Bill Blum, Independent Media Institute

For better or worse, the nine unelected elite lawyers who hold lifetime tenure as Justices of the United States Supreme Court have the last word on the interpretation of the Constitution. They and they alone get to pass final judgment on fundamental issues that touch all of our lives.

It is critically important, therefore, that the methodologies the Justices use to decide constitutional questions meet certain standards, and that their rulings are not only consistent with the text and history of the Constitution, but also responsive to the evolving needs and values of ordinary Americans.

This is, to be fair, no easy task, but it should be doable....

By now, it should be abundantly clear that the insurrection of January 6, 2021, was not a spontaneous uprising perpetrated by an angry horde of amped-up Trump supporters. To the contrary, the insurrection was the culmination of an attempted coup designed to prevent the peaceful transition of power.

But while the insurrection failed, a new coup is brewing and gathering steam. It is being spurred by Trump's relentless promotion of the "big lie" about the stolen election, and by means of massive voter suppression and voter subversion legislation enacted since the election in key Republican-dominated states to guarantee that the GOP regains control over Congress in 2022 and that Trump is restored to the presidency in 2024.

Any lingering doubts about the premeditated nature of the first Trump coup and the events of January 6 have been laid to rest by the public disclosure of two memos written on behalf of the Trump campaign by a conservative lawyer named John Eastman, a former dean of the Chapman University Law School in Orange County, California, who once served as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. ...

Donald Trump was no ordinary conservative American president. Far from it.

But how should we describe his presidency and the Make America Great Again political movement he spawned? Is it sufficient to refer to Trump and his MAGA supporters as anti-democratic or authoritarian, as many in the liberal mainstream press have written for the past five years?

I don't think so. ...

One of the first lessons attorneys involved in high-stakes litigation learn is that it sometimes pays not to say the quiet part out loud, lest your client's true intentions be revealed.

Michael A. Carvin, a highly respected partner in the powerful Jones Day law firm based in Washington, D.C., may have forgotten this lesson during the oral arguments conducted by the Supreme Court on March 2 in a pair of appeals from Arizona involving Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). In a shocking comment made toward the end of his presentation, Carvin revealed the Republican Party's entrenched and dedicated commitment to partisan advantage and voter suppression. In the process, however, Carvin may have unwittingly opened the door to abolishing the legislative filibuster and enacting H.R. 1, the landmark omnibus voting rights bill entitled the "For the People Act of 2021" that has passed the House and is now pending before the Senate.

The Arizona cases don't concern H.R. 1 or the filibuster directly. They involve a 2016 state statute that criminalizes the collection of ballots by third parties (a practice called "ballot harvesting"); and a state policy that strictly prohibits voters from casting ballots outside of their registered precincts....

Like a mob boss looking for payback, Donald Trump wanted the Supreme Court to do him two favors heading into the November election: keep him in power and keep him out of jail. To its everlasting credit, the court quickly declined to deliver on the first. Even though Trump had nominated three arch-conservatives to the bench—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett—the court rejected his baseless challenges to the results of the election.

It took the court far too long to screw up the courage to decline the second favor, but in a one-sentence order issued on February 22, the court dismissed an emergency petition Trump's lawyers had filed last October to stop Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. from enforcing a critical grand jury subpoena issued to the former president's accounting firm—Mazars USA, LLP—as part of a wide-ranging criminal investigation involving Trump's business practices.

Pending the court's ruling on the petition, Vance had agreed to pause enforcement of the subpoena. And in the meantime, as the court dithered, New York's five-year statute of limitations continued to tick away, threatening to derail the entire probe....