They mean to rig the elections

 SCOTUS is helping.

UPDATE 05/01/2026:

UPDATE 05/03/2026:

UPDATE 05/06/2026:

Speaking of corruption

 

UPDATE 04/21/2026:

Hmmmmm

More evidence John Roberts is Trump's butt boy.  You don't suppose Roberts is in the Epstein files, do you?  Okay, that was uncalled for.

Let's grade John Roberts

At his [2005] swearing-in ceremony, the new chief justice spoke eloquently about the immense weight of the court’s duty to preserve the U.S. constitutional order. “What Daniel Webster termed ‘the miracle of our Constitution’ is not something that happens every generation,” Roberts said in his remarks. “But every generation in its turn must accept the responsibility of supporting and defending the Constitution, and bearing true faith and allegiance to it.”

“That is the oath that I just took,” he continued. “I will try to ensure, in the discharge of my responsibilities, that, with the help of my colleagues, I can pass on to my children’s generation a charter of self-government as strong and as vibrant as the one that Chief Justice Rehnquist passed on to us.”

  New Republic

How's he doing?

“Umpires don’t make the rules,” Roberts said, when describing his judicial approach at his 2005 confirmation hearings. “They apply them.” If Roberts is rarely depicted as a firebrand or a zealot, few would deny his unmistakable ideological tilt.

[...]

The United States is less democratic, less self-governing, more dysfunctional, and more corrupt than it was 20 years ago, thanks in large part to the Supreme Court’s rulings. Many of its most important decisions—on campaign finance, on voting rights, on gerrymandering, and on the separation of powers—have left us less able to resolve political questions and issues than any previous generation has been.

[...]

Public confidence in the Supreme Court as an institution has also collapsed. When Roberts was inaugurated, Gallup found in a September 2005 poll that 56 percent of Americans approved of the court’s job. In July this year, that number had dropped to 39 percent—the first sub-40 result in the survey’s history.

[...]

Roberts shares much of the blame himself. Over the course of two decades, he has overseen an effort that has steadily chipped away at many of the twentieth century’s pivotal decisions, made government less responsive and effective, and handed enormous power to corporations and the extremely rich.

[...]

In the 2016 case McDonnell v. United States, the justices unanimously overturned the conviction of a former Virginia governor who had performed a variety of services—setting up meetings, making introductions, pressuring other officials—in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars in luxury gifts and loans.

The average American would probably consider that to be bribery. The high court disagreed by ruling that none of the activities counted as an “official act,” and therefore they were protected by the First Amendment. “There is no doubt that this case is distasteful; it may be worse than that. But our concern is not with tawdry tales of Ferraris, Rolexes, and ball gowns,” Roberts wrote for the court. “It is instead with the broader legal implications of the Government’s boundless interpretation of the federal bribery statute.”

[...]

The 2019 decision Rucho v. Common Cause—written by Roberts himself—allowed state GOP lawmakers to give themselves [gerrymandered] supermajorities even if a majority of voters cast their ballot for a Democratic candidate.

[...]

Self-government is impossible when elected officials know their power comes from gerrymandered districts and wealthy donors instead of the people.

[...]

Of the 435 House seats that were contested in the 2024 election, only about 30 of them were actually competitive races between Democratic and Republican candidates. Americans who lived in the other 400 or so districts effectively faced a preordained choice. Entrenched partisan gerrymandering also encourages more extreme candidates, by making party primaries—where compromise and moderation are often dissuaded in favor of ideological purity—the decisive factors in an election’s outcome.

[...]

As the Supreme Court was making the nation less democratic, it was also working to make its government less responsive and effective. Since the early twentieth century, Congress has created and relied upon specialized agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration to regulate complex aspects of the national economy.

[...]

For the Roberts court, however, those agencies represent a fundamental threat to the separation of powers. The court’s conservative majority has overturned precedents that required judges to defer to agencies’ interpretations in some cases and has struck down statutory protections that insulate some department heads from at-will dismissal. Congress’s intent in creating the agencies is sidelined in favor of stronger control by the executive branch and closer scrutiny from the conservative-led courts.

One of the Supreme Court’s most pernicious tools in recent years is the major questions doctrine. Under this doctrine, the court could overturn new regulations if it thought that Congress’s authorizing statute did not “speak clearly” enough to allow the agency to regulate a matter of “vast ‘economic and political significance.’”

[...]

In addition to weakening Congress, the Roberts court has laid the groundwork for an authoritarian presidency. Its ruling in Trump v. United States last year, where the court created the doctrine of “presidential immunity” out of thin air, allows presidents to commit a wide range of crimes without fear of future prosecution.

[...]

There is no constitutional basis whatsoever for that framework, or for the concept of “presidential immunity” in general. The Constitution itself only explicitly gives immunity to members of Congress in certain circumstances, such as travel to and from the Capitol and when participating in speeches and debates. The courts have also long recognized judicial immunity as an irreducible feature of the Anglo-American legal system. Presidential immunity, on the other hand, did not exist until Donald Trump asked for it and the Roberts court gave it to him.

[...]

Members of Congress and federal judges can still be prosecuted for taking bribes to perform an official act. Trump, on the other hand, could issue pardons in exchange for personal payments of $1 million and still fall within the immunity ruling’s bounds. The Roberts court’s ruling is not merely a shield against overzealous prosecutors; it is a blank check for corruption and abuse of power.

[...]

The Roberts court has spent the last 20 years dismantling liberal democracy as Americans have known it. Its rulings have paved the way for the first quasi-dictatorship in the republic’s history. Congress should add as many justices to the Supreme Court as it takes to produce a bench that believes in basic American values once more: self-government, civic virtue, and the rule of law.

Amen.

Greeted and thanked him.

Fuck John Roberts

 

Nobody should be asking him to speak.

The rule of law is endangered because of HIM.

UPDATE 09:29 am:

Under the bus

 Thank you, John Roberts, he said.  I won't forget it, he said.  John Roberts is just another fool.

You should read this.  They want control of the courts.

Trump 2.0 - Flooding the zone

 We simply don't need more big stories right now.

Trump 2.0 - Defying the courts - ongoing

The Trump administration pushed forward into a new phase of the rolling national constitutional crisis over the weekend, reportedly defying two different federal court orders imposing limits on its deportation of immigrants without due process. First, immigrant authorities deported Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist at Brown University, despite a judge’s Friday order halting her removal. Second, authorities deported about 250 Venezuelan migrants, flouting another judge’s explicit directive to turn around American planes that hadn’t yet landed in El Salvador, where the migrants were being sent. The Justice Department claimed that it could not comply with the order barring Alawieh’s removal because it arrived too late. But the White House defended its defiance of the order prohibiting deportations of Venezuelans, insisting that the judge had no jurisdiction over the migrants—and that Trump holds absolute, unreviewable constitutional authority to expel noncitizens.

[...]

His order was not complied with. Instead, as the ACLU has shown, migrant flights that were already “in the air” did not return to the U.S. According to Axios, administration officials debated whether to turn the planes around. They decided not to, “on advice of counsel,” who reportedly said “the order is not applicable” because “they were already outside U.S. airspace.” (That is not a remotely plausible reading of Boasberg’s order.) El Salvador’s president then tweeted a story about the court order with the comment “Oopsie … Too late,” which Secretary of State Marco Rubio retweeted. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later contended that the administration did not “refuse to comply,” but rather that the order “had no lawful basis” and was issued after the migrants “had already been removed from U.S. territory.” Again, as the ACLU has pointed out, Boasberg’s order expressly applied to migrants already en route to El Salvador. So the White House did, quite clearly, defy the order, on the grounds that it could unilaterally conclude its requirements were not “lawful.”

If that is sufficient reason to disobey a court ruling, then all judicial rulings are merely advisory, or just suggestions, and the three coequal branches of government have been replaced by an elected monarch. [...] DOJ lawyers have argued that Trump does not even need the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to order these deportations: Rather, he has an “inherent Article II authority to protect the nation” by determining that an immigrant “represents a significant risk to the United States” and “should be summarily removed from this country.”

[...]

Meanwhile, Trump himself has made it clear that this extreme and dangerous new vision of executive power does not apply to the presidency, but only his presidency: It is not a set of neutral principles, but an ever-evolving pretext for his own personal whims and cruelties, dressed up in legalese concocted by the conservative legal movement for precisely this purpose.

  Slate

Here we go...

Tyrant Baby has spoken: I'm the important one!  I won everything.  That lunatic judge didn't win anything!

From Trumpland, no doubt:  Sit down, JR.  We'll call on you when we need you to approve the king's moves.

That, too.

Pathetic.  They take their marching orders from Trump's bleats on his social media platform.

Just keep filing orders, I guess, and he'll keep ignoring them.

And in another case...

UPDATE 04:15 pm:

UPDATE 07:32 pm:

UPDATE 03/19/2025:

UPDATE 12:09 pm:

UPDATE 02:47 pm:

UPDATE 03/21/2025:

The Daily Beast has a Freudian typo

Re: Trump's "hot mic" episode after his non-SOTU.

 

Sure, they meant clear, but, even if they didn't, it wasn't EVER unclear.

Later on Wednesday night the president took to Truth Social to offer up an explanation for his gratitude.

“The Fake ‘Play the Ref’ News, in order to create a divide between me and our great U.S. Supreme Court, heard me say last night, loudly and openly as I was walking past the Justices on the way to the podium, ‘thank you,’ to Chief Justice John Roberts,” Trump wrote.

“Like most people, I don’t watch Fake News CNN or MSDNC, but I understand they are going ‘crazy’ asking what is it that I was thanking Justice Roberts for?”

Trump claimed neither outlet “called my office to ask,” but said “if they had I would have told these sleazebag ‘journalists’ that I thanked him for SWEARING ME IN ON INAUGURATION DAY, AND DOING A REALLY GOOD JOB IN SO DOING!

  Daily Beast

You done laughing?

"Won't forget it" - that was about doing a "really good job" swearing him in?

Roberts was one of only four justices in attendance for Trump’s speech. In it, Trump thanked the court for helping achieve his goal of ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs—an apparent reference to its 2023 ruling ending affirmative action in college admissions.

Number one: You shouldn't be thanking the Court for doing anything other than their job, which is to decide cases of law on the merits and legal precedence.

Number two: Where were Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas? I can understand why Jackson and Sotomayor didn't show, but where were Trump's other three buddies?

Number three: Has Trump been told the Court ruled against him on withholding USAID contract payments the next day? And... 

Number four: Did you see Amy Coney Barrett's look when Trump thanked Roberts?

Click that picture and watch.  Kavanaugh looks kinda disappointed, too.

Unthinkable in a different time

A third incident of Supreme Court leaking since the Dobbs decision. If there were ever any earlier SCOTUS leaks, I don't remember hearing about them.

The Supreme Court was hit by a flurry of damaging new leaks Sunday as a series of confidential memos written by the chief justice were revealed by The New York Times.

The court’s Chief Justice John Roberts was clear to his fellow justices in February: He wanted the court to take up a case weighing Donald Trump’s right to presidential immunity—and he seemed inclined to protect the former president.

[...]

[H]is handling of the cases surprised even some other justices on the high court, across ideological lines.

  Daily Beast

The chief justice responded by deploying his authority to steer rulings that benefited Mr. Trump, according to a New York Times examination that uncovered extensive new information about the court’s decision making.

[...]

The chief justice’s Feb. 22 memo, jump-starting the justices’ formal discussion on whether to hear the case, offered a scathing critique of a lower-court decision.

[...]

The chief justice tore into the appellate court opinion greenlighting Mr. Trump’s trial, calling it inadequate and poorly reasoned. On one key point, he complained, the lower court judges “failed to grapple with the most difficult questions altogether.” He wrote not only that the Supreme Court should take the case — which would stall the trial — but also how the justices should decide it.

“I think it likely that we will view the separation of powers analysis differently” from the appeals court, he wrote. In other words: grant Mr. Trump greater protection from prosecution.

  NYT

What Sunday’s Kantor/Liptak piece drives home is that Roberts wasn’t pushed to go that way; he pushed the Court—in ways that suggest not that Roberts was indifferent to public opinion (as some of his defenders have argued), but that he radically misjudged what that public opinion would be.

  Steve Vladeck

Or maybe Roberts is in the MAGA bubble, where opinion is different than America at large.

Kantor and Liptak’s reporting is based on a whole bunch of different leaks of what are usually closely held internal deliberations. It’s not just the Roberts memo (something we usually have no awareness of until the justices’ papers become available years, if not decades, after their deaths); it’s also the very specific details on timing, which Roberts clerks were working on the immunity opinion, and lots of other tidbits that could come only from inside a very small group of individuals. None of this, in my view, holds a candle to the Dobbs leak—a draft majority opinion leaked to the press and public while it is being debated and finalized. But this story wouldn’t have been possible without both excellent reporting by Kantor and Liptak and a whole lot of dissatisfaction inside the building—perhaps from some of the justices themselves.

[...]

I’m struck by how much pieces like this one reflect an overdue shift in the tenor of Supreme Court coverage—toward pieces that are less about summarizing the Court’s carefully manicured output and more about the behind-the-scenes stories on how the Court is reaching its decisions.

[...]

[I]t was important to Roberts for the immunity case to be heard this term—even if he knew which way it was going to come out. It was important to Roberts for the Colorado case to be unanimous—until he couldn’t get the justices to his left to go as far as he wanted. It was important to Roberts to take Alito’s name off of Fischer—even though it wasn’t important enough to leverage him to recuse, or to so much as acknowledge, at any point in his majority opinion, the deeply fraught, conspiracy-laden narrative into which the Court was necessarily wading. Ultimately, it’s not high constitutional politics driving the bus; it’s optics. And as these episodes underscore, those just aren’t the same thing.

[...]

And then there’s the remarkable push from at least Justices Thomas and Gorsuch (the story doesn’t mention Alito on this point) to not even hear the Trump immunity case this term.

Remarkable? Surprising!

Kantor and Liptak attribute to Thomas a concern over the Court being dragged into political battles; and to Gorsuch a concern about giving the parties time to fully develop their arguments. Both of these are, frankly, bollocks. Once the Court made up its mind to intervene (as, apparently, it had by no later than the day after Roberts circulated his memo), there was no way to not get involved in a “political battle.” [...] The timing the Court ultimately adopted—holding argument in April and a decision before the summer recess—was a compromise between the Special Counsel’s push to have the Court move even faster (as it had done as recently as … the Colorado ballot disqualification case, where the same justices had no trouble getting dragged into a political battle) and Trump’s desire to delay as long as possible. That Thomas thought that delay wouldn’t be seen as a profoundly political move is … alarming. As for Gorsuch and preferring to give the parties time to fully develop their arguments, well, that would be more persuasive from a justice who wasn’t so regularly voting to grant certiorari before judgment (as in the EMTALA cases) and/or emergency relief—deciding major statutory and constitutional issues without the usual percolation.

[...]

No one in Kantor and Liptak’s reporting is arguing for even a modicum of judicial restraint; and none of the justices to the right of Justice Barrett seem at all worried about the institutional impact of continuing to divide so transparently along partisan and ideological lines in the Court’s highest-profile (and themselves politically charged) rulings. What all of that suggests is that this is all going to get worse before it gets better—and that any arguments that the Court has somehow gotten past the nasty, bitter, and highly charged infighting that has characterized the past few terms are wanting for any basis in reality. This Court isn’t going to fix itself.

Cross your fingers

https://x.com/NormEisen/status/1812855922957422821/history

Don't hold your breath that Trump will ever be held accountable.

I think she may be right.  I thought she'd stall a little longer before dismissing.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 12:44 pm:

Here's the more harrowing thought, as mentioned in the piece by Elie Mystal below:  They could put her on the 11th Circuit, thereby diluting the bench that has stood now as a check on her Trump favoritism.

UPDATE 04:42 pm:

Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court proved that it valued Trump over the rule of law when it granted him absolute immunity. Today, Aileen Cannon proved that she values Trump over the rule of law when she dismissed the charges against him. The rule of law is not failing, it has failed.

[...]

The authority of special counsels has been challenged by countless defendants across multiple presidential administrations from the case before—from Ronald Reagan’s to Bill Clinton’s. But courts have roundly rejected these challenges on the basis that the power to appoint special counsels is widely recognized by statutes and precedent. Until now, that is.

[...]

Federalist Society judges generally and Trump appointed judges specifically are not serious people. They don’t give a damn about what the rules have been or should be. The only laws, precedents, and norms they believe in are the ones that help them achieve their current political goals. [...] Trump judges understand that judges make the rules, and they consistently act like it.

[...]

Trump was going to escape these charges the moment Cannon was appointed as his judge, and everybody who has an honest understanding of what Trump judges do for a living knew it.

[...]

Her job is secure unless someone can find a majority of votes in the House and 67 votes in the Senate to impeach and convict her. So long as the Republicans she aides hold any shred of power, getting fired from her job is not something that Cannon ever has to worry about.

[...]

Jack Smith, of course, has no choice but to play the losing hand he’s been dealt to the bitter end. As to how he does that, he has two options. First and most likely, he can appeal Cannon’s dismissal to the 11th Circuit. The circuit court will likely stay the dismissal pending a full hearing on the merits, at which point Trump’s lawyers will appeal the 11th Circuit ruling to the Supreme Court. There, six judges who have already declared Trump immune from accountability for official acts while president will have to determine if their fear of Trump being held accountable for crimes he committed after he was president is so great that they need to functionally destroy the special counsel rule in order to get him off once again. Of course, all of those determinations will happen after the election, and if Trump wins that election, the whole issue becomes moot anyway.

[...]

If you take Garland at his word and believe that he appointed Smith to avoid the political optics of a presidential cabinet member prosecuting a case against their administration’s defeated rival, those optics are probably even worse now, as Trump is about to be nominated by his party, and the case has no chance of being resolved before the next election. All of which means that Garland is unlikely to take the case under his own authority, even though that is the most expedient and effective legal move.

[...]

It is worth noting that the desire to appear apolitical is what pushed Garland to appoint a special counsel, which then opened the legal door for a partisan hack judge to make a political ruling focused on that appointment, instead of the underlying case. Maybe the next time Democrats hold power (if there is a next time) they could, I don’t know, do what is right instead of worrying about the political optics of it all?

  Elie Mystal @ The Nation

That would take some other party.  The Democrats are constitutionally incapable.

[T]he real failure of Democratic Party leadership, and most left-of-center folks, in the Trump era has been the unsupported belief that the institutions and especially the courts can and would hold.

That was simply never going to be the case. Institutions cannot work if only one side agrees to be bound by them.

[...]

Once again, Trump has won his battle against accountability, and the people telling you otherwise are selling you something (and probably asking for you to donate money to their campaigns).

Going to the 11th. This will at least be interesting.

UPDATE 08:28 pm:

Sadly, it won't matter.  These guys don't mind being hypocritical.