The results of the 2026 midterms could lead to repairing so much of the damage Chief Justice John Roberts and his cronies on SCOTUS have inflicted on our democracy. Yes, Trump and Trumpism/MAGA got a world-class smackdown. However, even if it wasn’t a fully formed thought/goal in voters minds they gave Chief Justice Roberts an equally hard smackdown. To paraphrase the nursery rhyme All of Musks money and tech bro friends, couldn’t by rich folks elections again. Even in confederate states where black voters made it clear they weren’t losing their voting rights without one hell of a fight.
Chief Justice Roberts has long disgusted me, and for the rest of this I’m going to just call him ‘Roberts.’ His abuse of the power he holds makes him anything but “The Honorable Chief Justice of the United States. His life’s mission has been to accomplish two goals:
Make this country what a handful of rich, white, powerful men tried to do via the Articles of Confederation. By that I mean only they would have actual power and be able to change the rules to protect it whenever they wanted.
If not repeal the Voting Rights Act at least render it worthless. Shove blacks and other non-whites back to the old Jim Crow days to keep them from voting. (For that matter he’d probably want to repeal the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote.)
Justice Kennedy is the author of record of the Citizens United decision that was a watershed moment in campaign finance law but you can bet the farm Roberts wrote the first draft and Kennedy simply reworked it to make it seem like his words instead of Roberts’. There were SCOTUS rulings before (some long before) Roberts came along agaist limiting donations to candidates/campaigns. Roberts tenure as Chief Justice is marked by rulings opening the floodgates to prolific political donations and spending and worse, enabling what’s known as dark money to flood our politics.
It was sometimes joked that elected officials should have to wear logos like those found on NASCAR race cars and driver’s outfits. Money, or more specifically LOTS of money made a relative handful of people a whole lot more equal than most of us. As bad as things had gotten this year was off the charts. Nothing made the point more than all the money Elon Musk, the world’s first (and hopefully the only one when history is written long from now) trillionaire. As we learn in this article from Politico Musk gave almost a half-billion (that we know of) in donations to the GOP – some $200 million just to Ken Paxton who still lost his Senate race in Texas.
Elon’s fellow ‘tech bros’ also invested heavily, alarmed at local and state pushback on data centers and talk of some regulation of AI. Other mega donors, both corporate and individual have made out like bandits and with Trump’ breathtaking grift and transactional ways it was in their interest to spend big to keep a foot on the necks of most Americans. Democrats fielded an impressive array of candidates and there was a theme that took hold with the public – keep corporate/mega-donor money out of their campaigns and politics in general.
Small-dollar donations couldn’t come close to matching what the GOP was getting but you know what? Yesterday showed that small-dollar donors can reach a critical mass who’s energy overwhelms all that money from a relative handful of uber rich people. To be blunt, there are a helluva lot MORE of us regular folks than there are multi-millionaires and billionaires and we’ve had enough of their whiny, self-serving bullshit. For all their money and its ability to try and mislead/influence voters, when it comes time to actually count up the actual votes, a vote trillionaire Elon Musk’s vote counts exactly the same as mine (or yours) – one single vote. Suck it Roberts!
Let’s turn to the second thing I pointed out. Roberts projects a milquetoast, whitebread image but at heart he’s a stone cold racist. If you parse his Wikipedia profile and numerous SCOTUS rulings a pattern emerges. Despite being Catholic Roberts is as WASP as it gets. He’d enjoy the hell of of an old fashioned Klan rally. Roberts has simply done a good job at hiding who he really is inside. After clerking for a couple of judges, the second of which was William Rehnquist Roberts wanted to work for the new Reagan administration, and did so via a stint at DOJ. In preparing Sandra Day O’Conner for confirmation he revealed his disdain for the Voting Rights Act. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Roberts was downright offended that ‘those people’ could vote and have it count the same as his. For all his lofty ambitions when confirmed to the Court about history recording the ‘Roberts Court’ in a positive light he couldn’t help himself. He presided over a systematic gutting of the Voting Rights Act.
Even when the GOP held the ‘trifecta’ of holding the White House, Senate and House of Representatives they didn’t dare try to outright repeal the VRA. They could however whittle away at it. As Chief Justice with a Court majority made of GOP President’s picks Roberts could do more than whittle away. He took a meat cleaver to the VRA over and over. If it couldn’t be repealed, he could lead the way to re-inventing Constitutional law and norms to make the VRA meaningless.
Roberts thought he’d nailed the door shut on minority voting rights, especially in the south but yesterday black voters led the charge to sending a message. Come hell or high water they by god were going to cast their votes, and not Trump or his AG Blanche authorized goons from DOJ, DHS and ICE going to stop them. Nor would the armed forces if Trump were to break the law and deploy them. Their anger was shared by white people and I saw a breakdown earlier that said white voters, who usually skew Republican actually wound up equally splitting support for Republicans and Democrats nationwide.
All that led to results that have to be sticking in Roberts craw like a batch of spoiled oysters forced down his throat. Georgia has been trending towards Democrats in recent cycles and it’s just elected the first Black female Governor in this country’s history. Jon Ossoff (Jewish) was easily re-elected to serve alongside a black man who had ministered at Ebeneezer Baptist, preaching from the same pulpit Martin Luther King stood at! And for all the voter suppression efforts outgoing Gov. Brian Kemp started enacting (it’s how he won against Stacey Abrams – leveraging his role as Georgia’s Secretary of State to remove hundreds of thousands from voter rolls almost at the last minute) other top elected positions will now be held by Democrats.
Over in Mississippi, freaking MISSISSIPPI which has the largest (38% if memory serves) proportion of black voters it’s looking quite likely Scott Colom, a black man will flip the Senate seat currently held by Cindy Hyde-Smith. Roberts overseeing gutting the pre-clearance section of the Voting Rights Act combined with other decisions led to all the mid-cycle gerrymandering we saw this year. Mississippi lost one of it’s two majority black districts. That pissed off voters and mobilized blacks in the state in a way never before seen. It will almost certainly cost the GOP yet another Senate seat.
In fact, in both Florida and Texas the gerrymandering wound up backfiring. The GOP has lost most of those seats Trump, with Roberts stamp of approval demanded GOP legislatures do. While not limited to the south, a big goal was to restore the infamous Nixon ‘Southern Strategy.’ Roberts thought he’d put certain folks ‘back in their place’ and found out that no, they aren’t going to just give in. And neither are an increasing number of white people. So once again I say Suck it Roberts!
Yesterday was every bit as much a repudiation of John Roberts as it was of Trump. Earlier I saw Rahm Emmanuel (not exactly my favorite Democrat) make in important point. He listed several actions of the Roberts Court that led to what we saw yesterday. Things that angered voters enough to mobilize and vote for Democrats in numbers few dreamed could happen. I was already tinkering with a ‘screw you and all your nasty works’ piece when I saw that so I’m writing about it. It’s my fervent hope that what Emmanuel said will get picked up and trumpted by other pundits.
Decent people in this country rose up and cut Trump off at the knees, and without (I think) realizing it did the same to John Roberts. We’ve got wind in our sails and now our task is to keep those sails full and move full speed ahead to set the stage for undoing what Trump and Roberts (and his fellow Federalist Society GROOMED Fascists on SCOTUS) have inflicted on our country. And by extension the free world.
Friends, I know everyone begs you for money. I promise, among all those asking for spare change, we are the smallest and the hardest working. We’re a group of old, disabled people, except for one writer in his mid-50s. The rest of us are in our sixties and seventies, and this is a labor of love. All we’re asking for is the chance to keep telling the truth about Trump and help ensure democracy survives. If you can help, please do. Thank you. Ursula
Amen, brother preach it! Winning this election is just the beginning of our work to restore this country and like Biden said build back better.
The problem with gerrymandering, as performed by republicans, is that when the wave turns into a tsunami, gerrymandering turns into dummymandering. They spread their vote so thinly in ‘obviously winnable’ seats, that there weren’t enough of their own voters left, guaranteeing a loss instead.