A majority of each party is opposed to the mid-decade redistricting  to guarantee a party’s win in midterms. An overwhelming majority of voters nationally (77%) and in Florida (76%), Texas (74%), New York (78%), Illinois (75%), and California (80%) support independent commissions to draw district lines instead of state lawmakers. 64% of Republican and independent voters want a ban on mid-decade redistricting. 

Even 60% of the voters who supported Donald Trump in 2024 want Congress to ban mid-decade redistricting. Yet he threatened Indiana that if the state Republicans didn’t pass a district map that gave the Republican House delegation a 9-0 sweep, all federal funding will be stripped from the state, roads will not be paved and major projects will stop. His warning was a brazen attempt at election interference.

The Supreme Court held that it is unconstitutional for the federal government to place a “gun to the head” of a state by threatening massive funding losses. Those funds are not discretionary political weapons. Any threat to strip highway funding would require clear statutory authority. 

While both parties politically gerrymander, the Republicans make much more use of  it. In 2022 Congress nearly passed the Freedom to Vote Act, that included a prohibition on partisan gerrymandering. The transformative bill passed the House and had majority support in the Senate. It stalled only because the Senate failed by two Republican votes to modify the chamber’s archaic filibuster rules to allow the bill to advance to an up-or-down floor vote.

In some states, the party that wins the most votes overall doesn’t win a proportional number of seats. For example:

• Pennsylvania (2012): Democrats won roughly half the vote in House races, but Republicans won about 75% of the seats due to how the lines were drawn.
• North Carolina & Michigan: Similar representational mismatches have occurred.

The worst consequence of gerrymandering is that it frequently guaranties the election of the least qualified candidate. Take for example Jim Jordan, the 2024 Republican candidate for Ohio’s Fourth Congressional. The state Republican legislature mangled the district map to make it look like a jigsaw puzzle missing random pieces to make Jordan a sure winner even though he had the lowest score of all Republicans for legislative effectiveness, and despite that over the  800 bills he authored in 2023, none have passed and become law.

Sadly, Republicans will sail through the Supreme Court’s pro-Trump majority, even when Republicans violate the 15^th Amendment by “deny or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color.”

In Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP the pro-Trump majority upheld the South Carolina Republicans’ legislature removal of 60% of Black voters from their Congressional District into a White-denominated District to ensure the election of the Republican candidate. The same majority, minus Barrett, previously held in Rucho. v. Common Cause that political gerrymandering is not the business of federal courts. The combination of these two rulings allows racial gerrymandering

because racial gerrymandering is always done to win elections.

In Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee Trump’s majority held that Arizona’s voting restrictions that allowed the tossing ballots that didn’t comply with the restrictions didn’t violate the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and 15^th Amendment prohibitions against denying or abridging the right to vote based on race or color. Although Chief Justice Roberts admitted that Arizona’s restrictions fell more heavily on Native American minorities, he hedged by claiming that the number of ballots tossed would be immaterial to the outcome of the election, even though they exceeded the margins of victory in the 2018 and 2020 elections.

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The decision handed the wealthiest Americans oversized control over how America was governed and planted the seed that grew into the widest wealth spread in American history. For example, Trump’s signed into law a 4.5 trillion-dollar tax bill which provided that the country would recover the lost revenues by cutting the safety nets that lower-earners depend on, such as Medicare, Medicaid and food programs.

Disavowing 89 years of precedent, the majority labored mightily to justify its finding that corporations and Super PACs – believe it or not — “speak” when they spend money to fund political campaigns. Alas, we all thought that only humans and parrots can speak.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his dissent, “The conceit that corporations must be treated identically to natural persons … is not only inaccurate but also inadequate to justify the Court’s” decision.

The majority justified its holding that corporations can speak because “they are associations of humans, which makes no sense. Corporations often contradict their human shareholders’ beliefs when they fund candidates and policies their shareholders oppose. As Justice Stevens said, “Nor does [the majority] tell us when a corporation may engage in electioneering that some of its shareholders oppose.”

Moreover, the Supreme Court previously held that state corporate law – not federal law —  a corporation’s governing structure, and ordered federal courts to defer to state law.  And it’s been that way for more than two centuries. 

When a state withholds the power to fund political campaigns, campaign funding is unauthorized and void; it doesn’t exist. So there’s nothing to protect. Federal law is mostly regulatory and prohibitory, limiting the exercise of corporate power. It does not bestow powers on  corporations.

Readers have to wonder why the majority labored so hard to reach its conclusion. One answer is that the concurrences of Justices Scalia, Thomas and Roberts, was necessary to carry the decision. Their willingness to stretch the Constitution to accommodate the Republican party was evident when they joined Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett to become the current Supreme Court majority. 

Citizens United was decided by the Republican majority and turned Republican power into law.  The decision was followed by a flood of campaign spending by corporations and Super PACs that spent $1,755 trillion on Republican campaigns in the 2024 election cycle while they spent $.787 trillion on Democratic campaigns. Moreover, two-thirds of business’s (including corporations) spending funded Republican campaigns. It worked. 90% of it went to Republican winners. 

The Court’s majority concluded that large spending on campaigns doesn’t increase corruption or cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.  Wrong on both counts. 66 percent of Republicans and 85 percent of Democrats back a constitutional amendment overruling Citizens United. Also, a majority of Americans (55%) consider corruption in government a major cause of their loss of trust. 

Ever since Roberts became chief justice in 2005, his main objectives have been clear: to empower corporate America and help Republicans consolidate power. It wasn’t too long before he added the priority of accommodating Trump’s march to autocracy.

Indeed, led by Roberts, the Republican Majority appears ready to transfer enormous amounts of power from Congress to the Republican President, which would brazenly violate a clear legislative prohibition as well as the Constitutions mandates for separation of powers, checks and balances and three independent branches of government.

Yes, folks. This is where we’ve come – a Supreme Court with pernicious political holdings that rival Constitutional ones, Congressional Republicans who’ve checked their spines at the Capitol doors, and a sociopathic President whose obsession with self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement precludes any focus on what’s best for America.

The only feasible solution is to replace Trump’s enslave Republicans with Republicans not afraid of him, or by Democrats. We’d relish in overdue bipartisan legislating.

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The Supreme Court’s Trump-favoring majority (“Trump’s Majority”) blocked both injunctions which freed Trump to replace Democrats with Republicans in the hundreds of agencies created by Congress in the face of Congress’s express prohibition against such firings without cause – something Trump never raised. The agencies were created to perform legislative policies with more expertise than Congress had. The majority’s holding also violated 90 years of  Supreme Court precedent in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States in 1935, followed by a unanimous decision in 1957 holding that Congress intended to create an agency that was “‘entirely free from the control or coercive influence of the Executive.”

Trump’s Majority’s holding allowed Trump to take the next step towards king status. He can now stack the agencies with his loyalists and usurp Congress’s policymaking authority. Take, for example, two feared possibilities: 

• Trump takes control of the NLRB which protects the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively. Good bye unions …that is that don’t vote for MAGA Republicans.
• The worst calamity would be if Trump’s Majority allows him to fire  Federal Reserve Board members without cause, which they’d have to to be consistent with their holding that let Trump fire the two board members. A hearing on the matter is scheduled for January. If the Court finds for Trump, he would control interest rates, the money supply flowing through the economy, and when to print money. He will have gained extraordinary power to reward his friends and destroy his enemies. 

The prohibition against a president’s firings reflects Congress’s belief that knowledgeable people from both parties [emphasis added] would make decisions that advance the long-term public good. Its intent couldn’t be clearer. 

Trump however dreads bipartisanship. So, confident that the Supreme Court Majority is on his team, he got it to stay the order reinstating the two board members on their boards. Trump’s Majority mangled the Constitution to accommodate him, holding that Congress’s restrictions on the President’s firing authority violated the Constitution’s separation of powers requirement.

The majority Justices also stated their hollow belief that the government faces more risk than the removed officer from allowing the removed officer to remain on their boards. The majority’s belief is credible only if the risk the majority referred to arises from Trump replacing Democrats with the type of unqualified sycophants Trump chose for his cabinet. 

The majority also omitted the obvious – allowing a president to fire employees without cause is as clear a violation as the Constitution’s separation of powers and of its mandate for the independence of the government’s three branches and its blueprint for checks and balances.

The majority Justices violated their Judicial Oaths  “to administer justice without respect to persons and .… impartially [emphasis added] perform all duties incumbent upon me under the Constitution…. So help me God.” By the way,  Its not the first time  Trump’s Majority butchered the Constitution to favor Trump.

In another recent case, the Supreme Court heard  oral arguments  regarding  whether Trump’s firing of Commissioners of the FTC, another independent bipartisan agency created by Congress with legislation prohibiting the President from firing its employs without cause. Sadly, Trump’s Majority is more than likely to overrule its own decision in the Humphrey’s case which would have prohibited Trump’s firings. 

If you’re wondering why Supreme Court Justices would enable Trump’s path to a dictatorship, here’s an answer: 

Every Majority Justice  (John Roberts, Brett Karnaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett), was funded and masterminded by the Federalist Society, piloted by reactionary billionaire Leonard Leo.  It’s not a stretch to say that these Justices repeatedly ruled in favor of their patron’s priorities rather than the Constitution. Take a look: 

• Keeping Trump in office: Trump’s Majority gave him broad immunity and delayed Jack Smith’s criminal trial against him for eleven months, until his win in 2024 election, after which the case was dismissed. In contrast, the Supreme Court took just 16 days to unanimously decide that Nixon wasn’t immune from prosecution and one day to decide Bush v. Gore. 
  
• Rolling back prohibitions against racial discrimination in voting: In Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP Trump’s Majority upheld a Republican legislature’s removal 60% of Black voters from their Congressional district into a White-denominated district to ensure a Republican win.
• Deregulation of corporations. For decades courts deferred to an agency’s interpretation of unclear legislation. The Trump’s Majority held that only the courts can decide if an agency’s interpretation of an unclear statute is correct. The holding transferred enormous amounts of policymaking to the Judiciary, which lacks the expertise and personnel to do the job — an indirect form of deregulation. 
• Restricting access to abortion.  Enough said.

Tragically, America has lost its last stop to unencumbered justice. If the country wants it back, either Trump-coddling Republicans need to find their true patriotism, or they must be replaced by Republicans not enslaved by Trump, or  Democrats must recapture their Congressional majorities. Then, Trump’s Majority can be replaced by justices – Republican or Democrat — with allegiance to the Constitution.

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Trump claimed in his brief that countries are paying America trillions of dollars in tariffs. Of course Justices knew tariffs are not paid by the exporting countries, they’re paid by American consumers. Indeed, Chief Justice Roberts, noted that tariffs are a tax on Americans. The Justices are also aware that many countries are avoiding Trump’s tariffs by replacing America with other trading partners.

• Canada imports more cars from Mexico for the first time in three decades.China, the world’s largest soybeans buyer, hasn’t bought any soybeans  from US farmers. They’re now buying them from Brazil and Argentina. Just like in his first term, Trump will have to pay them again. India and China are restoring trade ties to avoid Trump’s tariffs. Peru switched to buying textiles and blueberries from other countries.14 countries formed a trade group that excluded America.The EU is expanding its list of trade partners to avoid Trump’s tariffs. c are joining a common market of South American countries that excludes the U.S.

In his brief, Trump referred to   trade deficits as “losses”.  The Justices know better — when businesses buy goods from foreign countries, they’re exchanging currency for something of value.

Trump told the Justices he’s made “historic deals” with several countries. At best though, Trump’s deals are frameworks for agreement that require much more detailed negotiating and may never become deals. 

The only reason Trump made those inaccurate claims to the Justices, is that Trump doesn’t think he’s lying.

Perhaps Trump’s address to the UN is the best proof that his false claims are his realities. Trump claimed, “I ended seven un-endable wars,” which “were raging, with countless thousands of people being killed.” In fact, two of the wars never existed, two more didn’t end, and the others were short, minor skirmishes in which “countless thousands of people” weren’t killed. 

Trump’s claim to the UN was made to 193 member countries and their delegates, whom Trump knew were knowledgeable about international wars. He believed he was telling the truth.

The whole world watched a mob of Trump supporters: storm the Capitol; 

injure police with bats and chemical sprays; smash windows and doors; force their way into the Capitol; vandalize congressional offices; damage and steal government property; and build gallows and chant “Hang Pence.’

Trump saw what we saw, but later described it as a day of love, said rioters were “hugging and kissing” police, “had love in their heart” and were patriots. 

It may be hard to believe, but our President  is a pathological liar  — a person who believes their lies. Trump’s National Security Adviser observed, “Trump can’t tell the difference between what’s true and what’s false ….Trump [says] what he believes ….”

 While pathological liars may be able to navigate their way through society,  

they should not be the leader of the free world. The 25^th Amendment provides for the President’s removal if he’s unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. If there were ever a need for it, it is now.

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