All posts tagged "john roberts"

'We're worried': Experts fear Supreme Court will follow tariff case with huge Trump gift

If the U.S. Supreme Court issues a decision in a high-profile redistricting case within the next few weeks — likely weakening the Voting Rights Act, as experts anticipate — Republicans are poised to gerrymander as many as eight House seats in their favor ahead of November’s midterms, a nonpartisan political reform group warns in a new report.

Long-term effects could be more drastic, resulting in 15 or more districts gerrymandered to benefit the GOP in 2028, if the Supreme Court weakens Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 in its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, according to Issue One.

The Court heard oral arguments in the case involving racial gerrymandering in Louisiana late last year and could issue a decision anytime between now and June.

The timing of the decision will determine how aggressive redistricting might be, which could “dramatically decrease minority representation” and “spur another gerrymandering war,” Michael McNulty, Issue One policy director and a report co-author, told Raw Story.

McNulty called Louisiana v. Callais “the most important redistricting case” since Rucho v. Common Cause, a 2019 ruling that determined federal courts cannot address alleged cases of partisan gerrymandering, of the sort now pursued by Republican- and Democratic-held states alike.

“We're worried that [the Supreme Court] could eliminate the last meaningful federal check on discriminatory maps,” McNulty said.

“If the Supreme Court does weaken or dismantle Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, it would basically leave … no real federal-level guardrails against diluting racial votes.”

‘The precipice’

Experts have expressed concern for months that the Court will issue a 6-3 conservative majority decision to weaken or even declare unconstitutional Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits racial discrimination against voters.

In this scenario, conservatives led by Chief Justice John Roberts would affirm a district court ruling that a Louisiana congressional map redrawn in 2024 to create a second Black-majority district is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

That’s despite the fact that the map was redrawn to ensure Black representation after a federal court determined redistricting based on the 2020 census was likely in violation of federal law.

In that map, only one of Louisiana’s six districts represented a majority of Black voters, though one-third of the state’s population is Black.

“I'm concerned based on the oral arguments in that case and the way this Roberts Court has been playing a pretty ruthless game of chess against our voting rights and fair representation, that the Roberts Court is poised to decimate the protections … to prevent the dilution of Black votes and Black and brown voting in America,” said Lisa Graves, executive director of public policy watchdog group True North Research and co-founder of Court Accountability, a nonprofit.

Graves, who last year published the book Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights, said Roberts started his legal career “attacking” Section 2 of the VRA and was questioned during nomination hearings over his “mean-spirited view” of the law.

“John Roberts sits at the precipice of potentially winning what he could not win as a Justice Department lawyer by using the Court to advance his long-standing partisan goal of basically protecting his party at any cost and the cost of our voting rights,” Graves said.

‘Immediate and severe’

The Issue One report argues that consequences would be “immediate and severe” if the Supreme Court hampers or eliminates states’ ability “to use race-conscious remedies to comply with federal voting rights law,” the outcome of siding with the challenger in Louisiana v. Callais.

“Black voters would likely lose a significant amount of representation in Congress,” McNulty said.

“We're very concerned about the impact of any gerrymandering, but this in particular has a double negative impact because it's taking away from representation, and it's specifically from minority representation, if it were to happen.”

If the Court issued such a decision in late February or early March, aggressive redistricting could lead to gerrymandering five to eight House seats to benefit Republicans in the midterms and reduce Black representation in states including Florida, Georgia, Missouri, South Carolina and Tennessee, the report says.

The Court issued another much-anticipated decision on Friday, striking down President Donald Trump’s global tariffs.

An April or May ruling on Louisiana v. Callais would reduce the risk of further gerrymandering before this year’s midterms but two to four seats could still be affected, with Florida the most likely to try to redraw maps, the report says.

Even if the Court waits to rule until June, before it enters its summer recess, it could allow states such as Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas to redraw maps for 2028 and beyond, resulting in 15 to 18 gerrymandered districts, McNulty said.

“If [the Court] were to gut Section Two, it would essentially allow state legislatures, or those making decisions in each of the states, to dilute the vote of primarily Black voters … such that it would advantage Republicans in all cases,” McNulty said.

“These are not gerrymanders that would favor Democrats because these are red-controlled, GOP-controlled state legislatures that would use every opportunity to essentially … gerrymander based on race, and that would favor the GOP in all cases.”

Mitchell Brown, senior voting rights counsel for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, said redistricting can primarily be challenged by alleging intentional discrimination, racial gerrymandering or violations of the VRA.

A Court ruling that weakens the VRA will make it harder to challenge maps that are “unfair and inequitable for Black and brown voters,” he said.

“It’s going to have potentially a huge impact on our ability to bring redistricting cases,” Brown said. “We have to now have smoking gun evidence of you discriminating against Black or brown voters.”

‘Last guardrail’

Issue One fights gerrymandering as “an attack on democracy and an attack on voters and representation,” McNulty said.

The nonpartisan group advocates for reforms including banning mid-decade redistricting, establishing national standards for drawing congressional maps, and requiring states to use independent redistricting commissions.

“Congress needs to step up and take action,” McNulty said.

“We need to stop the madness, and there's zero reason why they should be letting politicians pick their voters anytime, anywhere, and diminishing the voice of voters, as they've done through the decade.”

Graves, who was chief counsel for nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee from 2002-05, said if the Supreme Court weakens Section 2 of the VRA, it would “basically put its fists on the scale in favor of the party that appointed this majority faction,” and would “bleach out the Black representation in Congress.”

“I would consider such a ruling by this court to be an illegitimate dictate from this captured court, the Roberts Court, that is acting in a way that is arrogant and inconsistent with the role of the Supreme Court in trying to displace the proper role of Congress in protecting the voting rights of Americans,” Graves said.

McNulty said the VRA was “the last remaining guardrail” to fight racism in elections.

If the right-wing justices weaken the Voting Rights Act, Graves said, it would show “outrageous hostility” toward Black voters.

Such justices, Graves said, are “not just willing, but eager, to help their party entrench their power to secure basically political minority rule over the rights of majorities in their states and to make Congress whiter and more Republican than is merited by the diversity of American society.”

Supreme Court clerks hit with nondisclosure contracts amid panic over leaks: report

The Supreme Court has come under fire after insiders revealed staffers are being told to sign formal contracts opening them to legal action if they reveal secrets.

Representatives could previously rely on informal pledges from justices based on longstanding norms — but those relaxed understandings could be at an end, an expert claimed Monday. An overhaul and fresh contract for the Supreme Court is set to come into play which, according to Jeffrey L. Fisher, co-director of the Supreme Court litigation clinic at Stanford Law School, is a sign the court is not as trusting as it once was.

Speaking to the New York Times, Fisher, a former clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens, said, "They feel under the microscope and are unwilling to rely simply on trust."

Switching from the informal trust to formal confidentiality contracts within the Supreme Court has been branded by law professor Mark Fenster as a "sign of the court's own weakness."

Nondisclosure agreements were imposed by Chief Justice John Roberts in late 2024. Jodi Kantor, writing in the New York Times, wrote that these NDAs were a result of unusual leaks and ethical lapses.

She wrote, "The chief justice acted after a series of unusual leaks of internal court documents, most notably of the decision overturning the right to abortion, and news reports about ethical lapses by the justices.

"Trust in the institution was languishing at a historic low. Debate was intensifying over whether the black box institution should be more transparent. Instead, the chief justice tightened the court’s hold on information.

"Its employees have long been expected to stay silent about what they witness behind the scenes. But starting that autumn, in a move that has not been previously reported, the chief justice converted what was once a norm into a formal contract, according to five people familiar with the shift."

The report stated, "The New York Times has not reviewed the new agreements. But people familiar with them said they appeared to be more forceful and understood them to threaten legal action if an employee revealed confidential information. Clerks and members of the court’s support staff signed them in 2024, and new arrivals have continued to do so, the people said."

Kantor went on to suggest new proposals introduced internally are "more forceful and understood them to threaten legal action if an employee revealed confidential information."

'They knew': MS NOW's Morning Joe shames 'scared' Supreme Court for failure to stop Trump

John Roberts' Supreme Court is so afraid of President Donald Trump that it is actively avoiding standing up to him, an MS NOW host said Tuesday.

MS NOW's "Morning Joe" co-host Joe Scarborough asked "where are the Republicans?" as he hammered the conservative majority Supreme Court for fearing Trump's backlash instead of facing him head-on. Scarborough argued it was time for the high court to "reaffirm the law of the land," as federal agents have detained American citizens and incited violence in Minnesota and Trump demands that Greenland be seized and potentially destroys NATO.

Scarborough pointed to the Supreme Court's lack of action as the reason many of Trump's actions have unfolded.

"Telling generals and admirals, 'Hey, we can actually practice our military tactics on Americans in American cities,' [Trump] said that at that meeting where they called together all the generals and admirals," Scarborough said. "So again, so much of this is on the Supreme Court, sitting back, saying nothing, doing nothing, not ruling on tariffs, allowing Donald Trump when he gets upset with a foreign country because they won't just hand him land, the threatening of tariffs and everybody stands up for that foreign country, an ally, a close ally.

"He then threatens other allies that are saying they will stand with the ally Donald Trump is threatening."

Scarborough also said that Trump's threat to send troops to American cities is something the Supreme Court could have pushed back on.

"It is so un-American. It is so unconstitutional and it is so right in front of the Roberts court and they sit back and they say nothing and they do nothing and so much of the chaos that you've been seeing over the past six months could have been so easily cleared up by the Roberts court if they had simply told the truth and acted quickly on tariffs, what they know to be the law on tariffs," Scarborough said.

"If they had stepped forward and said what they knew the law was on using American troops for domestic policing. They know that's illegal. They know that's unconstitutional and yet, they continue to do nothing."

He argued that it was up to the high court to protect Americans, however, the conservative court has shown no signs of resisting Trump.

"A temporary order at the end of the year — not enough, not enough — they need to not even close the door on these actions, they need to reaffirm the law of the land and they're too scared to even do that," Scarborough added.

Trump's shameless enabler just signaled he may be having second thoughts

I was struck by the inspirational tone of the year-end report issued by Chief Justice John Roberts.

Roberts went back to basics with his review of the fundamentals spelled out by Thomas Paine in his Common Sense pamphlet and the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence. Although the Declaration of Independence is not part of U.S. law, Roberts viewed the founding document as having “played a signal role in the nation’s constitutional, statutory, and common law.”

Roberts then highlighted points in U.S. history when the nation made progress in vindicating the promise of the Declaration. He pointed to the abolition of slavery in the 13th Amendment, the recognition of women’s right to vote in the 19th Amendment, the recognition of equal rights in Brown v. Board of Education, and the adoption of the landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Roberts saw these events as part of the “never ending quest to fulfill the Constitution’s promise of a ‘more perfect union’.”

Roberts wrote: “These national accomplishments illustrate that the responsibilities for livings up to the promises of the Declaration rest on all three branches of government as well as well as on each successive generation of Americans.” Roberts placed particular emphasis on the critical role of federal judges in this process. Roberts wrote that the judges “must continue to decide the cases before us according to our oath, doing equal right to the poor and to the rich, and performing all our duties faithfully and impartially under the Constituion and laws of the United States.”

I consider the stirring words of this report to be truly inspirational. But what was the Chief Justice actually signaling to the nation with his words? Roberts devoted much of his leadership role as Chief Justice to undermining the “national accomplishments” he now celebrates. And in ruling on shadow docket cases, Roberts has repeatedly sided with the majority in undermining the role of lower federal court judges as bastions against abuses of executive authority.

Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. 181 (2023). Roberts in SFFA overruled decades of affirmative acton cases going back to the Bakke decision in the 1970s. The majority adopted what Roberts viewed as a “colorblind” approach to equal protection. Roberts rejected the theory that the Reconstruction era amendments, like the Thirteenth Amendment, allowed the government to give any affirmative relief to AfricanAmericans who had been subjected to the horrors of slavery. At the same time, Roberts ignored the key role Brown played in providing affirmative relief to African Americans by ordering the integration of public schools.
Roberts took an indirect swipe atBrown when he wrote a plurality opinion in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 551 U.S. 701 (2007). In a split decision, the Court found it unconstitutional for a school district to use race as a factor in assigning students to schools to achieve racial diversity, unless the district was remedying a prior history of de jure Roberts wrote bluntly in his plurality opinion: “The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013). Roberts in Shelby County struck down the formula used for the preclearance requirement under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Under this formula in Section 4(b), those states with a long history of racial discrimination had to obtain preclearance from the Justice Department to make changes that might undermine the voting rights of African Americans. Roberts considered the formula in this landmark civil rights legislation to be outdated and no longer necessary.
In this term, the Roberts Court now has before it a case where the Court could strike down a more fundamental part of the Voting Rights Act – the Section 2 provision prohibiting racial discrimination in voting rights. See, Louisiana v. Callais, No. 24-109. The specific question presented in Louisiana is whether the Voting Rights Act still allows voters of color to challenge racially discriminatory voting maps in court.
On many questions associated with separation of powers, Roberts has consistently sided with the majority in using the Court’s emergency docket to give the Trump administration sweeping powers under its unitary executive theory. And in so doing, Roberts rejected the power of lower court judges to issue temporary injunctions to rein in abuses of executive authority.

So now, what are we to make of the Chief Justice’s inspirational year-end report? Is Roberts having second thoughts about his prior actions because of the imminent threat to democracy posed by Trump? The recent Trump invasion of Venezuala may feed that theory. If that is Roberts’ thinking, he could be signaling a change in course on how he approaches critical questions like tariffs, birthright citizenship, racial discrimination, or separation of powers.

The other possibility is that Roberts is presenting his inspirational theme just to placate an increasing angry public. Polling suggests the public no longer holds the Supreme Court in particularly high esteem. Roberts cannot reverse this trend with empty platitudes.

We should have some idea by the end of this term if the year-end report has any lasting significance.

Daniel R. Schramm is a retired lawyer on inactive status with the Missouri Bar who practiced law for a total of 45 years. When he was engaged in the practice of law, Schramm concentrated in appellate advocacy, estate planning and business transactions. Since his retirement, he has continued to write articles on legal topics in Substack and other publications.

Legal expert lays out 4 ways to rein in Supreme Court

Should Democrats retake the White House in 2028 and have majorities in both chambers of Congress, one legal expert is arguing there are numerous ways the six-member conservative majority on the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) could be brought to heel.

In a Monday essay for Slate, legal writer and attorney Mark Joseph Stern directly addressed a reader's concern that no matter what laws Democrats may try to pass under a potential new Democratic majority government, the Supreme Court could simply strike those laws down. Stern countered that there are several ways to re-establish Congress' powers and prevent SCOTUS from acting as an unelected super-legislature.

First, Stern argued that Congress should immediately grant statehood to both Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. as part of a "suite of structural reforms." He argued this was a necessary step to take in order to make sure that sparsely populated conservative states like South Dakota and Wyoming aren't over-represented in Congress (both territories have already passed statehood resolutions, meaning all Congress needs to do is pass a bill to admit them).

"Remember, the senators who voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court represented fewer people than the senators who voted to oppose him," Stern wrote. "That is a huge structural problem that Congress can fix."

Second, Stern proposed that Congress pass a law that would require the Supreme Court to have a 7-2 supermajority to strike down any legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by the president. He noted that the Nebraska and North Dakota state constitutions already have amendments requiring a supreme court supermajority in order to toss out any laws, and called on a potential future Democratic government to "put it in there that the law cannot be struck down unless seven justices agree that it’s unconstitutional."

Stern also advocated for imposing a strict time limit on the judicial review process, calling the Supreme Court to no longer be able to evaluate the constitutionality of any new laws more than one calendar year after their passage. He observed that the Supreme Court's 2012 review of the Affordable Care Act took place after Democrats had already lost their majority in the House of Representatives in 2010, and that a one-year limit would mean that Congress' partisan makeup would still be the same if the Court threw out any laws passed by that Congress and lawmakers wanted to try passing the law again.

The Slate author described these proposed reforms as a "good-faith effort by Democrats to recalibrate the balance of power by reestablishing Congress’ primacy and diminishing the Supreme Court’s untouchable supremacy." However, he allowed for the possibility that these reforms may fall short. In that event, he called on Democrats to "add four seats" and pack the Supreme Court with new Democratic appointees.

"The current Republican justices have already shredded adherence to precedent. A future liberal majority should say no to unilateral disarmament and apply the same rules," Stern wrote. "That is how Democrats put the court back in its place: by undoing its attacks on democracy and restoring the constitutional settlement the Roberts court has spent years dismantling."

Click here to read Stern's full article in Slate (subscription required).

These 6 treacherous Trump lackeys will never be forgotten — or forgiven

The losers in political battles often insist that history will prove them right and their opponents wrong. As comforting a thought as this may be for people licking their political wounds, it is rarely true. History forgets far more than it remembers. Apart from a few major players, even people who gain a degree of prominence in the politics of their time will eventually disappear into the black hole of advancing years. Their victories, defeats, glories, and disgraces — all blown away by the wind of time like dust on their gravestones.

If there is any group today that deserves the censure of history, it is the Republican members of Congress. Faced with the existential threat that President Donald Trump poses to our democracy, their nearly unanimous response has been to worshipfully give him whatever he wants — reducing their role to little more than handmaidens to a would-be tyrant.

These people have been given the honor of serving as representatives in the United States Congress. And all the Constitution asks of them in return is to take and honor an oath to support and defend the Constitution.

One by one, these Republicans raise their right hands and take the oath of office. Then one by one, they quickly throw that oath away.

But as deserving as these Republican politicians are of history’s censure, most will likely escape it. There are just too many of them — 535 total senators and representatives, with approximately 272 of them currently Republican. Trump will, of course, be remembered and judged severely. The same goes for a few prominent congressional leaders. But as for the rest, within a relatively brief time, as measured by the long view of history, they will be forgotten, their sins forever interred with them in their graves.

But for justices of the United States Supreme Court, it is a different story. Unlike the Congress, the Supreme Court is made up of only nine justices. And of those nine current justices, only six have consistently supported Trump’s authoritarian actions. When it comes to the judgment of history, these few justices will have no place to hide and no crowd to be lost in. If they continue to support Trump’s ever-growing list of power grabs, their treachery, and yes it would be treachery, will never be forgotten and certainly never be forgiven.

The origin story of the current far-right Supreme Court majority begins 43 years ago, in 1982, when Ronald Reagan was president and car radios blasted out songs like “Eye of the Tiger” and “I Love Rock and Roll.” That was also the year the Federalist Society was born. Best described as a breeding ground for right-wing judges, it has led a decades-long quest by wealthy conservatives to produce a dependably right-wing Supreme Court.

They knew doing this would take time, and they were prepared to play the long game. The Federalist Society’s core strategy is to embrace and groom conservative law students. With easy access to almost limitless funding from their wealthy conservative patrons, the society has had no need to pinch pennies.

They have helped to establish Federalist Society chapters in law schools across the country, financed scholarships to Federalist Society seminars, arranged social opportunities for student members to meet and converse with prominent judicial conservatives, and much more. Later, after law school, the group works to connect prized prospects with leading right-wing judges for prestigious clerkships, putting them on the path to future judicial appointments of their own.

All six of the current far-right justices have strong connections with the group. They grew up as lawyers in an environment that strongly encourages the use of the law as a weapon to remake America into a far-right paradise. These six far-right justices are called conservatives, but this is true only in the political sense of the word. They are anything but conservative in the judicial sense.

Traditional judicial conservatism is based upon things like respect for precedent and a commitment to judicial restraint, neither of which in any way describes the actions of these six justices. Not only have they repeatedly overruled well-established precedents, they have shown no consistent judicial philosophy in doing so. And even when they do purport to follow a particular judicial philosophy, such as originalism, it is often little more than a smokescreen.

One “good” example from an earlier time is District of Columbia v. Heller, decided in 2008, in which the Supreme Court, for the first time, held that the Second Amendment creates a private right to gun possession. In writing the majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia claimed to follow an originalist view of the Constitution and that history supported this view. The audaciousness of this claim led to a number of conservative as well as liberal constitutional scholars rejecting the court’s rationale.

Even then, it was the political result that mattered, not the jurisprudence. This court isn’t about judicial philosophy and legal principles. It is about the raw application of power for political ends — political ends that are largely contrary to the preferences of a majority of the American public.

But then, why would it be otherwise? Does anyone believe that the small collection of massively wealthy families who funded this conservative judicial revolution did so out of concern for judicial philosophy? Of course not. These wealthy families spent their hard-earned money — or perhaps more accurately in many cases their hard-inherited money — for concrete political ends. They wanted to increase their wealth and power even further by reducing government regulation, destroying labor unions, cutting worker protections, ending government protection of the environment, force feeding right-wing religious dogma, and the rest of the fat catalog of the daydreams of the greed-is-good crowd.

And if these ends can best be achieved by flushing functioning democracy down the toilet, they will shed few tears. And if one is to judge by their actions since Trump returned to the presidency, the current right-wing justices seem ready to drive the train.

But there is a tenuous basis for hope. One characteristic shared by almost all Supreme Court justices is a profound concern over their historical legacy. These are smart people. Even living within the isolating fog of the far-right, at least a few of these justices must recognize they are dancing with a legacy of infamy. If defending democracy and the constitutional separation of power is not enough to motivate them to push back against Trump’s authoritarian actions, perhaps their certain condemnation by history will be.

The Dred Scott opinion was handed down almost 170 years ago, but the shame of the decision hasn’t lessened with time. The primary legacy Chief Justice Roger B. Taney left behind was a full-throated defense of the evil of slavery and racism. And that is how history remembers and damns him.

Few things are guaranteed in this world, but one thing seems certain. If the Supreme Court majority continues down the road of aiding and abetting Trump’s quest for dictatorial power, they are inviting an infamy far worse than Taney’s.

This is something the six justices should remember, because history will never forget.

Steven Day practices law in Wichita, Kansas and is the author of The Patriot's Grill, a novel about a future America in which democracy no longer exists, but might still return.

'Not too late': Chief Justice John Roberts told legacy can be saved — but it has to be now

An analyst warned Tuesday that it's now time for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to stand up to President Donald Trump.

In an opinion piece for The Guardian, journalist Steven Greenhouse argued that Roberts has "spearheaded a rightwing judicial revolution that took a wrecking ball to many precedents, laws and institutions. Some have called him the worst chief justice since Roger Taney, who wrote the horrific Dred Scott decision of 1857, which held that enslaved Black people couldn’t be citizens."

The high court — and Roberts specifically — have given Trump even more power, he wrote.

"The bottom line is that under John Roberts, the court has gone far to weaken the pillars of our democracy; it has given the super-rich and giant corporations huge sway over our elections, greatly weakened protections for minority voters, encouraged out-of-control gerrymandering, handed more and more power to the most authoritarian president in history and emboldened him to act lawlessly. In other words, the Roberts court has done much of what an authoritarian ruler would want," Greenhouse wrote.

Roberts' rulings have also justified "the naive conclusion that state lawmakers’ desire to adopt discriminatory voting rules had largely disappeared." The justice has attempted to gut the Voting Rights Act, which aimed to guard states and local municipalities from drawing maps or election rules based on racial discrimination.

"But with each passing year, it has become increasingly clear that Roberts will be remembered as the chief justice who helped wreck numerous institutions vital to our democracy – they include fair, non-gerrymandered elections, a sane campaign finance system, the Voting Rights Act’s protections of minority voters, and the bedrock notion that presidents are not above the law," Greenhouse wrote.

Roberts could change that, the journalist pointed out, and he might have shown some skepticism of Trump over his tariffs, adding "it’s not too late for Roberts to begin to redeem his reputation and legacy. He showed some signs of doing this in early November in signaling that he thought Trump had violated the law in imposing his 'emergency' tariffs on dozens of countries without clear authorization from Congress. We can hope that the tariffs case will serve as a long-awaited, much-needed first step for Roberts and the conservative supermajority to develop a backbone and begin issuing a series of rulings that curb Trump’s unending power grab."

"If they don’t stand up to Trump’s lawlessness soon, we may truly lose our democracy," he wrote.

John Roberts' 'corrupt bargain' exposed in eye-popping new analysis

The Supreme Court’s John Roberts' ‘corrupt bargain’ reveals what led to President Donald Trump's "abusive reign," a new analysis found.

Roberts and the high court are in a "love triangle" with Republicans and billionaires, Mother Jones wrote Wednesday.

" Trump needed Roberts to win, and Trump’s victory came just in time for Roberts," according to Mother Jones.

"His corrupt bargain has had an exorbitant cost, both for the nation and the court’s reputation," the outlet reports.

The conservative majority justices have paved the way for the president's "lawless second term."

“The court has traded public legitimacy as a significant basis for its authority in favor of just alignment with the GOP," Harvard Law professor Ryan Doerfler told the outlet.

And the justices appear to be on Trump's side, allowing the courts to be used as a shadow docket while "the Roberts court had handed Trump almost unlimited power to defy the law without accountability. And once Trump was back in office, it weaponized the shadow docket to bless his lawless actions, reversing lower court findings, often without a word of explanation. As of this writing, the right-wing majority has used the shadow docket to uphold Trump’s actions roughly 90 percent of the time, repeatedly bailing him out of any obligation to follow the law."

It's puzzled lower courts and added more questions to the high court's decisions.

"As the justices keep rushing to Trump’s aid, Democrats grow more open to reform if they return to power—and thus Roberts lashes himself more tightly to Trump’s mast," Mother Jones reports.

“It seems like what the court is trying to do is maximize the likelihood of future GOP control,” said Doerfler, who studies the judiciary's role in democracy.

With a legal attack on the Voting Rights Act in the current term, the court will also consider "the last remaining limits on billionaires financing campaigns; it’s no mystery how the justices are likely to rule."

It's now a matter of whether the Roberts court will push to secure a permanent GOP court.

"Roberts didn’t just strip political power from ordinary people—he handed it to billionaires," Mother Jones reports. "His decisive vote in 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC lifted restrictions on political spending, while ludicrously insisting it would not 'lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption.' Political spending by billionaires has since increased 160-fold. There’s a direct line between the ruling and Elon Musk buying Trump the White House with more than $290 million and being given free rein to fire his companies’ regulators in return."

Trump just 'laid bare' the 'absurdity' of John Roberts' catastrophic decision: analysis

President Donald Trump just "laid bare" the "absurdity" of Chief Justice John Roberts' catastrophic Supreme Court decision, according to new analysis published Wednesday.

A new Mother Jones report from reporter Pema Levy describes how Trump can make the decision to demand the Justice Department pay him $230 million of taxpayer money "because thanks to the Supreme Court’s recent decisions, the executive branch could accurately be described by King Louis XIV—L’état, c’est Trump."

That "colossal cash transfer" Trump is requesting can happen due to the high court opinions from Roberts, "in which the court has shifted the fundamental structure of American government such that federal agencies, including the Justice Department, are mere extensions of the president’s will."

The reality is that Roberts set the groundwork for Trump's latest "shakedown."

"The absurdity of Roberts’ decision was laid bare Tuesday: The president gets to pay himself hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars, because he controls all executive branch personnel and all of their decisions, and there’s probably nothing anyone can do about it," Levy writes. "It sure doesn’t feel like our democratic accountability has increased. Of course, Congress could and should pass a law prohibiting such payments, and dare the Supreme Court to strike it down—but this Congress is unlikely to do even that bare minimum in response."

Trump wants to be compensated after the investigations over Russia's involvement and interference in the 2016 election, and Trump's alleged mishandling of classified documents that he took after leaving the White House the first time.

"Now that he’s back in the White House, Trump plans to make the government pay for its appropriate use of its ability to investigate and prosecute to safeguard our democracy. And he grasps the fact that he has the absolute power to do that," Levy writes.

He even admitted it.

“With the country, it’s interesting, because I’m the one that makes the decision,” Trump said Tuesday in the Oval Office, following questions about the payments he requested.

“That decision would have to go across my desk. And it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself,” Trump said.

Roberts has claimed to be increasing democratic accountability in his opinions.

"But at this point, we can all see the mess he’s created. A man who takes from the voters to line his pockets is not feeling all that accountable to anyone," Levy writes.

This man wants to steal your vote — and cement GOP minority control

America is at war over partisan gerrymandering. The Republican-controlled Texas legislature has just gerrymandered voting districts to create five more safe Republican US House seats, as demanded by Donald Trump.

Then Missouri Republicans were ordered by Trump to enact a gerrymander to increase the states’ disproportionate Republican minority from 6-2 to 7-1 by cutting Democratic-leaning Kansas City districts down the middle. Now Vice President JD Vance is urging Indiana Republicans to gerrymander the only two remaining Democratic House districts out of existence.

In response, California Governor Gavin Newsom has proposed a ballot measure that would temporarily suspend California’s independent redistricting commission until 2030 and let the Democratic legislature redistrict Republicans out of five seats to match what Republicans have done in Texas.

A large majority of voters nationally don’t think partisan gerrymandering should be legal. According to a recent YouGov poll, 69 percent of Americans think partisan gerrymandering should be illegal and only 9 percent think it should be legal.

Chief Justice John Roberts (and all of his Republican colleagues on the Supreme Court) disagree with this vast majority of Americans. In 2019, Roberts’ 5-4 majority opinion in Rucho v Common Cause (the chief joined by the four other Republicans on the Court) held that federal courts do not have the constitutional power to prevent partisan gerrymandering and restored blatantly partisan gerrymanders in North Carolina and Maryland.

Since Roberts’ decision, partisan gerrymandering has exploded. According to Michael Li of the Brennan Center, partisan gerrymandering has given Republicans 16 extra seats in the House. Without that, Democrats would have a House majority and Republicans would not have been able to pass the so-called “big beautiful bill” which has led to a government shutdown.

As the Brennan Center states, “Gerrymandering decided House control.”

Roberts’ opinion conceded that partisan gerrymandering is “incompatible with democratic institutions” and “leads to results that reasonably seem unjust.” But Roberts then invented a procedural technicality to bar federal courts from doing anything about it or to uphold the Constitutional principle of “one person, one vote.”

Roberts claimed that partisan gerrymandering is a so-called “political question” that federal courts have no right to answer and must be left to the states.

Of course, when one party controls the state legislature, they have every incentive to draw voting districts to guarantee they never lose political power, no matter what the view of the voters is. Voters don’t get to pick their own legislators. Instead, legislators get to pick their voters.

In her dissent in Rucho — joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Stephen Breyer —Justice Eleanor Kagan wrote:

"For the first time ever, this court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because [Roberts] thinks the task is beyond judicial capabilities. And not just any constitutional violation. The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the right participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance their political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives. In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy ... enabl[ing] politicians to entrench themselves in office as against voters' preferences ... They encouraged a politics of polarization and disfunction."

Is it any wonder that a New York Times/Siena poll taken last week found that only 33 percent of voters believe that America’s political system can still address the nation’s problems, while 64 percent believe the political system is too politically divided to solve the nation’s problems?

As former Senate Judiciary Committee counsel Lisa Graves argues in a new book, “[I]n the last 20 years the US Supreme Court has radically curtailed voting rights, undermined anti-corruption measures, encouraged extreme political gerrymandering, restricted the regulation of guns, and obliterated the constitutional right to control one’s reproductive choices. This transformation was orchestrated by a billionaire-backed reactionary political movement, whose interests Chief Justice John Roberts has been all too willing to serve.”

Citizens have no power to overturn a US Supreme Court decision. However, California citizens have the ability to equalize Texas Republicans’ gerrymander of five House seats.

On Nov. 4, they can pass Proposition 50 which lets the state legislature temporarily draw new congressional district maps through 2030, at which point the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission would resume control of redistricting, and supports nonpartisan redistricting commissions nationwide.

It won’t completely block Roberts’ 20-year project to undermine democracy and judicially enact the increasingly MAGA Republican agenda. (It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call it a “judicial coup”.)

Indeed, last week, SCOTUS heard oral arguments in a case where it appears that Roberts will lead the Republican majority to overturn Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act which protects the right of Black voters to have electoral representation. Such a ruling could likely flip as many as 19 House seats from Democratic to Republican, cementing a Republican House majority for the foreseeable future, regardless of the will of the voters.

Passing Proposition 50 is one thing Californians can do to fight back against Justice Roberts’ undemocratic judicial campaign, which has helped enable Trump’s authoritarianism. Mail-in ballots have already been sent out so California voters can cast “Yes” votes for Proposition 50 from now until Nov. 4.

Beyond that, thanks to John Roberts and his Republican colleagues on SCOTUS, other blue states will have to be brought into the gerrymander wars and enact their own partisan gerrymanders, to balance Republican gerrymanders to the extent possible.