It is sickening to me as an American to think that our Constitution will be trashed in favor of a more authoritarian structure, headed by the world’s most ridiculous wanna-be dictator. It is even more sickening to realize that the trashing of the Constitution will be done by the persons most responsible for upholding the Constitution, the current Justices of the Supreme Court established by that Constitution.
The “conservative” majority of John Roberts’s Supreme Court seems to have become an unhinged authoritarian body that is completely failing to maintain a “judicial temperament” in judging Trump’s numerous attacks on and evasions of America’s Constitution, Trump’s daily reckless contradictions of the laws that the Constitution orders him to enforce, and his attempts to bulldoze and erase 250 years of “normal” bipartisan expectations of reasonable government. This body of “judges,” like everyone else in America, can also see how Trump is attempting to establish a government propaganda apparatus that rival’s Stalin’s or Mao’s for blind exaltations of a totalitarian dictator, while encouraging their political cult to dance in enthusiastic joy at all the ridiculous policies and reversals of policy that the dictator decrees – and it bothers them not at all to allow this person to smash the laws he is mandated to “execute faithfully.”
The 6 justices of the majority, Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett, are certainly not honest Judges in any meaningful sense, and deserve no respect or deference from the public or an honest news media. They are not traditional American conservatives, they are instead radial authoritarians, inventing and adopting tendentious arguments that always seem to increase the power of the President or the legal untouchability of our modern plutocrats, or simply giving the Republican party the victories they seek on abortion, guns, environmental pollution and destruction, voting rights and police powers, but which the voters won’t approve. Though most of these justices have their eccentric intellectual causes to follow, it seems likely their minds are made up well before most cases reach them. I can’t say they’re “completely” politically biased; but if they don’t want to be seen as a pro-Trump, pro-Republican, pro- plutocrat bunch of toadies, they can stop acting like that at any time.
For now, it seems they will adhere to a radical pro-Republican, pro-plutocrat ideology in all significant cases: Republican Presidents can overrule or ignore Congress and written laws, the rights or ordinary citizens (and their need for good government) will be denied. As I write in the 2nd week of September 2025, every day brings news of “shadow docket” rulings, reversing or “staying” appeals Court rulings against Trump’s lawlessness, allowing the damage to citizen interests to accumulate as they take years to come to official decisions, with signed opinions justifying their reasoning. While today’s “conservative” judges pretend to be focused on the “text” of the Constitution, their own writings show how they will invent new doctrines and constitutional interpretations whenever they need to reach their ideological goal, and they have a very bad habit of ignoring the actual facts presented in the original trial when those facts disprove the conclusion they wish to reach, while exalting opinions and possibilities presented by the side they favor into unchallengeable facts in their final opinions.
I need to take a break here to apologize to my readers. I’m getting too old work both quickly and accurately, and my family business took on some extra projects this summer that are leaving me very tired. I do like to write long, accurate articles that approach the highest standards, but I’m just too tired and too responsible for many other demands on my time. So I am not footnoting every source, I am not using all the proper names of the cases before the Court, and this essay will be more like one citizen’s (hopefully rational) rant, than an academic exercise in dispassionate History. Nevertheless, I do believe my general statements are supported by many other scholars and experts. I especially like Dalia Lithwick at the Slate platform for deep coverage of the Supreme Court, Marcy Wheeler, Steve Vladek and the Lawfare blog are also good sources, and the current doings of the Court are being reported by many others. Two specific references I am using may be behind paywalls or other not-easy-to-reach corners of the internet. Where I discuss “two professors” seeking the source of disinformation against science itself, this was from (the paywalled portion of) Paul Krugman’s Substack outlet, “Science Under Siege: A Talk with Peter Hotez and Michael Mann, Sept. 6, 2025.” And the quote from former Solicitor-General Neal Katyal is from the newsletter of Bloomberg Columnist and financial executive Barry Ritholtz (who discusses a lot of high finance and investment advice, but is also informative on social and political issues), “Transcript: Neal Katyal on Challenging Trump’s Global Tariffs,” Sept. 8, 2025.
The roots of the dictatorship project in America are deep, from the Powell Memo to the Federalist Society to the discovery by Rupert Murdoch, back in his native Australia, that he could make millions with a formula of marrying dishonest news coverage, designed to create fear over various (alleged) socio-political situations with a coverage that demonized more liberal politicians while exalting more conservative ones, combined with a salacious coverage of entertainment and social issues featuring all the human behavior that the religious conservatives hated. Is it still true, for many decades in Australia and Britain Murdoch’s newspapers featured daily big pictures of big bare-breasted women together with all the conservative bias in political coverage.
The overall thrust of American History that has brought us to the potential destruction of the American Constitution and American democracy is the evolution of one of our major political parties into an authoritarian cult, under the leadership of a reckless, ignorant and hateful personality, determined to tell any lies and commit any outrage in order to end democracy for the 51% of America that cannot approve of their madness. And along the way, they had the Federalist Society taking the initiative to install a class of political judges who could be counted on to understand that the interests of ordinary Americans don’t count for anything in the worlds of Republican political domination and plutocratic economic domination.
This evolution has been promoted, financed and shepherded since the 1980’s and ‘90’s by a number of business and Republican political interests and lobbies, most notably the Koch brothers and their various organizations and coalitions, and the Murdoch media empire. According to two professors who have been strongly attacked by the Trumpist cults for their work on climate change and vaccines, and were thus motivated to see who was funding the anti-science ideologies that the authoritarian cult has latched onto, the Koch brothers various organizations -whose fortune and influence depend on the oil industry – have been longtime supporters of anti-science propaganda on climate change. They’ve also been longtime supporters of the “sell the suckers some junk” side of the pharmaceutical industries, over-the-counter pills to counter every know malady, with some vitamins and herbs sold at huge profit margins, with advertising on the conservative talk radio of the late 20th Century, the “Info Wars” of Alex Jones in recent decades, and now such miracle cures are ubiquitous on all types of mass and social media.
I wanted to bring that bit of digression to your attention, and to bring us back to our discussion of the Political Corruption of six human beings who should know better. In order for media moguls and special interests to better succeed in their massive advertising and public relations campaigns full of twisted truths and opinions presented as facts, it is helpful if they can hide their sources of income and present themselves simply as concerned citizens. Thus, the Supreme Court needed to give great credence to their fears of being questioned about their money and the names of of their supporters and approve huge pools of “dark money’ that does not have to be reported. Ordinary citizens do have the right to try form such groups as well, but this was clearly a decision that favors the organized plutocrats (and the sharp-elbowed Republican politicians who have manipulated the regulatory agencies that should be enforcing the minimal rules on these dark money groups to give themselves even more advantages in election campaigns than other non-wealthy citizens have).
Fairly elected legislatures can’t be counted on to support Republicans and billionaires, while modern technologies can make the process of “gerrymandering” legislative districts so precisely that 60% of the votes can easily get the 2/3 and ¾ majorities of legislative seats in a particular state that allow them to change the state constitutions to make election rules even more favorable to the party that can usually achieve a 60% vote. This gerrymandering does act to fundamentally deny “the republican form of government” that the Constitution requires states to maintain, and both parties have engaged in it … but in recent years it is overwhelmingly the rural states with Republican majorities that have practiced gerrymandering in a ruthless fashion (while some Democratic states were trying to find less partisan methods for drawing fair districts.) So, presented with many cases seeking to overturn extreme gerrymanders, the exalted wisdom of the Supreme Court majority gave us a ruling, that while they are usually very happy able to spend months working out the details of obscure areas of the law, they were just too confused to be able to figure out a rule that would tell them when gerrymandering was extreme, and therefore nothing can be done to regulate or prevent extreme gerrymandering – a result that every law clerk in Washington DC knows gives Republicans some 5 or 10 extra seat in the House of Representatives as gerrymandered state legislatures create gerrymandered Congressional districts.
And while not all Republicans are racists, and not all racists are Republicans, it does seem to be true that in modern America the 30% or so of white citizens that cannot be happy when their Black neighbors have equal rights and privileges do tend to support the Republican party. So naturally, the Voting Rights Act that specifically attempted to correct and prevent a return to the old patterns of preventing Blacks from freely voting needed to be found un-Constitutional, giving Republicans a few more seats in Congress.
One episode that was not a case, and that was not treated in the media as an issue directly affecting the Court, was Mitch McConnell’s infamous refusal to allow the Senate to consider President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Court in 2016. Essentially, the Republican position was “we’re not going to let you have the opportunity to nominate a reasonable person to this Court.” I know I was very agitated at the time, that this was a serous breach of “norms” in government practice, the unspoken rules of compromise that have kept a messy democracy going fairly smoothly for centuries now. I strongly felt that Chief Justice Roberts should have called on the Senate to act least act on the nomination, I know that he would find many reasons of “not interfering in another branch of government” to refuse my preference, yet it did seem to symbolize for me that this Supreme Court was far too close to the Republican Party to be good for the nation that I would like to live in.
This was confirmed for me after Trump took office in 2017, and the Court basically became a “Santa Claus” for Republican voters who wanted more conservative policies, that so far voters have never approved. Ban abortions? Even the Roberts’ majority on the Court knew that to directly ban ALL abortion would backfire on public opinion, but sure, we’ll remove the protection that an earlier Court had allowed – and which had received majority support in the polls and in the election results for 50 years – and give it back to the states, so half the nation can immediately ban abortion, and try to ban their womenfolk from seeking abortion in other states. For things like expanding gun rights and giving property rights much greater freedom to overrule environmental considerations, or expanding prayer in schools (in a case that notoriously included complete false narratives of the plaintiff’s actions, that were disproved in the original case, into the final decision of the Court), or allowing religious conservatives to claim the right to refuse providing commercial services to persons they find “offensive,” the Supreme Court simply opened up the gift bag and handed the 40% of voters who liked Trump all the of the “good things” they had wanted for years (no matter the cost to the 60% of Americans who might have disagreed).
This more clearly-biased attitude at the Supreme Court culminated after Trump had been voted out of office, and had maintained a continuous campaign, completely involving his character and actions and the evolution of his cult, to maintain that he had NOT lost the election, to the point that he called for and led an insurrection against a Constitutionally process to certify the results of elections.
This was, of course, completely un-precedented in American history, as was the nearly complete restoration of Trump as a “major political figure” after just two weeks or so of media and other Republicans regretting the assault on the Capitol. But because the malignant narcissist that Republicans chose to lead them managed to not lose the approval of 40% of the voters, he was de facto rehabilitated to be taken seriously by the media – the same corporate media that went all-out in reporting rumors of Biden’s disabilities in 2024, but has never questioned Trump’s fitness in the same way, whether with his word salads in 2015 or his more clear signs of physical and mental decline in 2025. Where is the mainstream media that once upon a time tore politicians apart for a mistake in a debate, or looking puny when posing in a tank, or wearing the wrong color suit? If American democracy does fail on its 250th birthday, the various TV networks and major newspapers will have a lot of responsibility for not holding Trump to the same standards they once used to excoriate and excommunicate Presidents and candidates like Ford and Dukakis and Clinton and Obama.
But despite all these revelations of Trump’s character and his typical policies and political actions, this politically corrupt Supreme Court took the opportunity to use Trump’s complaints about being persecuted for leading an insurrection that killed police officers to consider the possibility of a Presidential immunity against criminal charges. The beloved Founders in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 did indeed debate the question of immunity against criminal charges for a President. And many opposed it because the President was not intended to be a monarch with monarchical privileges. The Constitutional Convention did not directly vote on Presidential immunity, but while they did approve of immunity for Congresspersons in certain circumstances, they made NO mention of a President being immune to criminal charges whether for offenses before or during Presidency. And indeed, the general thrust of the Constitutional Convention was to require the 3 branches of government to work together in cooperation, and to make sure the President was considered more like more like an ordinary citizen (temporarily given great responsibilities) and not considered as any type of monarch (who gained privileges, personally, as part of his identity).
Yet instead of considering the original texts of he Founders, or the many decades of a government functioning quite well without any formal theory of Presidential immunity, the politically corrupt majority essentially invented a whole structure of Presidential immunity, on the very thin basis of some Nixon-era Court opinions that gave the President the right to shield some of his highest advisors from legal questioning about presidential decision-making. By claiming that the Founders preferred a strong Presidency (a claim seems to be more false than true), they expanded this into a wide-ranging set of Presidential immunities (now established as legal facts by their decision). The President needed to be absolutely immune from any threat of prosecution, either during or after their term, for any activity that could be described as “official acts” of the President, and the President also enjoyed “presumptive immunity” for a wide variety of political actions in dealing with Congress, the states and other institutional actors, and of course the President could not be questioned by any Court on matters of foreign policy. This immunity extended to all “occupants of the Oval office,” and the Court went so far as to say that if it ever was supposed that an “official act” was possibly criminal, the discussions of the President and their advisors could not even be considered as evidence in any case against the President.
None of these newly invented structures had ever been proposed or discussed in legal circles previously, nor was there any popular campaign for a “stronger Presidency” beside the megalomaniac venting of Trump himself (it was after this that Trump circulated images of himself with a royal jeweled crown, and in the costume of the Pope of the Catholic Church).
I believe that it is correct to argue that this decision of the Supreme Court in 2024 will go down in history as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever. The choice facing the Justices is right in the official title of the case: Trump v. United States. It seems an obvious conclusion that these politically motivated Judges on today’s Supreme Court looked at a potential clash between Donald Trump and American democracy under the Constitution, and made a clear decision that they favored Donald Trump over the continued existence of American democracy under the Constitution.
The Supreme Court has not made a full final decision on any of the scores of lawsuits that Trump’s actions since January 20, 2025 have brought forth, but their “emergency” orders (given without previous oral or written arguments by plaintiffs or defendants, and without supporting signed opinions or records of votes,) have invariably prevented appeals court orders that Trump stop and reverse his many funding cuts, personnel firings, and closures of departments and agencies authorized by Congress, all of which violate laws passed by Congress and existing regulations generated by the federal government itself (through procedures authorized and budgeted by Congress over past decades).
Apparently, much of the fate of Constitutional government, where the President obeys the laws passed by Congress, rests on the Supreme Court’s decision in the case known as Democracy’s Executioner, pardon me, that’s Humphrey’s Executor, based on a 1930’s case that established that Congress could establish semi-independent agencies to take care of problems that required regulation, but which were too individualized and complex for the full Congress to pass every rule, and that while these agencies were part of the federal government, and for many decades worked well with other government entities and with Presidents and their Cabinets, there was some insulation of the governing boards from constant, momentary political influence, and some protection of their workers against unjustified dismissal.
Well of course the Federalist Society and the Roberts Court majority just hates this precedent, it does block Trump from becoming a complete dictator, and they can’t wait to overturn it and they’ve talked about overturning it. However, they realize that completely overturning this precedent would create a terrible case of ‘stuff-hitting-the-fan’ if it allowed Trump to grab control of the Federal Reserve Board, which, in the opinion of most economists and financial specialists, supported by the historical record of what happens when dictators get control of central banks and monetary supplies, which is that there a year or two of fun, but then there’s huge inflation and a wrecking of the national economy for the next decade or so. Is the radical right-wing Court majority actually smart enough to recognize and fear this danger? They may be, since they specifically discussed exempting the Federal Reserve from their intention to reverse the Humphrey’s Executor precedent – even though the Federal Reserve Board is on the same legal ground as all the other agencies that citizens need, the fault that the Court is trying to correct in all these cases is that these agencies aren’t completely controlled by Trump. The vote to reverse and overturn Humphrey’s Executor will represent a major step away from the limited ability of average citizens to express their preferences thorough their elected representatives.
One of the worst examples of the Court’s pro-Trump bias came just days ago, in the second week of September. This emergency decision was based on of one of the worst examples of the recent Supreme Court decisions giving Republicans policy victories they have not been able to win though ordinary politics, decreeing that legislation prohibiting discrimination on racial grounds makes any and all efforts at affirmative action for minorities unconstitutional. Trump’s law-breaking Justice Department has used this decision to attack universities, law firms and media companies to demand payments and government control over private organization decisions in retribution for their past affirmative action efforts, despite any clear legal authorization to take such actions. Yet in a Supreme irony, this week the Supreme Court itself authorized (Trump’s secretive and terroristic special police force,) the newly expanded Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE) agency to use clearly racial characteristics (skin color and non-English-speaking) as approved reasons for their masked, non-uniformed or badged personnel to detain persons for interrogation and detention. Trump’s secret police get to use racial judgements, but the rest of us better not!
The Supremes themselves must be aware that it takes them years sometimes to decide complex and contentious cases, and they must also be aware of the character of President Trump and the decision-making processes he prefers (i.e., personal, dogmatic, unpredictable and changeable decisions made with a variety of official and unofficial advisors, but without a formal process of consideration). And yet they are fully prepared to see President Trump tear his way through laws passed by Congress, and to impose his personal, hateful stamp on how American government is conducted for two or three years, allowing him to staff the government with the far-right provocateurs and social media warriors that he prefers, while they make up their minds on how to formally excuse his attacks on all the norms and institutions of good government that we have evolved over two and half Centuries.
It really is a very sad conclusion. American democracy will be tortured by Trump and his cast of malevolent characters for months and years, and then finally die with barely a whimper a few years from now, after Trump has been able to totally transform the Federal government into an instrument of his own vengeful, racist and misogynist, and ignorant and capricious impulses, and the Supreme Court majority will finally come out and “Oh, it’s all OK, a President can break laws and tear up the Constitution if he really wants to.”
To conclude this discussion of today’s Supreme Court majority, I do want to entertain the possibility that these Justices may see the error of their ways to date, and will make their final rulings to favor the interests of America’s 330 million ordinary citizens, and not the selfish interest of the clique of authoritarians and plutocrats that are trying to change our democracy and liberty.
I myself have little confidence in Roberts and his politically corrupt majority, so I was glad to find a public figure I can respect who does believe that the Court has not completely closed its mind. Neil Katyal was Acting Solicitor-in-Chief under President Obama, in charge of preparing and arguing cases before the Supreme Court, he does have a excellent career resume in the law and is currently involved in the case that will be coming before the Court most likely this November, representing the business interests being harmed by and seeking to overturn Trump’s imposition of tariffs without Congress, against many laws and treaties, and using the excuse of an “emergency” that has been a chronic situation that is not seriously damaging America’s laws, reputation or economy.
In a recent interview, he said, “I love the question because you know, oftentimes people say things like, well the Supreme Court is appointed by Republicans so they only wrote Republican or nonsense like that. This is not my experience. I mean I’ve been lucky to argue 52 cases there and I just don’t see it in the same way as those kind of pundits see it. … So I don’t think it’s the right way to think about it. I think that there are people who take constitutional limits more seriously and others who want to defer and avoid getting the courts in the middle of something.”
I think we all need to hope and pray and do what we can to urge the Supreme Court’s majority to take the Constitution and the limits it places on a citizen-President more seriously.
While the President himself utters threats of violence and degrading insults to Americans and others nearly every day, now in the second week of September we are being told that seeing Trump as a “fascist” is somehow creating an atmosphere of violence that requires the mass arrests against ordinary citizens. I mean, we’ve got a cultish mob marching on the capital (via social media today) and government taking over and directing industries, this history does seem to rhyme with 1920’s Italy. Trump himself is saying he wants to be dictator, if he doesn’t wish to be compared to fascists” he should disband his secret police force and stop breaking laws established by Congress, and stop including ridiculous claims of his own “achievements” and “greatness” in every official communication.
And if our current Supreme Court majority of Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett does not wish to be regarded as a politically corrupt radical-Republican bunch of clowns who are disgracing their own personal and professional legacies, it is very easy for them to escape that judgement by making better decisions that align with the words and spirit of the Constitution – a spirit that envisioned a President limited by rules and working with the other branches of government in a system of compromise.
They can go back and overturn their terrible Citizens United decision that allowed huge pools of dark money telling lies in national advertising. They can realize that gerrymandered legislatures do cancel the liberties of the affected citizens, and make some simple rules – if a 48% vote gains 53 % of the seats, if a 55% vote gains 62 or 63% of seats, if a 61% vote gains more than 70 % of seats, those should be illegal gerrymanders that need to stop. And when they can clearly see a President who literally believes “I can do anything,” when they see that President breaking laws with the flimsiest of excuses and made-up “emergencies” to send troops to major cities controlled by Democrats, when they see lower courts dealing with a Justice Dept. that tells outright lies in court, that accuses specific citizens of breaking laws (but without filing indictments) and a President and his whole official and popular supporters regularly accusing huge classes of citizens of being terrorists and “scum” just because they don’t follow the President’s cult, they need to go back and entirely re-think and re-order their decision creating a whole structure of immunity for a lawless President. The Founding Fathers clearly believed the President should be a citizen subject to the law (and more responsible than others at actually following the law.)
America Does Not Have Kings, American Does Not Need Kings, and especially not this sick, hateful King. Please protest and resist at every opportunity. Call Congresspersons of both major parties every day, urge them not to let America become a dictatorship, and take every opportunity to help yourself, your friends and acquaintances and co-workers and all citizens to maintain and restore a government whose President follows laws and respects citizen’s rights.
And it is legal and useful to write letters to this Supreme Court, of course they will try to ignore them, but if we can get enough letters and postcards to show them and their clerks that we are serious and numerous, it will have an effect. They need to know that we can see what they’re up to and that we will not agree, we will not simply obey and respect them personally or respect their decisions obediently.
The address is:
(name of Justice or Justices)
Supreme Court of the United States
1 First St., NE
Washington DC 20513
And finally, the best course of action for Americans who do not want to see the death of their democracy is to try to re-invigorate and strengthen the Democratic Party to be an effective opposition: urge the existing elected Democrats to fight Trump and his regime ever more forcefully, elect new Democrats who are not afraid to fight more forcefully, and to be in the streets and in the committee rooms and the vote-counting rooms to be sure we continue to have honest elections that will be obeyed by government bodies. Again, follow every avenue of protest that has ever been tried, and try to create new avenues for protest, and don’t let major corporations and big media hide from the crisis, the economic chaos and recession that Trump will likely cause will hurt them too.
America Does Not Need Kings. We Especially Do Not Need This Stupid and Hateful King. And as an American citizen who can remember when politicians, the media, and larger parts of the public had a knowledge and a respect for the Constitution and the many “norms” of a functioning democracy, it makes me sick, sick to my stomach and my head and my bones, to think that American democracy will be transformed to an authoritarian dictatorship (under leadership of a particularly unqualified narcissist) by the work of the Supreme Court that should have been a guard against this national failure and national disaster. It’s still only a possible national disaster (and existential failure of every ideal America has ever tried to stand for), we still need to fight like heck against it, yet it is up to this very questionable Court to make the final decision. I gotta go, my stomach and head and bones aren’t feeling very good right now.
