Yes, he says that they really need to worry about the Democrats but come on. The whole government is run by Republicans, right now. And I think he knows it…
This is something that needs to be discussed more openly and fully. All that gold and the East Wing and the parties at Mar-a-lago and the meme coins and the billionaires crawling all over thing — maybe it’s starting to gel, even among some on the right.
Yesterday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—the nonpartisan agency whose work has long been the global gold-standard for health science—made a change to the section of its website on the nonexistent link between autism and vaccines. The CDC went from stating that “vaccines do not cause autism” to saying that:
The claim “vaccines do not cause autism” is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.
Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.
We’re going to get into the details of this change in a minute, because they’re important. Kids will get sick because of what the CDC just did. Some of them will die.
But the even bigger story is that the U.S. government is no longer a reliable source of information. The consequences of this corruption will ripple through American society for years.
And despite my fit of optimism yesterday, this is not a thing that can be put back together.
Last goes on to explain why trust is so important to a democracy. If people cannot make informed decisions without having to verify every piece of information (if that’s even possible) the whole system becomes very inefficient and unproductive, not to mention stupid and dangerous.
Politicians exaggerate, distort, and lie all the time. This is—however regrettable—an accepted part of our democratic politics.
But until 2025, it was assumed that important, apolitical government agencies did not lie. If the Bureau of Labor Statistics said that inflation was up by 2 percent, then that’s what its best methodology could determine. If the NIH said that measles had an r0 between 12 and 18, then that’s what the best science showed.
The government could be wrong. Methodology evolves; models can be improved; new data emerges.But the American government would never intentionally spread disinformation as part of a political project.
That’s all gone. And it’s not just Trump. In fact, he’s irrelevant to this larger problem:
What I’m talking about is that in the legal world, judges have seen so many lies from federal prosecutors that they are grappling with the end of regular order.I’m talking about the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics being fired after her agency released data the president did not like. And now, the CDC changing its guidance on vaccines and autism to fit with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccination project.
These lies at the CDC are going to get kids killed. I can’t believe any scientist or medical doctor would put up with it. And the rest of this is making everyone unable to make reasoned decisions, including American businesses. I wish I understood why they are so pathetically myopic that they’re just letting this happen with virtually no push back simply in order to secure their own short-lived profits. I guess they must think they’re going to die soon (and they don’t love their children) because what this is doing to the future of this country and potentially even their own fortunes is profound.
Once again, all of Washington—and the country and the world—wait and speculate: Will he or won’t he? Over the summer, we wondered whether Donald Trump would strike Iran. (He did.) Four months later, we’re back waiting on this man, who ran as the “president of peace,” to decide whether he’ll strike Venezuela. Trump has already ordered alleged narcotrafficking boats to be blown out of the water. Now he has publicly authorized covert C.I.A. action inside Venezuela, deployed Reaper drones and F-35s to Puerto Rico, and moved a carrier strike group into the region.
In the cases of both Iran and Venezuela, regime change has not been an overt or even primary goal, at least for Trump. “I tried to get him to do it a lot, but he didn’t want to do it,” Trump’s erstwhile national security advisor and regime-change aficionado John Bolton told me. “He said earlier, with Iran, that he doesn’t seek regime change. But once he’s in it, it becomes about, what does he think he can get credit for?” Likewise in Venezuela, Bolton said, Trump is mostly focused on the appearance of strength. “I think he thinks about what will make him look tough, but he doesn’t think much beyond that,” Bolton went on. “He never does.”
This, of course, leaves Trump wide open to the influences of people who do think beyond political theater.
We already know about Rubio who has long wanted to overthrow Maduro. It’s his Castro fantasy. Miller’s happy to go along because it will inflict pain and suffering on Latinos. Hegseth would love to prove his manhood.
Trump loves to be a tough guy and sabre rattle. but he’s afraid to make the call. And the administration is struggling to find a rationale for doing it:
The messages coming out of the White House are a jumble: Officials say the point is to fight narcotrafficking, and also claim the regime itself is the main narcotrafficker via the “Cartel de los Soles.” But the Cartel de los Soles is not an actual cartel. Rather, it’s the derisive moniker that Venezuelan journalists have given the corrupt Maduro regime, whose security forces are indeed reportedly in bed with narcotraffickers. Trump says he’s open to talking to Maduro, but has also made clear that he wants him out—probably. The carrier strike group is in the region because, in the president’s words, “it’s gotta be somewhere, it’s a big one”—and it’s also there to pressure Maduro to leave power peacefully. And so on.
Bolton characterized the administration’s policy as a “muddle” of ideas. “It’s a little bit of an anti-narcotics strategy, a little bit of an anti-migration strategy. Rubio may have in his mind what he wants to do, but that’s not what’s happening.” As for what Trump could be contemplating? “I think he doesn’t know, either,” Bolton said. “If you look at different comments he’s made, I think it’s really swirling in his head and he doesn’t know what to do.
No doubt. He thought that killing a bunch of random people in boats and issuing threats would make Maduro cower and run away but it hasn’t worked so far:
But the pressure campaign on Maduro is, so far, not having the intended effect. “You haven’t seen any high-level defections or fracturing in the regime,” said one former senior defense official who specializes in the Western Hemisphere. “This has proven to be a pretty remarkably cohesive regime.” The Trump administration, this source explained, wants to display a credible military threat to force Maduro to leave peacefully, but they don’t want to have to actually make good on it. The result is “a game of chicken, because Maduro is unlikely to leave unless he’s somehow forced to do so, and then that puts the Trump administration in a position of either having to go ahead with further escalation or finding some other off-ramp.”
So, will he or won’t he? Military buildups are a little like Chekhov’s gun: If you bring it out in Act I, it has to go off before the end of the play. On the other hand, launching military action could be politically costly, especially if it leads to American casualties. Decapitating an autocratic regime also risks creating a failed state, à la Iraq or Libya—this time in America’s backyard. Experts believe the Venezuelan opposition, led by Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado, is strong enough to fill any power vacuum. But Venezuela itself lacks many of the democratic institutions it would need.
And Trump has MAGA to contend with:
On yet another hand, Trump’s base—and his vice president and many of his national security appointees—are vehemently against foreign adventures and especially regime change, scarred as they are by Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump campaigned as an isolationist, which should give him some leeway to take his finger off the trigger.
Trump can simply declare victory if he wants to. But he isn’t stable and he’s got a lot of people around him like Rubio, MIller and Hegseth who are itching for the fight. He’s tired and wants to spend his time picking out swatches for the Blue Room. He might just let them have their splendid little war.
I noted last week that the Biden era vibecession — people feeling bad about an economy that looked good by standard measures — has persisted under Trump. In fact, public perceptions of the economy appear to be plumbing new depths.
Honestly, I’m surprised. One factor in poor economic sentiment under Biden was partisanship. People’s reported perception of the economy is strongly affected by whether their preferred party is in power:
This is true for both parties, but historically Republicans have tended to cheer harder and boo louder than Democrats. So other things equal we would have expected average sentiment to improve under Trump II.
Now, things aren’t equal. Objectively, the economy is worse in important ways than it was a year ago. Still, the extent of the plunge in perceptions is remarkable.
It may be that Trump is — bear with me here — actually paying a price for telling Americans not to believe their own eyes. As I’ve written recently, it’s important not to engage in false equivalence. Biden and company told Americans that their incomes were outpacing inflation, which was true but not what people wanted to hear. Trump keeps insisting that grocery prices are way down, which is simply a lie. And people may be noticing.
The absolute absurdity of the Trump team’s efforts to explain away bad economic news may also be taking a toll. Remember when Scott Bessent was supposed to be the adult in the room? Now he’s blaming migrants taking diseased cattle with them for high beef prices.
I think all of that is part of it. But those of you who’ve been reading me for a while know that I was saying the following throughout the last year of the Biden term:
I also wonder whether Trump’s other problems — from Epstein to the deep unpopularity of ICE’s actions — are bleeding over to economic sentiment. Political consultants like to imagine that the public makes clear distinctions between issues: “kitchen table” versus democracy versus corruption.
In reality public opinion is much more of a gestalt in which bad or good feelings on different issues merge.
I think it’s unresolved pandemic trauma. This country never reckoned with the death of more than a million people and just went on as if it never happened. Maybe that even explains Trump’s otherwise inexplicable victory in some way — people wanted to go back to the time before it happened and erase everything after. But it didn’t work. They ended up being reminded of everything horrible about the pandemic over which Trump presided, the chaos, the incompetence, the corruption and the narcissism.
People blame food prices or immigrants or “woke” for the deep feelings of insecurity and fear that were unleashed in that period and they are subconsciously reminded of it when they see the orange miscreant on their television screens. It was as if the nation somehow thought that rubbing salt into its psychic wound would heal it and all it did was keep the pain fresh every single day.
The Democrats’ video, released Tuesday, urges U.S. troops and intelligence officers to reject any unlawful commands.
The group of prominent Democrats includes senators Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly, as well as Reps. Chrissy Houlahan, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, and Jason Crow.
In the video, they speak directly to U.S. service members and the intelligence community, reminding them that they took an oath to the U.S. Constitution and that they “can refuse illegal orders.”The group warned that the threats to the Constitution are not just coming from abroad but from home and urged them to “not give up the ship.”
The six lawmakers do not specify exactly what would constitute an illegal order in the video, but Crow did address it on Fox News on Wednesday. “We are standing by our troops, our service members who are often put in very difficult positions, and Donald Trump has put them in very difficult positions and has alluded to putting them in even more difficult positions in the months and years ahead,” he said. “So we are reminding folks about what the uniform code of military justice says, what the Constitution says, what the law of war says.”
Crow is a former Army Ranger who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and is also a Bronze Star recipient. He represents Colorado’s 6th congressional district and sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Armed Services Committee.
When asked about what specifically he was referring to when implying the president might demand something they wouldn’t want to uphold, Crow noted Trump’s comment suggesting protesters be shot in the legs during his first term, as well as suggesting he would send the military into American cities to go to war and alluding to sending troops to polling stations which is against the law.
I’d say murdering people on the high seas is an illegal demand too…
The wingnuts are having a fit. Good. People need to understand how far Trump has gone and is clearly prepared to go.
It has long been an article of faith that Donald Trump rules the GOP with an iron fist. There shall be no deviation from his word. Lest anyone stray from his path, the sinner can expect to be smote with a single Truth Social post and their political career destroyed with fire and brimstone. Trump’s rule by intimidation has allowed him to usurp the constitutional duties of Congress — and led congressional Republicans to a near-total abdication of their legislative prerogatives.
Trump has managed to destroy the careers of many Republicans he has deemed disloyal by endorsing primary opponents to run against them or making life so difficult that they simply leave politics altogether. And his followers have often taken his ire so much to heart that they routinely threaten violence against elected officials and their families if they cross the president. One need only review the footage from Jan. 6 and see his followers flooding the Capitol while chanting “hang Mike Pence” to be reminded of that fact.
For nearly a decade it’s been Trump or nothing in the Republican Party. But the president’s erratic behavior, obvious decline and growing unpopularity in his second term is starting to expose fault lines that are weakening his hold. He appears to be hitting lame duck status much earlier than expected, and MAGA is starting to eat its own.
The old GOP is long dead and MAGA is incoherent. Trump is impulsively indulging his every passing whim while his apparatchiks are following their own bliss and the party establishment is frozen in amber like a bunch of prehistoric insects.
But there is one person who seems to believe that MAGA is an actual movement with an actual ideology. And she is someone whose entire political career and persona were formed when she became a passionate follower of Donald Trump on Facebook: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.
Even before she was in Congress, Greene showed a talent for getting attention, such as the time she traveled to Washington, D.C., and live streamed herself confronting Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg, who was then a teenager, and harassing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., by telling her to “get rid of your diaper.” When Greene took office in 2021, she immediately became the most obnoxious member of Congress, accomplishing the rare bipartisan feat of persuading 11 GOP members to vote with Democrats to strip her of her committee assignments due to her violent comments. She became a ubiquitous TV presence and a staunch Trump defender. In a word, she became infamous.
Greene is literally the last person anyone would have expected to break with Donald Trump — but that’s what she has done. Her first move was to support the release of the Epstein files against the president’s will. That rebellion would have been shocking enough, but since the case had been a cause célèbre among the MAGA faithful, it made some sense. However, she’s since gone much further, condemning Trump’s support for Israel, showing support for Gaza and criticizing his decision, however reluctantly it was made, to support Ukraine. But most surprising of all is her call to extend Obamacare subsidies and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, citing the needs of the working families, both of which were a red line for Trump and the GOP establishment.
Then there is the radical change in Greene’s tone. She’s been all over mainstream TV of late, apologizing for being a toxic terror and claiming she was misled into believing all those QAnon conspiracies. Coming from the second rudest, most confrontational politician in America, that turnabout is really something. Trump has exiled her, of course, saying she’s lost her mind and referring to her as “Marjorie Traitor Greene,” which seems to have really hurt her feelings. In her new, softer voice, she retorted, “Let me tell you what a traitor is. A traitor is an American that serves foreign countries and themselves.”
What’s Greene up to? It’s bizarre to say the least. There’s a ton of speculation that she’s mad because Trump told her she couldn’t win a Senate race, and so she’s decided to position herself for a presidential run. Time will tell. But whatever she has in mind, she is following what she believes to be true MAGA ideology.
Greene believes in America First, which means isolationism and withdrawal from international commitments and foreign aid. She believes that America should close its borders to foreigners and rid itself of those who are here. And she believes in Trumpian economic populism, which says you can lower taxes and pay for generous benefits simply by doing all those things. But she’s discarding MAGA’s most fundamental tenet: Loyalty to Donald Trump.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a 51-year-old woman who never gave much thought to politics until she was 45. She is not a product of the modern conservative movement or even of Rush Limbaugh talk radio propaganda. She is pure MAGA; the only political ideology she knows is a shallow amalgam of half-baked bromides that Trump has been spouting since he came down that escalator 10 years ago, most of which he himself doesn’t believe in or care about.
But Greene is highly ambitious. She’s a cunning, natural politician with an ego almost as big as Trump’s, and she sees that he is not going to be around much longer. Will she be able to survive Trump’s assault and come out the other side with a coherent MAGA ideology that will capture the hearts of the faithful once he’s gone? At the moment she seems to be the only one who’s trying
We’ve covered this before and need to cover it again. On Nov. 1, I reposted two videos from Chicago in which agitated Customs agents threaten people (both women) with arrest for following and recording them. In the second, they warn the woman that blowing her horn or a whistle to alert neighbors to their presence could be grounds for arrest. “Impeding” a federal agent in the performance of their duties, in their estimation. In neither case did they actually arrest the women. That’s telling.
David Bier of the Cato Institute tweeted on October 30, “At some point recently, there must have been an order issued to threaten witnesses with arrest for recording DHS activities. There are a number of nearly identical instances of this exact threat that I’ve seen, delivered in the same way, in just the last month.”
The agents cite 18 USC 111, in my non-lawyerly estimation, as an intimidation tactic to get protesters to stand down from exercising their First Amendment rights.
CBP is still doing it in North Carolina. In one case, however, with violent arrests (Daily Beast):
Border Patrol agents smashed a car window with a rifle before hauling out two female U.S. citizens accused of honking their horn to warn others that federal immigration officers were in the area, according to relatives and a witness.
A shocking video recorded in a Charlotte, North Carolina, neighborhood showed one goon pointing his gun into the window while shouting commands. He was then seen breaking the window and pulling a woman from the driver’s seat..
A second woman, also a U.S. citizen, was arrested moments earlier, according to a report from WCNC Charlotte.
According to the women’s family members, who spoke to WCNC, the pair were accused of honking their car horn to alert neighbors that Border Patrol was conducting operations nearby.
The women, still unidentified, were released with “a citation.” Citation for what is unclear. It also remains unclear under what circumstances the CBP gave chase and two Charlotte women had an automatic rifle aimed at their heads for blowing their car horn.
In another Charlotte incident, the agents warn a videographer that blowing a car horn is a violation (again, 18 USC 111), but they don’t arrest her. Apparently she didn’t honk. (They’re all women, notice?)
18 U.S. Code § 111 – Assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers or employees
(a) In General.—Whoever—
(1)forcibly assaults, resists, opposes, impedes, intimidates, or interferes with any person designated in section 1114 of this title while engaged in or on account of the performance of official duties; or
(2)forcibly assaults or intimidates any person who formerly served as a person designated in section 1114 on account of the performance of official duties during such person’s term of service,
shall, where the acts in violation of this section constitute only simple assault, be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both, and where such acts involve physical contact with the victim of that assault or the intent to commit another felony, be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both.
“Forcibly” is the first word in both subparagraphs. The DOJ Resource Manual on this section addresses that in more detail (emphasis and brackets mine):
Section 111 of Title 18 punishes anyone who “forcibly assaults, resists, opposes, impedes, intimidates or interferes with any person designated in 18 U.S.C. § 1114 or who formerly served as a person designated in § 1114, while engaged in or on account of the performance of his/her official duties.” Force is an essential element of the crime. Long v. United States, 199 F.2d 717 (4th Cir. 1952). Whether the element of force, as required by the statute, is present in a particular case is a question of fact to be determined from all of the circumstances. The Long case indicates that a threat of force will satisfy the statute [… if it] reasonably causes a Federal officer to anticipate bodily harm while in the performance of his/her duties constitutes a “forcible assault” within the meaning of 18 U.S.C. § 111. See alsoUnited States v. Walker, 835 F.2d 983, 987 (2d Cir. 1987); Gornick v. United States, 320 F.2d 325 (10th Cir. 1963). Thus, a threat uttered with the apparent present ability to execute it, or with menacing gestures, or in hostile company or threatening surroundings, may, in the proper case, be considered sufficient force for a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 111. These judicial decisions suggest a similar construction of the statutory words “resists, opposes, impedes, intimidates or interferes with.”
I’d like to see any of these agents explain to a federal judge how blowing a whistle or honking a car horn was a forcible assault or threat of it that “reasonably” causes “a Federal officer to anticipate bodily harm.” And then explain why the arrest they made was not a justiciable civil rights violation. Except in the case of the women yanked from their car, the agents are making empty threats to quell protest. They are being instructed to.
My guess is that these poorly trained unprofessionals don’t even know the parameters of the code section with which they’ve been told to intimidate people. Or if they do, most are not dumb enough to actually charge allegedly “threatening” women under it.
Six Democratic lawmakers released a video on Tuesday that reminds soldiers of all ranks that they are obliged under their oaths not to carry out illegal orders (New York Times):
The stark message, posted on Tuesday, was organized by Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, a former C.I.A. analyst who served multiple tours in Iraq. The lawmakers took turns reading a statement in which they cautioned that the “threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home.”
“Our laws are clear,” said Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a Navy veteran and former astronaut. “You can refuse illegal orders.”
“You must refuse illegal orders,” added Representative Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, who also served in the Navy.
The Democratic lawmakers’ message did not focus on a specific order or scenario. “We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now,” they said. “This administration is pitting our uniform military and intelligence community against American citizens.”
We want to speak directly to members of the Military and the Intelligence Community.
The American people need you to stand up for our laws and our Constitution.
Slotkin raised concerns about illegal orders during a hearing this summer with now-Defense Secretary Hegseth about Trump’s desire to deploy active-duty troops to suppress protests in American cities.
She referenced the time in 2020 when then-President Donald Trump asked then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley if they could “just shoot” Black Lives Matter protesters. You know, “just shoot them in the legs or something?”
The two manly men looked at Trump with tears in their eyes and said, “Sir, no sir.” (Or something like that.) It would be criminal, they told the now-convicted criminal.
So before Trump’s second inauguration in January, his proposed defense secretary, Fox News Weekend alcoholic, Pete Hegseth, faced questioning about that episode in his Senate confirmation hearings.
Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) asked Hegseth, “Would you carry out such an order from President Trump?” Hegseth dissembled.
Since then, Trump has acted routinely outside the boundaries of his constitutional authorities with no pushback from the Republican-controlled Congress. He has declared a war against drug cartels for which he lacks the authority. He has called in missile strikes against small boats in the Caribbean, killing at least 82 since September 2, alleging without providing evidence, that they are carrying drugs to the U.S. This would ordinarily be a law enforcement responsibility involving Coast Guard interdiction, arrest and prosecution. Trump is ordering summary execution. It has these lawmakers concerned.
In an interview with The New York Times, Ms. Slotkin said that she had heard from active-duty troops who were concerned about the legality of strikes that have targeted people accused by the Trump administration of trafficking narcotics by sea. Some wondered whether they could be held personally liable for the deaths, she said.
Kelly raised similar concerns in an NBC interview.
Trump’s pet psychopath, Stephen Miller (rumored to be the person really running the Trump White House), is not pleased.
“Democrat lawmakers are now openly calling for insurrection,” Stephen Miller, President Trump’s deputy chief of staff, wrote on social media.
Martha MacCallum of Fox News questioned Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado (D), a former Army Ranger, about his part in the video. Crow pushed back. Hard.
CROW: Donald Trump has made a series of very disturbing comments and suggestions that would violate US law and put our military in terrible positions. We are standing by our troops–MacCALLUM: Who sign up every day as you did to carry out the orders of the commander in chief
Oregon state Rep. Dwayne Yunker (R), himself a veteran, pushed back, calling the video “a direct threat to our republic.” But he helped disseminate the Democrats’ message by including it in his tweet. Thanks, Dwayne.
As a veteran of 21 years, let me be clear: when politicians or activists tell our military to ignore the Commander-in-Chief, that’s not “debate”—it’s a direct threat to our republic. pic.twitter.com/AzWpkbiCyW
A search of websites tackling this issue reveals this from a law office:
What are unlawful orders?
An unlawful order is a directive issued by someone in a position of authority that violates the law, a person’s rights, or ethical principles. Following such orders can have legal consequences for both the person giving the order and the one executing it. Here are some examples of unlawful orders:
A superior orders a soldier to engage in war crimes, such as:
Targeting civilians intentionally.
Torturing prisoners of war.
Looting or pillaging property.
A commanding officer orders personnel to suppress lawful protests in violation of First Amendment rights.
Violations of International Laws.
Some other examples may be an Abuse of Authority:
Misuse of resources: A public official orders employees to use government funds or equipment for personal gain.
Harassment or retaliation: A superior orders someone to engage in workplace bullying or to retaliate againsta whistleblower.
We’ll get to suppressing lawful protests in violation of First Amendment rights in the next post.
Twenty years ago, John Roberts promised that as chief justice of the Supreme Court, he would be like an umpire, calling balls and strikes. His promise charmed senators and the media, who believed that his predilection for executive power and long-held antipathy for civil rights could be moderated by this commitment to faithfully apply the law. The delusion was so powerful that for two decades, the media defaulted to portraying him as a moderate institutionalist, pointing to high-profile decisions—to uphold parts of the Affordable Care Act or striking down President Donald Trump’s attempt to ask about citizenship in the 2020 census—in which he broke from conservative orthodoxy.
But those decisions were always the exception. Today, as the Roberts court rewrites the Constitution in the image of Trumpian autocracy, it’s become clear that Roberts’ promise to be a neutral umpire was a lie. We are watching a rigged game, and Roberts set it up.
They go over all the familiar Supreme Court atrocities we’ve seen during this second term of the Trump presidency but they have news for us. It’s been happening all along:
Roberts has been embedding white-dominant authoritarianism into the country’s source code for two decades. It’s impossible to imagine today’s crisis without the Roberts court having first undermined the foundations of our democracy.
Democracies are built on the right to vote and choose representatives. The United States finally recognized this right for all people with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But over the last five decades, Roberts has taken aim at the law, beginning as a young lawyer in President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department fighting its reauthorization, when he claimed it would “lead to a quota system in all areas.” He lost that skirmish when Congress overwhelmingly voted to strengthen the VRA in 1982, but he won the larger battle decades later as chief justice, helping craft a string of rulings kneecapping the law, starting with his 2013 opinion in Shelby County v. Holder. The decision overruled Congress and freed states with histories of discrimination to change their voting rules, spurring the creation of 115 voter suppression laws in more than 30 states. Many were inspired by Trump’s election lies.
In 2019, Roberts toppled another pillar of democratic governance—if you don’t like a politician, you can vote them out—by writing in Rucho v. Common Causethat federal judges could not even review claims of partisan gerrymandering, deeming them “political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.” In the decision, Roberts pinkie-swore that courts could still block “racial discrimination in districting,” but now the Supreme Court is on the verge of making that nearly impossible. After October’s oral arguments in a Louisiana redistricting case, observers expect Roberts and the GOP justices to declare that districts drawn to preserve representation for voters of color are either unconstitutional or subject to insurmountable barriers. It’s a decision that would turn the 14th and 15th Amendments—passed under Reconstruction to give formerly enslaved people citizenship and equal rights—on their heads, and turbocharge Trump’s gerrymandering push. Such redrawn maps could shift up to 19 seats to the GOP in 2026 and “really runs the threat of just creating permanent GOP control of Congress,” Doerfler warns.
That’s not all by a long shot. There’s Citizens United and presidential immunity for starters. The outright corruption alone is astonishing. And they reveal that Roberts had been laying the ground work for many years before he even joined the Court. He’s a stealth right wing operative whose pleasant persona has masked his radicalism for decades.
They conclude:
The question lingering over this mess is how it will end. The past may be instructive. “This is the third moment in the country’s history where court reform was a mainstream political topic,” Doerfler says. In 1857, the Supreme Court held in Dred Scott that Black people could not be citizens. The decision helped spur the Civil War and was overturned by the Reconstruction amendments, which ended slavery and aimed to extend political equality to the newly freed. When President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration fought the Depression, the Supreme Court struck down his initiatives, most notably attempts to regulate industrial policy and stabilize farming, as well as a minimum wage law. Ultimately, Roosevelt’s threat to pack the court cowed the justices, who permitted New Deal legislation like Social Security and labor laws to endure.
In the 1930s, the court itself changed. The justices chose to preserve the institution, with four retiring in quick succession, allowing Roosevelt to appoint new ones. But in the postbellum era, the opposite had occurred. Attempts to guarantee equality under the law and Constitution were rolled back by a Supreme Court that, by 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson, officially gave Jim Crow the Constitution’s blessing.
Today’s court is on the same trajectory, bent on retrenching white political dominance. But it will go further. It will greenlight Trump’s corrupt, self-enriching behavior and unlawful power grabs. The majority will instinctively know that its fate is tied to the fate of Trump’s movement, and so it will protect it. The result will be a democracy in name only.
Under the Roberts court, it won’t be enough to rewrite the rules of the game. The umpires are the problem.
Scary stuff.
If you have the time best sure to read the whole thing about Roberts’ years before he was on the court. I knew some of it but not all. We should have seen this coming.
When Lauren Vaughn, a kindergarten assistant in South Carolina, saw reports that right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk had been shot at an event in Utah, she opened Facebook and typed out a quote from Kirk himself.
Gun deaths, Kirk said in 2023, were unfortunate but “worth it” if they preserved “the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given Rights.” Following the quote, Vaughn added: “Thoughts and prayers.”
Vaughn, a 37-year-old Christian who has taken missionary trips to Guatemala, said her call for prayer was sincere. She said she hoped reading Kirk’s words in the context of the shooting might prompt her friendsto rethink their opposition to gun control.
“Maybe now they’ll listen,” she recalled thinking.
A few days later, Vaughn lost her job. She was one of more than 600 Americans fired, suspended, placed under investigation or disciplined by employers for comments about Kirk’s September 10 assassination, according to a Reuters review of court records, public statements, local media reports and interviews with two dozen people who were fired or otherwise disciplined.
Meanwhile, Trump is defending the free speech of Hitler defender Tucker Carlson and Nazi, Nick Fuentes telling Axios, “you can’t tell him [Carlson] who to interview…if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it, get the word out. Let him, you know, people have to decide.” Gotta let the wingnuts say what they wanna say. They have a first amendment.
But they managed to get at least 600 ordinary people’s lives upended for saying something they deemed to be disrespectful toward a political activist who was murdered. I’m sure that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
We still have free speech in this country, never fear. For right wingers. Everyone else had better watch what they say.
