Constraining the executive, a fundamental concern among the framers of the Constitution, has become, increasingly, a full-time job for the other two branches during Trump’s second term. Americans breathed a sigh of relief this week when the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s plan to restrict mail-in ballot delivery that would have severely disrupted the midterm elections, less than 50 days away.

The court left in place a lower-court ruling that blocked the U.S. Postal Service from implementing the new requirements, developed by the Trump administration, due to the potential that millions of voters could be disenfranchised by not having their ballots delivered. Most of the justices that formed the majority did not provide a rationale for their reasoning, since the case was heard on the court’s emergency docket. The majority said simply that the administration’s position was unlikely to succeed and that the legal matters that brought the suit center stage did not favor lifting a lower court decision. Justice Brent Kavanaugh’s brief concurring opinion said that “state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before election.” That’s an understatement to be remembered. Indeed, voting by mail has already begun in various states, including Alabama, North Carolina and Wisconsin, with others just days from starting, including Western states such as Hawaii, Oregon and Washington, in which elections are held primarily or fully with mail ballots.

Under Trump’s unconstitutional and manipulative executive order, designed to insert the presidency into a realm that the framers denied to it, states would have had to turn over to the Trump administration lists of voters’ names and addresses and have certain specific barcodes on ballot envelopes to have them delivered by the Postal Service. A federal district court ruled earlier this month that Trump’s ballot requirements were likely illegal because the Postal Service has no authority to control mail-in voting. Of course, the president is given no constitutional role whatever in conducting or supervising elections. Rather, the Constitution assigns to the states, in Article 1, section 4, principal authority to govern the time, place and manner of elections, while Congress is granted power to alter the regulations, except for “places.”

The Supreme Court’s rejection of Trump’s brazen attempt to usurp authority over elections — offensive to states, advocates of states’ rights and powers, and the grant to Congress of sole and exclusive authority to alter state regulations — was a welcome break from its pattern of supporting Trump’s positions in lawsuits. In many ways, the Trump administration’s raw power grab, like its earlier effort, also rejected by the court, to rewrite the 14th Amendment to subvert birthright citizenship, was too much, even for this compliant court.

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives, aided by seven Republicans who joined Democrats, though none from Idaho, to support a largely symbolic measure to halt the Iran War, in what constituted the latest bipartisan effort to stop Trump’s usurpation of the war power, signaled a welcome use by conscientious members of the House to defend the congressional power over war and peace. Even though the White House will ignore the measure, it is of the utmost importance for Congress to demonstrate its willingness to defend the constitutional enumeration of powers, approved and ratified by the citizenry. A statement of legislative defiance in the face of executive violation of the Constitution, particularly on a matter of such grave importance as Trump’s initiation of a war of choice, which is enormously unpopular and which has cost Americans dearly, in lives lost and injuries sustained, the skyrocketing cost of groceries, the obscene price of gasoline and rising inflation, spiked by the hostilities in Iran, states to the public that there are many compelling reasons to support constitutional governance. The price of ignoring constitutional provisions is a harsh reality. We feel it every day.