Part II: Six Supreme Court Decisions That Destroyed Our Political System and Led to a Lawless Autocratic Presidency
In last week’s Note, I discussed three of the six Supreme Court decisions that are destroying our political system and that have led to a lawless autocratic presidency.
In today’s Note, I discuss the other three decisions: Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), Trump v. United States (2024) and Callais v. Louisiana (2026).
The opinions written by Chief Justice John Roberts in four of these fateful six cases are among the most destructive Supreme Court opinions in modern times.
Roberts’ opinions make him the leading voice of a Supreme Court majority that:
- demolished the most important voting/civil rights law in history;
- vastly increased political money corruption in Washington;
- permanently eliminated any federal legal remedy for extreme partisan gerrymandering;
- set the stage for our first autocratic president;
- placed the president above the law; and
- insulated presidential control of the Justice Department and FBI
The Rucho case dealt with a challenge to the partisan gerrymandering of North Carolina’s congressional districts.
Before Rucho, the Court had recognized that extreme partisan gerrymandering is incompatible with democratic principles and could be found unconstitutional. However, the Court had not found an appropriate standard for deciding such claims, while leaving open the possibility to do so.
In Rucho, Roberts, who wrote the opinion, continued to acknowledge that excessive partisan gerrymandering is “unjust” and “incompatible with democratic principles.” However, he ruled that partisan-gerrymandering claims are nonjusticiable political questions beyond the reach of federal courts.
Thus, the Supreme Court eliminated any federal legal remedy to partisan gerrymandering even if it violates the Constitution. This was an abject abdication of responsibility by the Supreme Court.
Roberts’ opinion in Trump v. United States is perhaps the most dangerous, anti-democracy opinion in American history. It is a frontal assault on the foundational principle that no one in our country is above the law.
Roberts stated in his opinion that presidents have absolute immunity from prosecution for certain core official acts and presumptive immunity for other official acts. The opinion also gratuitously gave presidents “exclusive authority” over the Justice Department and FBI – an extraordinarily dangerous power that Trump has repeatedly abused.
Roberts justified the broad sweep of presidential immunity as necessary to ensure an “energetic” and “fearless” executive.
But the Founders fought a revolution to rid our nation of a king and created a governing system to ensure we never suffered a king-like figure again. They succeeded for almost 250 years until the Roberts opinion set forth a permission structure for the autocratic President Trump who took office less than seven months after the decision was issued.
The dangers of the Roberts opinion became clear. By November 2025, Reuters “documented at least 470 targets of retribution under Trump’s leadership – from federal employees and prosecutors to universities and media outlets.”
Louisiana v. Callais (2026)
Chief Justice Roberts has been an opponent of the Voting Rights Act since his work as a young lawyer in the 1980s. He finally got his opportunity to take down a large part of the VRA when as Chief Justice, he wrote the opinion in a 5-to-4 decision in Shelby County (2013). The opinion gutted the highly effective preclearance requirements of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.
Roberts used Section 2 of the VRA as part of the justification for disabling Section 5, writing that “Section 2 is permanent, applies nationwide, and is not at issue in this case.” In other words, Roberts used Section 2 to reassure the country that it would remain available even as the Court eliminated Section 5’s preclearance protections.
Thirteen years later, however, in Callais, Roberts joined in a Court decision that, in essence, struck down Section 2. Roberts offered no explanation for why Section 2, which he had held out to the country as intact and permanent, was now receiving his vote to destroy it.
In his opinion in Callais, Justice Samuel Alito applied the coup de grace to the VRA while locking in the role of partisan gerrymandering as a tool to justify racial discrimination.
Alito wrote that partisan gerrymandering is “a constitutionally permissible criterion that States may rely on as desired.” In other words, the opinion authorizes states to use partisan gerrymandering to dilute or eliminate minority representation, as long as the purpose of the gerrymandering is partisan.
According to Harvard law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos, the Callais decision “is a disaster for minority representation in America — likely to cause the biggest reduction in the number of minority legislators since at least the end of Reconstruction.”
The Roberts-led majority has left the country with a dead Voting Rights Act and a return to Jim Crow voter discrimination, perhaps the most corrupt political money system in our history, no legal remedy in federal courts for extreme partisan gerrymandering, presidential immunity for certain criminal actions, and likely some of the greatest abuses of federal law enforcement power in Justice Department history.
That is their record. It is one of the most destructive anti-democracy legacies in Supreme Court history.
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Fred’s Weekly Note appears on Thursdays in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s newsletter, and other recent editions, here. And subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.
