If they think they can get away with it, the Roberts Court majority won’t hesitate to throw the election to Trump.

But many doubt this because SCOTUS rejected Trump’s 2020 election cases. Those rulings are “exceptions” that prove the most important rule we need to understand about the Roberts 6: Whenever Trump’s or the Republican Party’s interests conflict with those of key plutocratic business interests, the business interests win out.

The Roberts 6 are not political partisans; they are interest group partisans, loyal to the Federalist Society and the coalition of pluto-theocratic interests behind it. For more, read my new post: weekendreading.net/p/politicians-…

We now live in a political system sponsored by billionaires and built by the Roberts Court—where the richest Americans dominate political spending, where rewarding them for their backing is legal, and where an insurrectionist is shielded from criminal prosecution by the judges he appointed.

The egregiously reasoned immunity decision, and the delay created in reaching that decision, prevented Trump from standing trial even for what limited conduct could still be prosecuted.

As this timeline shows, a Trump criminal trial for the insurrection could easily have been as early as May. Consider this chart, and ask yourself if it’s a coincidence:

-Every time he has faced a grand jury, Trump has been indicted;
-Every time he has faced a trial jury, Trump has been found guilty;
-Every time his cases have come before judges he didn’t appoint, including those appointed by previous Republican presidents, Trump has lost;
-Whenever surveys have asked, a majority of Americans say Trump has committed crimes;
-BUT: Every time he has come before the justices and judges he appointed, Trump has had his way.

Have you heard that even most Latino voters support Trump’s mass deportation plans? That’s because of what I call “poll-washing”—using surveys to “reveal” popular support for something the survey-takers don’t fully understand. It’s time for pollsters to poll the policies, not the euphemisms for the policy.

The same surveys show even higher Latino support for a path to citizenship—for the same people Trump wants deported! Trump and his allies have described their intentions toward immigrants in openly fascist terms. (“Getting them out will be a bloody story.”)

This poll-washing is very dangerous for two reasons:

1) A potentially decisive number of voters (not just Latinos), who would vote for Harris if they knew Trump's actual plans, could stay home or vote for Trump; and
2) Should Trump win, it will appear that he has a mandate for his mass deportation plans.

We should be alarmed by how unalarmed we are about a second Trump administration.

This race is closer than it would be if more people understood what a second Trump term would actually mean for them. 🧵 Take the New York Times front page coverage, for example.

Comparing the past month of coverage with the same time period in the last two election cycles, the 2024 election has received about half as much front-page attention as 2020, and even less than 2016.

Many are wondering whether the Roberts majority will intervene in the election to “select” the next president, a la Bush v. Gore.

As if they haven’t already intervened repeatedly and profoundly on behalf of Trump—shielding him from prosecution via delays and the completely unjustifiable immunity ruling, and by disabling the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment.

But, as I explain in today’s Weekend Reading post, as much as we worry that Trump will follow through on his pledge to be a “dictator on day one,” we have allowed Roberts’s “institutionalist” sheen to blind us to the fact that his majority has operated as an unaccountable dictator for nearly 7,000 days now. Apologists for the Roberts Court say that other courts have also overturned major precedents. But other courts were not specifically installed for that purpose.

Think of it this way: The justices on the Warren and Burger Courts who gave us Brown, Roe, and Gideon did not come out of a multibillion dollar pipeline constructed by civil rights activists, feminists, or indigent prisoners.

But the six members of the Roberts majority DO owe their positions to a cabal of 1) plutocrats, who directly benefited from rulings like Citizens United and Loper Bright, and 2) theocrats, who have a fierce ideological commitment to outcomes like Dobbs and Hobby Lobby.

Moreover, nearly every major precedent overturned by earlier courts were achieved with unanimous or near unanimous rulings, while nearly every one of the Roberts rulings was accomplished with only the votes of the five (now six) Republican-appointed justices.

One reaction to my last post, “Kamala Harris Will Win the Popular Vote,” has been something like, “Duh, but what matters is the Electoral College.”

I’d ask you to consider what it means that we collectively shrug off such an anti-democratic structure as “just the way it is.”

Remember that all the progress we’ve made on expanding American democracy—women’s suffrage, the Civil Rights Act, and more—has been because of people who recognized and fought against legal, but democratically illegitimate, structures.

For the last 20 years or more, the American people routinely insist that the system is not serving them and that they have no confidence in it in general—and the Electoral College in particular. “Anti-democratic” is putting it mildly to describe many results of how our Constitution is written. Consider:

▪️In two of the last six presidential elections (one third!) the results of the Electoral College overturned the popular vote, and in one instance (2000), that result depended not only on the Electoral College but on five partisan Supreme Court justices swooping in to prevent all the ballots in Florida from being counted.
▪️Five of the six Republicans on the Supreme Court were confirmed by senators representing less than half of the US population.
▪️Republicans have held the Senate majority for five of the last twelve Congresses despite representing a majority of the US population only once in that span.

You may have heard that public support for unions “has been increasing”—but you probably haven’t heard just how big a deal that is in the context of the last 15 years.

Since the Great Recession, we’ve seen the credibility of, and approval for, just about every major institution plummet—yet we’ve seen support for unions substantially increase. Why is this happening? I call it the “fuck yeah factor.”

A lot of us who strongly support unions already have at least some agency in our working lives (like good pay and benefits, the ability to telecommute, and so on). We might read about a successful UAW strike and think, “Yay! Good for them!”

That’s not the experience of most working-class people in America, especially if they do not belong to a union. They and their peers often have little or no agency in their work life—unpredictable schedules, no paid leave, dangerous working conditions, and the ever present threat of being fired at will.

When they see other working-class people like them standing up to their bosses and winning, it’s a game-changer. They don’t think, “Yay! Good for them!” They think, “Fuck yeah! I want that too!”

The “fuck yeah” factor is exactly what scares plutocrats like Musk and Trump the most. It’s the seed of social proof that blossoms into meaningful solidarity and powerful collective action.

As Frederick Douglass famously said, “power concedes nothing without a demand” – and a true “demand” is much more than, say, a preference revealed on an issue poll.

You’ll be hearing a lot of speculation about how Kamala Harris might poll against Trump.

But we don’t actually need polls to tell us our chances of beating him!

Whether Trump wins in November depends on what voters think this election is “about” in October. The key to Democratic overperformance since 2016 has been voters who oppose MAGA, but are typically disengaged from politics.

They keep turning out in record numbers to defeat MAGA—but there’s a catch. They turn out IF AND ONLY IF they BELIEVE there is a credible threat to their freedoms from MAGA. How do we know this? The 2022 midterms were a natural experiment. In battleground states, new voters surged to the polls, and Democrats won. Turnout was even higher in those states than the 2018 Blue Wave election!

But in other states, that didn’t happen. And CA, NY, and NJ—solid Blue states where Dems lost enough seats to lose the House—had particularly low turnout.

Voters there just didn’t believe the MAGA threat would affect them. The election was “about” more “normal” issues like crime and inflation. Nothing that inspires disaffected voters to come off the sidelines.

1/ Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision Monday to dismiss the classified documents criminal case against Donald Trump is not merely spurious jurisprudence or an example of incompetence.

In any other country, we would recognize Cannon’s actions—dismissing a major criminal case against a presidential candidate on the first day of his party’s convention—to be part of an ongoing constitutional coup. 

Even more so if that judge had been placed on the court by the defendant after he had lost his re-election bid (and before he incited an attempted insurrection, for which three of his appointments to the Supreme Court immunized him from prosecution two weeks ago.)

https://x.com/Mike_Podhorzer/status/1810777522411327916

2/ Any foreigner would see this as a coup led by a revanchist alliance of plutocrats like Charles Koch and theocrats like Leonard Leo, whose approval is now a prerequisite for any Republican judicial appointment.

This alliance seeks to repeal and replace the 20th century’s major advancements on civil rights and economic justice—doing as much as they can to return America to the era of robber barons and unchallenged white Christian patriarchy.

1/ Let’s try a thought experiment.

Suppose you heard that in another country, a defeated former president who had attempted a coup was granted immunity for that coup by six Supreme Court judges, half of whom he had appointed; that this attempted coup included a widely-televised, deadly assault on the nation’s capitol intended to prevent the certification of his defeat in the last election; and that the Court’s immunity ruling came just months before a next election in which this defeated president is once again a candidate, seeking to recover the powers he previously abused.

What would you expect the focus of news reports about that Supreme Court’s ruling to be?

a) Debating whether the ruling itself aligns with the history and traditions of that nation’s legal system, or

b) Explaining the Court’s role in an ongoing authoritarian coup. 2/ Now, let’s add more details to this scenario about our "foreign nation."

Consider that the defeated president’s loss in the last election was:

◾️Decided by the second-largest popular vote margin in the last six elections, and by the defeated president’s loss in five key states he had narrowly won in the previous election

◾️Independently confirmed by the defeated president’s own copartisans at many levels, including:

▪️Monitors at every voting place
▪️Members on every canvass board assenting to the count
▪️Governors certifying the results in both of the key, narrowly-won states where the president’s party held that office

◾️Validated by courts, which rejected over sixty legal cases brought by the defeated president or his allies – with many rulings made by judges appointed by him or his copartisans

◾️Acknowledged as valid by the Senate majority leader, also a copartisan

1/ At long last, can we all stop pretending that Alito, Thomas, Barrett, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh are legitimate jurists? They are politicians who were effectively “appointed” to the Court by the Federalist Society, which has turned the Supreme Court into an unaccountable super-legislature.

Their mission is to repeal and replace the 20th Century—to destroy the guardrails protecting Americans from civil rights violations and corporate predations. #Immunity 2/ Alito, Thomas, Barrett, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are the only five of the 116 justices to serve on the Supreme Court to have been confirmed by senators representing less than one half of the US population.

The panel on the left shows how dramatically different that was just 24 years ago, when, with the exception of Thomas, every justice on the Court was confirmed by senators representing at least two-thirds of the US population, and six were confirmed by senators representing 90 percent of the US population.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the presidential immunity decision. If you’re wondering whether the MAGA majority on the Court will let Trump off the hook, they already have.

By doing so, they have already interfered in the 2024 elections.

They’ve forced a historic crisis—an irreconcilable showdown between the normal operation of the criminal justice system (which should find Trump in pretrial and trial proceedings for his January 6th crimes over the next five months) and the normal functioning of presidential elections (which should find him campaigning full-time during those months).

It didn’t have to be this way; it’s a crisis entirely of their own manufacturing. Imagine you were told that in another country, a president who had been defeated in a free and fair election attempted a coup, for which he was indicted—but four years later, the very judges he had appointed have helped protect him from standing trial so he could return to office.

Whether it’s in Orban’s Hungary, Erdogan’s Turkey, Putin’s Russia, or now the United States, authoritarian movements consistently attempt to amass and consolidate power by hijacking courts to provide them with post-hoc impunity.

In the US’s case, the hijacking we now confront by the MAGA judges is the result of decades of hollowing out judicial independence by the Federalist Society and its revanchist backers.

Yesterday’s verdict made it clear why the Federalist Society Supreme Court Justices and Judge Cannon are doing everything they can to prevent Trump from facing a jury in the J6 and classified documents cases – it’s because they know that when everyday Americans review the evidence, they will convict him. As I previously wrote, it’s long past time we acknowledge that the only reason Trump’s J6 trial did not start on schedule, and why we don’t have a verdict now, is because of Alito and his similarly conflicted fellow justices.

weekendreading.net/p/supreme-gasl…

Alito and Thomas have made clear their insurrectionist connections. So why are we debating whether Alito should recuse himself, instead of demanding Roberts dismiss Trump’s immunity appeal so the J6 trial can begin immediately? (It’s called “dismissed as improvidently granted”—when a court recognizes that they never should have taken up a case in the first place.) It’s long past time we acknowledge and reckon with the following:

1) But for Alito and his similarly conflicted fellow justices, Donald Trump would almost certainly be a convicted felon for J6 by now.

The only legitimate move for the Court to make on the immunity case now would be dismissing it as improvidently granted.

While we focus on what SCOTUS means for Trump, we forget what Trump means for SCOTUS. If he wins, he could replace Thomas, Alito, and 40+ federal judges over 75 with young zealots.

Trump is the means to the end of an ongoing Federalist Society coup. That coup, in charts: 🧵 Since George W. Bush, the Federalist Society’s approval has been a prerequisite for any Republican SCOTUS nominee.

The result? More polarizing nominees, confirmed by senators representing fewer and fewer Americans.

First, here’s the average Senate confirmation vote over time:

One of the most important, and least understood, facts about unions is that unions spread prosperity beyond their membership.

To see how dramatic an effect this has, let’s compare work and life in “right to work” states to work and life in states without these anti-union laws.🧵 To start, workers are over twice as likely to have a union in other states as they are in RTW states. The corporate-government coalition against working people has been so successful in RTW states that only 1 in 25 private sector workers have a union – fewer than before Wagner.

My thread yesterday outlining how different life is in America’s liberal Blue Nation and illiberal Red Nation only scratched the surface.

Here’s a deeper dive on how much freer, more prosperous, healthier, and safer Americans living under Blue Nation’s policies really are.

https://twitter.com/Mike_Podhorzer/status/1731780393987150060

Let’s begin with the differences in how Red and Blue state trifectas have redefined voting rules and democracy. Over the last dozen years, Red states have enacted laws to make it more difficult to vote – with the intended result that Black turnout rates have declined.

Can’t stop thinking about polls showing Trump and Biden tied? You might be suffering from Mad Poll Disease.

Symptoms include anxiety, problems sleeping, and feelings of helplessness about the future of democracy.

Fear not: there is a cure. To cure Mad Poll Disease, we have to focus on the only thing that matters—the ongoing MAGA threat.

Make this your healing mantra: Horse race polling can’t tell us anything we don’t already know about who will win the Electoral College.