants whose ballots are stolen,” embolden postal workers to interfere with elections, and disincentivize USPS from preventing intentional misconduct.
The court ruled for the government anyway.
The founders built a republic on the principle that mail belongs to the people, and a government that tampers with it is a tyranny.
Mail theft is a federal crime.
The Supreme Court just ruled that when the government commits it, the people have no recourse.
The Crown wins, apparently. The midterms are in November.
