Supreme Court Empowering Donald Trump Won’t Save Democracy—Only Voters Can

In the weeks leading up to January 6, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court turned away Republicans’ cowardly attempt to overturn state presidential election results Donald Trump lost Joe Biden but the judges were not the guardians of democracy. On one page order it was just a few offers, they simply rejected the gambit and called it a day. They didn’t because an influential member of the Supreme Court Tom Goldstein had proposedLet’s take this opportunity to confront “this extraordinary, dangerous moment for our democracy” – a moment in which the sitting president and his supporters have “firmly convinced many tens of millions of people that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.”

When these legal maneuvers failed and supporters of the losing candidate resorted to violence, storming the Capitol and threatening a peaceful transfer of power, Goldstein issued second call for the judges to speak with one voice and reassure a tense nation that its president was indeed a “legally elected president.” As part of a coequal branch of government that deals with questions of law and fact, the high court could provide clarity by “issuing an opinion that sets forth a straightforward description of reality,” Goldstein said. “Speaking unanimously now obviously won’t fix everything,” Goldstein continued on the evening of January 6. “But there is a part of the country that yearns for someone they trusted to explain that our democracy functioned as it should so that the results could be trusted. and should be respected.”

The Supreme Court did no such thing.

Four years ago seems like ancient history, but the silence in that dark hour for democracy is instructive as the country prepares for a new frantic presidential cycle in which the Supreme Court can be expected to intervene, sometimes without saying a word, in big and important matters. small. And the specter of an election too close to being called looms again in the minds of people who simply don’t trust this establishment serve as a bulwark against anti-democratic forces.

This mistrust is justified: the Court’s actions in the last year alone have had only made it clearer that a majority of the justices, three of whom were appointed by Trump, do not view him as a threat to a free and fair election, let alone as a mastermind who engineered a scheme based on “deception targeting every step of the election process.” “, as special prosecutor Jack Smith wrote in materials published last month that build a criminal case against the ex-president.

Chief Judge’s Indifference John Roberts and his overwhelming majority, which almost destroyed the fragile system that ensures the continuity of democracy, practically brought the game to naught; a president refusing to relinquish power even as his followers trashed the building of our national government was not enough to move them. By refusing to impose consequences, they demonstrated their disinterest in suppressing insurrections, denying elections and the firehose of lies and fabrications poisoning people’s faith in the democratic process, and then And Now. “In that case,” Roberts wrote in his widely ridiculed opinion By shielding Trump with broad immunity from prosecution, “focusing on ‘temporary results’ could have profound implications for the separation of powers and for the future of our Republic.”

In other words, the Supreme Court would like to move on, leave bygones in the past and focus on the future. But that future is already here: Trump openly boasts that he and the Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson have “little secretElection-related, whatever that means, and how some of the loudest voices in Trumpworld flood the zone Given the lies and misdirection of the election, voters and their communities would be wise to do their civic duty, prepare for the worst, and hope our institutions hold up. Like a recently released Steve Bannon said on his War room podcast: “Remember, November 5th – it doesn’t end there, it starts there.”

This post-election hell has yet to take shape, but it’s worth keeping in mind because judges up and down the chain will help shape the universe of fact and fiction that people will tell themselves about the 2024 election. One at a time countmore than 100 cases are ongoing.

One of the reasons Republican lawyers are so busy challenging voting procedures that make it easier for people to vote may not be a victory in court, but “question in advanceabout the results of the presidential election, as reported by CNN Tierney Snead reported this week. Democrats and voting rights advocates, for their part, are also busy protection access to a franchise. Almost everything is mired in litigation, from mail-in voting rules and voter purges to the legal powers of election officials. guess who won this competition. And no matter how the judges govern, their decrees will become fodder for the post-election narrative.

At least for now, the Supreme Court is shaping this reality on the margins. Just this week, again without much explanation, the justices took three actions related to the presidential election—one more significant than others, but all of them reinforcing the conventional wisdom that every vote counts. And with the lion’s share of election disputes concentrated in battleground states, it is impossible to predict how the Court’s signals will contribute to unrest on the ground. In Pennsylvania, where critical happening still awaiting judges’ decision, Trump and his entourage anxious election officials with unsubstantiated claims that fraud is already rampant.

At first there were two orders rejecting requests Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be removed from the ballot in Michigan and Wisconsin—a Hail Mary that was destined to fail because, as one judge astutely noted, the former candidate had failed to make similar efforts in other states, including New York, where he had insisted to be left on newsletter. “It is difficult to see how Plaintiff’s exclusion from the ballot could protect him from irreparable reputational harm in one state but cause the same harm in another,” the judge said. wrote Kennedy in September in the Michigan case.