The biggest story in the country right now is flying completely under the radar. Last cycle, Louisiana Republicans were ordered to draw a second majority-Black district to be in compliance with the Voting Rights Act. But Republicans sued, saying that the creation of a second majority-Black district (so that Black voters in Louisiana would have fair representation) was actually discriminatory against white voters. Which is farcical, given that the whole point of the Voting Rights Act is to prevent white voters from stripping Black voters of their due representation. In other words, it is absurd on its face to suggest that the creation or preservation of Black opportunity districts are somehow discriminatory against white people.
But… the US Supreme Court didn’t think it was absurd. The justices curiously refused to hand down a ruling at the end of their term. And on Friday, SCOTUS ordered new legal briefings from the parties on whether or not the very concept of Black majority districts violate the 14th and 15th Amendments to the US Constitution. This matters because if SCOTUS finds that these Black-majority districts do violate the Constitution and that the VRA is actually unconstitutional, then there is no federal prohibition to stop states under Republican control from re-drawing their maps without the required opportunity districts. And there are dozens of those districts in states across the country intended to protect the voting power of oft-disenfranchised minority voters. Which means, where Republicans are in control, all of those theoretically could be drawn out of existence.
Right now the country’s attention is trained on Texas Republicans gerrymandering their maps even further in an effort to steal an additional five seats in midterms. But if the VRA is gutted, then the prospect of Republicans stealing only five seats will feel quaint. And the reality is that while California can (and must) counteract what Republicans are doing in Texas, we simply don’t have enough seats to counteract what Republicans could do if the Supreme Court decides to gut the VRA. The conservative bloc could cement Republican rule for good in the House.
So what are our options?
First off, the case still has to be litigated. And we’ll have good lawyers making as compelling a case as possible where they argue that Section 2 of the VRA has been upheld for decades, including by conservative justices who made a specific point to keep in tact that provision. “The Chief Justice made a point in Shelby County v. Holder of saying that Section 2 of the VRA continues to apply nationwide, and he and the other justices are going to be held to keep that promise,” Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket, explained to me. “So don’t count out the courts, don’t count out the lawyers arguing in the courts, and don’t count out the voters.”
[...]
And lastly, this is a reminder that we ultimately need to pass a federal ban on gerrymandering. That’s the only way we escape from this race to the bottom.
The MAGA Majority on SCOTUS seek to rig the congressional maps to help entrench permanent Republican rule just like what Orbán’s Hungary did with Fidesz.
Chief Justice John Roberts is continuing his wholesale destruction of the Supreme Court’s credibility in favor of advancing President Donald
Lisa Needham at Daily Kos:
Chief Justice John Roberts is continuing his wholesale destruction of the Supreme Court’s credibility in favor of advancing President Donald Trump’s imperial interests. This time, he’s making sure that Trump can fire Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter despite a Supreme Court case that literally says he can’t without cause.
Roberts and the rest of the court’s conservatives love making bold moves like this, but what they don’t feel so bold about is actually owning up to their actions. So all of the massive reshaping of the federal government by giving ever-increasing power to Trump is happening in the shadows.
In the Slaughter case, Roberts issued an emergency stay of an order from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which ruled that Trump could not remove Slaughter without cause because of the 90-year-old precedent set in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States.
The lower court had no option but to rule against Trump. Unlike the Supreme Court, lower courts are actually bound by precedent, so until and unless the Supreme Court explicitly overrules Humphrey, the lower courts are required to follow its holding. But with this stay, Roberts is saying that the lower courts are wrong in doing so.
And this is where the Supreme Court conservatives are wussing out. They don’t want to actually overrule Humphrey’s, in no small part because they would then have to grapple with whether Trump could fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. And they also don’t want to be perceived as undermining the separation of powers, so they tell themselves that these are just narrow, technical rulings.
In their framing, they’re not ignoring the Constitution or overruling their own precedent; all they’re doing is putting a lower court order on hold while litigation moves forward.
[...]
Roberts’ stay obviously screws over Slaughter, but it also screws over the American people with further erosion of the separation of powers as Trump turns himself into a king. And it screws over the lower courts, which do not have an actual decision saying that Humphrey’s is no longer law. That means that, when Trump illegally removes commissioners, they’re stuck with the impossible task of choosing between existing precedent or divining the ultimate intentions of the Supreme Court.
This is no way to run a country or a judiciary. If Roberts believes that the purpose of his job is to make sure that Trump gets to do whatever he wants—laws be damned—he should say so with his whole chest.
The right-wing judicial activist MAGA Majority on SCOTUS issued an emergency stay in Trump v. Slaughter that Donald Trump’s firing of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter is “lawful”, violating the precedent set in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States.
The decision could mandate forced outing of trans youth across America.
Erin Reed at Erin In The Morning:
On Monday night, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a shadow docket decision that reinstates a lower court judge's injunction in favor of parents who wish for the forcible outing of transgender children in California and who wish for their transgender children to be misgendered by their teachers. The decision is the latest in a series of anti-transgender decisions by the Supreme Court, with more potentially on the way soon. The full impact of this decision is not yet clear, though it is likely going to lead to the invalidation of California's prohibition on forced outing and could be used to challenge individual school policies nationwide—even potentially leading to the forced misgendering of transgender youth in safe states. Because of a provision in the lower court injunction that prohibits schools from using different names or pronouns with parents than are being used at school, all parent contact effectively becomes an outing event for transgender students across California.
“Gender dysphoria is a condition that has an important bearing on a child’s mental health, but when a child exhibits symptoms of gender dysphoria at school, California’s policies conceal that information from parents and facilitate a degree of gender transitioning during school hours. These policies likely violate parents’ rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children,” says the unsigned majority opinion, leaning heavily on a parental rights framework to rule in favor of the forced outing of transgender youth.
The use of the parental rights framework is something that the liberal minority of the court did not pull punches on. In a footnote to her dissent, Kagan writes, "Another contrast—this time, between this case and United States v. Skrmetti—is also striking. In Skrmetti, several parents challenged Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors. The suit raised claims grounded in both equal protection and substantive due process. As to the latter, the parents in Skrmetti, similarly to the parents here, asserted a right 'to make decisions concerning medical care for their minor children.' And in support of that right, the Skrmetti parents relied on the same precedents the Court does today. But the Court, when deciding to grant certiorari in Skrmetti, limited its review to the equal protection issue: It would not even hear the parents out on their substantive due process claim."
[...]
While the ruling technically applies only to California, the constitutional reasoning extends far beyond the state’s borders. The court’s due process holding—that parents have a right “not to be shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children’s mental health”—applies to all parents, not just those with religious objections. That means every school district in the country that maintains a confidentiality policy for transgender students is now operating under a constitutional cloud. Fifteen states have already enacted forced outing laws or policies; those laws now have strong constitutional backing from the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, states with protections for transgender students now face the prospect of legal challenges citing this ruling. Kagan noted in her dissent that nearly 40 cases raising similar challenges to school confidentiality policies are already in the courts. This ruling hands every one of them a roadmap.
The 6 right-wing black-robed judicial activist tyrants on SCOTUS (aka the “MAGA Majority”) issued a vile shadow docket decision Monday night putting trans school students in harm’s way with the reckless Mirabelli v. Bonta decision against California’s AB1955 law that prohibits the forced outing and forced misgendering of students in schools.
See Also:
Law Dork (Chris Geidner): SCOTUS conservatives block California gender-identity student protections, N.Y. map change
Them: Supreme Court Allows California Teachers to Out Trans Students
HuffPost: In Mirabelli v. Bonta, Supreme Court Blocks California Policy That Prohibited Outing Trans Kids
LGBTQ Nation: Supreme Court forces California to allow teachers to out trans kids
The Advocate: Conservative Supreme Court justices curb California’s effort to shield transgender students from forced outing
The Guardian: US supreme court blocks California privacy protections for trans students
For the court’s conservative bloc, the line between upholding the Constitution and serving as Donald Trump’s personal attorneys has all but
Matt Ford at TNR:
The Supreme Court’s most recent term may be over, but its work on behalf of President Donald Trump continues. The justices announced on Wednesday evening in Trump v. Boyle that they would stay a lower court order that had blocked Trump from firing the three Democratic appointees on the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
As usual, the court’s action took place on the shadow docket, where it handles emergency appeals and motions. This time, the court’s conservative majority greatly expanded that docket’s power to decide legal and constitutional questions. In theory, shadow-docket actions are procedural or administrative in nature and shouldn’t be seen as a decision on the actual merits of a case.
That understanding no longer holds weight. Trump’s dismissals violated a federal statute passed by Congress that only allows the president to fire CPSC commissioners for cause. The Supreme Court previously ruled in the 1934 case Humphrey’s Executor v. United States that Congress could lawfully extend for-cause removal protections to the heads of certain agencies. Congress has not repealed the law in question. The Supreme Court also has not overturned Humphrey’s Executor outright.
Except, well, now it effectively has. “Although our interim orders are not conclusive as to the merits, they inform how a court should exercise its equitable discretion in like cases,” the court wrote in its unsigned order. “The stay we issued in [Trump v.] Wilcox reflected ‘our judgment that the government faces greater risk of harm from an order allowing a removed officer to continue exercising the executive power than a wrongfully removed officer faces from being unable to perform her statutory duty.’”
[You morons, the court might as well have said to lower court judges. Why are you applying our precedents to these cases? Why aren’t you telepathically discerning the law of the land from these unsigned orders where we barely explain ourselves? Why aren’t you treating our procedural moves as equivalent to a fully briefed decision on the merits? Don’t you know we want Humphrey’s Executor dead and buried?]
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for his part, was the only member of the majority with a somewhat intellectually consistent position on how to handle this case. He argued in a concurring opinion that, in addition to issuing a stay, the court should have simultaneously agreed to take up the case on the merits because the case centered on whether one of the high court’s precedents should be overturned.
“In those unusual circumstances, if we grant a stay but do not also grant certiorari before judgment, we may leave the lower courts and affected parties with extended uncertainty and confusion about the status of the precedent in question,” he argued. (Certiorari before judgment is a rarely used procedure where the court reviews a district court’s ruling without waiting for an appeals court to weigh in.) He noted that waiting for the issue to “percolate” in the lower courts made no sense because lower courts, by definition, cannot overturn a Supreme Court ruling.
Justice Elena Kagan noted in a short but stern dissent that the conservatives had wrought major changes to the structure of the federal government with only a cursory explanation. “The majority’s sole professed basis for today’s stay order is its prior stay order in Wilcox,” she wrote, referring to the court’s prior decision in May to allow Trump to dismiss members of the National Labor Relations Board. “But Wilcox itself was minimally (and, as I have previously shown, poorly) explained.”
The three-sentence explanation the court gave in Wilcox, Kagan argued, was insufficient to justify Wednesday’s order. “So only another under-reasoned emergency order undergirds today’s,” she continued. “Next time, though, the majority will have two (if still under-reasoned) orders to cite.” At that point, Kagan noted, the court’s reasoning would be “turtles all the way down.” (Kagan also wrote the dissent in the Wilcox case; she appears to be the liberal justices’ point person on this issue.)
[...]
Here is how the federal government has generally worked within living memory. Congress generally passes laws to provide the scaffolding for federal agencies to regulate the national economy. In theory, Congress could pass a new law every time it wants to approve a cancer drug, or ban a pesticide, or do any of the other mundane but vital tasks that come with governing a modern industrialized economy. Instead, it created agencies to regulate these things within the bounds that Congress authorizes.
Most of these agencies operate directly under the president. Starting in the early twentieth century, Congress also began to create agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission to tackle more complex economic issues, investing them with a greater degree of power and autonomy. Presidents have the power to appoint the heads of these agencies, as the Constitution requires, but Congress set limits on when and how they can fire them to give those agencies a measure of independence.
[...]
This worked out pretty well for the United States, which enjoyed a high standard of living and unprecedented economic prosperity throughout the twentieth century. You would not know this if you only listened to the conservative legal movement, which often describes these agencies and their powers in ominous and near-apocalyptic terms. In a 2020 case, for example, Justice Clarence Thomas claimed in a concurring opinion that “the decision in Humphrey’s Executor poses a direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people.”
Humphrey’s Executor was 85 years old at that point, and the republic somehow managed to survive until then. It would be more accurate to say that the precedent was a threat to corporate interests since it preserved the independence of their regulators from political interference. (The court often gets these things confused.) Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the case in which Thomas wrote that concurring opinion, narrowed Humphrey’s Executor by allowing Trump to fire the CFPB’s director. That decision, in turn, paved the way for the Trump administration to dismantle the agency altogether when it retook power earlier this year.
At the center of the court’s approach to these agencies is a fundamental misunderstanding about the separation of powers and the early republic. In his majority opinion in Seila Law, Roberts explained the Framers’ mindset through his own hyper-presidentialism. He sketched a vision of the Constitution where Congress was a potential fount of despotism and the presidency was the bulwark of American democracy.
[...]
All of this represents a fundamental shift in how the Supreme Court operates. The court could have allowed the CPSC and NLRB officials to stay in office to preserve the status quo during litigation, heard their cases on an accelerated briefing schedule, and overturned Humphrey’s Executor while ruling against them on the merits. The court’s critics could have disagreed with the court’s ultimate reasoning, but they could have found no fault in how it operated to get there. Instead, the conservative justices simply did what they wanted to do because they could.
The Roberts Court at SCOTUS has become a MAGA-fied protection racket rife with judicial activism.
The conservative justice set the scene for a new SCOTUS term with a train metaphor that was off the rails.
Laura Esposito at The Daily Beast:
Justice Clarence Thomas is finding increasingly creative ways to justify reshaping long-standing laws.
During a rare appearance at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, the George H.W. Bush–appointed justice said the Supreme Court should take a more critical approach to settled precedent, arguing that decided cases are not “the gospel,” ABC News reported.
Thomas, 77, compared his Supreme Court colleagues to passengers on a train, and said: ”We never go to the front to see who’s driving the train, where is it going. And you could go up there in the engine room, find it’s an orangutan driving the train, but you want to follow that just because it’s a train.”
He reasoned that some precedents were simply “something somebody dreamt up and others went along with.”
“At some point we need to think about what we’re doing with stare decisis‚" Thomas said, referring to the legal principle of abiding by precedent. “And it’s not some sort of talismanic deal where you can just say ‘stare decisis’ and not think, turn off the brain, right?”
[...]
“I don’t think that I have the gospel,” he added, “that any of these cases that have been decided are the gospel, and I do give perspective to the precedent. But it should—the precedent should be respectful of our legal tradition, and our country, and our laws, and be based on something, not just something somebody dreamt up and others went along with.”
Thomas has long been keen to revisit some of the Supreme Court’s most significant decisions—especially now that the Court has a conservative majority of six to three.
SCOTUS “Justice” Clarence Thomas is a disgrace to the highest court in the land.
See Also:
The Guardian: Clarence Thomas says precedent might not determine cases on upcoming supreme court docket
Justice Kagan, dissenting for the Democratic appointees, noted the majority's "preliminary" order means $4 billion in aid allotted by Congre
Chris Geidner at Law Dork:
The U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican appointees on Friday issued an order allowing President Donald Trump to unilaterally hold back $4 billion in foreign aid funding — overturning the decision of Congress that was previously signed into law.
It was a ruling that required a willful disregard for some of the most fundamental understandings of America’s federal government — and prompted a sharp dissent from the Democratic appointees.
The shadow docket ruling addressed $4 billion in funds that Trump has asked Congress to rescind under a provision in another law, the Impoundment Control Act. Congress has not acted on that, however, meaning the administration is still obligated to spend the money.
The unsigned order from the Supreme Court on Friday nonetheless blocked a lower court’s order that would have required the Trump administration to spend the money by September 30, when that funding expires.
As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent for her and Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, “The effect is to prevent the funds from reaching their intended recipients—not just now but (because of their impending expiration) for all time.“
There is no justification for the Republican-appointee majority’s decision — which itself came 17 days after Chief Justice John Roberts granted the Trump administration an “administrative” stay in the case. Roberts’s “administrative” stay blocked the district court’s order until the majority could on Friday issue what amounted to five sentences of mostly conclusory reasoning to justify allowing the Trump administration to refuse to spend billions of dollars in foreign aid funding that Congress decided the United States should spend.
On the two primary issues on which the court based its decision — the meaning of the Impoundment Control Act in this case and the so-called “harms” claimed by the administration to justify a stay of the injunction — Kagan meticulously explained why the one-sentence explanations from the majority1 do not even stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny.
In the State Department v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition case, the 6-3 MAGA Majority judicial activists on SCOTUS once again gives Donald Trump permission to unlawfully block $4BN of foreign aid from being used.
See Also:
HuffPost: Supreme Court Lets Trump Freeze $4.9B in Foreign Aid Funds
Election 2026: Suozzi Opponent Added to Republican 'Maga Majority' List
The National Republican Congressional Committee has added Mike LiPetri’s name to its Maga Majority list, candidates that the party believes will do well in the November election.
He is running for the second time against Democrat Rep. Tom Suozzi in the Third Congressional District. Suozzi defeated the former state assemblyman in a tight race in 2024.
The MAGA Majority is a Republican effort…
