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john roberts
Blame the Escalating Gerrymander Wars on Chief Justice John Roberts
Nobody has done more damage to US democracy and voting rights in the 21st Century than this one despicable jurist.
Oct 16, 2025
America is currently at war over partisan gerrymandering. The Republican-controlled Texas legislature has just gerrymandered voting districts to create five more safe Republican US House seats, as demanded by Trump.
Then Missouri Republicans were ordered by Trump to enact a gerrymander to increase the states' disproportionate Republican minority from 6-2 to 7-1 by cutting Democratic-leaning Kansas City voting districts down the middle. Now JD Vance is urging Indiana Republicans to gerrymander the only two remaining Democratic House districts out of existence.
In response, California Governor Gavin Newsom has proposed a ballot measure that would temporarily suspend California's independent redistricting commission until 2030 and let the Democratic legislature redistrict Republicans out of five seats to match what Republicans have done in Texas.
A large majority of voters nationally don't think partisan gerrymandering should be legal. According to a recent YouGov poll, 69% of Americans think partisan gerrymandering should be illegal and only 9% think it should be legal.
Chief Justice John Roberts (and all of his Republican colleagues on the Supreme Court) disagree with this vast majority of Americans. In 2019, Roberts' 5-4 majority opinion in Rucho v Common Cause (joined by the four other Republicans on the Court) held that federal courts do not have the constitutional power to prevent partisan gerrymandering and restored blatantly partisan gerrymanders in North Carolin and Maryland.
Since Roberts' decision, partisan gerrymandering has exploded. According to Michael Li of the Brennan Center, partisan gerrymandering has given Republicans 16 extra seats in the House. Without that, Democrats would have a House majority and Republicans would not be able to pass the so-called "big beautiful bill" which has led to a government shutdown. As the Brennan Center states, "Gerrymandering decided House control."
Roberts' opinion conceded that partisan gerrymandering is “incompatible with democratic institutions” and “leads to results that reasonably seem unjust.” But Roberts then invented a procedural technicality to bar Federal courts from doing anything about it or to uphold the Constitutional principle of "one person, one vote." Roberts claimed that partisan gerrymandering is a so-called "political question" that Federal Courts have no right to question and must be left to the states. Of course, when one party controls the state legislature, they have every incentive to draw voting districts to guarantee they never lose political power, no matter what the view of the voters is. Voters don't get to pick their own legislators. Instead, legislators get to pick their voters. In her dissent—joined by Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Breyer—Justice Kagan wrote:
"For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because he thinks the task is beyond judicial capabilities. And not just any constitutional violation. The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the right participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance their political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives. In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy...enabl[ing] politicians to entrench themselves in office as against voters' preferences...They encouraged a politics of polarization and disfunction."
Is it any wonder that a NY Times/Siena poll taken last week found that only 33% of voters believe that America's political system can still address the nation's problems, while 64% believe the political system is too politically divided to solve the nation's problems?
As former Senate Judiciary Committee counsel Lisa Graves argues in a new book, "[i]n the last twenty years the US Supreme Court has radically curtailed voting rights, undermined anti-corruption measures, encouraged extreme political gerrymandering, restricted the regulation of guns, and obliterated the constitutional right to control one’s reproductive choices. This transformation was orchestrated by a billionaire-backed reactionary political movement, whose interests Chief Justice John Roberts has been all too willing to serve."
Citizens have no power to overturn a US Supreme Court decision. However, California citizens have the ability to equalize Texas Republicans' gerrymander of five House seats. On November 4, they can pass Proposition 50 which lets the State legislature temporarily draw new congressional district maps through 2030, at which point the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission would resume control of redistricting, and supports nonpartisan redistricting commissions nationwide.
It won't completely block John Roberts' 20-year long project to undermine democracy and judicially enact the increasingly MAGA Republican agenda. (It wouldn't be an exaggeration to call it a "judicial coup".) Indeed, this week SCOTUS heard oral arguments in a case where it appears that Roberts will lead the Republican majority to overturn Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act which protects the right of Black voters to have electoral representation. Such a ruling could likely flip as many as 19 House seats from Democratic to Republican, cementing a Republican House majority for the foreseeable future, regardless of the will of the voters.
Passing Proposition 50 is one thing Californians can do to fight back against Justice Roberts' undemocratic judicial campaign, which has helped enable Trump's authoritarianism. Mail-in ballots have already been sent out so California voters can cast "Yes" votes for Proposition 50 from now until November 4. Beyond that, thanks to John Roberts and his Republican colleagues on SCOTUS, other Blue states will have to be brought into the gerrymander wars and enact their own partisan gerrymanders to balance Republican gerrymanders to the extent possible.
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How Will John Roberts Be Remembered? As a Democracy Destroyer
It is unlikely that any Chief Justice in history played more of a role in destroying more of our nation’s democracy rules than this man.
Sep 15, 2025
Chief Justice John Roberts is smart and skilled. He will be remembered, however, as a historic failure.
This is not a claim to make lightly, but his record compels it, because Roberts’ legacy will be defined by two catastrophic roles he played.
First, Roberts has played the lead role in destroying indispensable rules of our democracy.
Second, Roberts has played the lead judicial role in serving as the handmaiden to President Trump’s efforts to turn our democracy into an autocracy. (This historic failure will be detailed next week in Part II).
Roberts’ role in destroying essential rules of our democracy
Chief Justice Roberts has taken the lead in writing a series of opinions that have destroyed essential rules governing our democracy. They deal with:
- The sacred right of every eligible citizen to vote.
- The integrity and honesty of the political system.
- The right of citizens to have an unrigged opportunity to choose their representatives.
- The idea that public officials should not be allowed to sell influence with their office.
- The foundational principle that no person is above the law.
The following opinions, written by Roberts and joined in all but one case only by the Republican-appointed majority on the Court, have done unprecedented harm to our democracy.
Roberts wrote the majority opinion for a 5–4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013). It declared key sections of the landmarkVoting Rights Act of 1965, the most consequential voting rights law ever enacted, to be unconstitutional. The Act was reenacted periodically over decades until the Shelby County decision.
The Roberts opinion unleashed a wave of regressive and discriminatory voting changes by states and local jurisdictions that disadvantaged minority voters and impeded their voting rights and their ability to fully participate in the democratic process.
McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission
Roberts wrote the majority opinion for a 5–4 decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission (2014) which struck down the aggregate limit on all contributions by a donor in an election cycle, a provision previously held constitutional by the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo in 1976.
In Buckley, the Supreme Court had found that unlimited contributions given to support candidates were inherently corrupt. The McCutcheon decision, however, eviscerated the limits on individual contributions to candidates by unleashing billionaires, millionaires, and other big money donors to give unlimited, often huge, contributions to Super PACs to benefit specific candidates.
Roberts wrote the majority opinion for a 5–4 Court decision in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), in which the Court decided that it could not act on challenges to partisan redistricting plans. The decision claimed that the Court is incapable of establishing standards for determining when partisan maps become unconstitutional, no matter how extreme.
The Rucho decision means that there are no constitutional restrictions on partisan gerrymandering, no matter how rigged the plans are. The result is that politicians get to choose their voters rather than voters choosing their representatives.
Roberts wrote the unanimous opinion in McDonnell v. United States, (2016), which vacated the conviction of former Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell for honest services fraud and extortion. In his opinion, Roberts said that McDonnell’s actions did not constitute “official acts” under the applicable laws, including the bribery law.
In its decision, the Court adopted a narrow, unrealistic construction of the term “official act” to exclude various acts of an officeholder that should be covered, even when those acts are done in direct exchange for gifts or other benefits. For all practical purposes, the Court has left the country without effective bribery laws to prevent public officials from selling their office for financial benefits.
Roberts wrote the opinion for a 6–3 majority in Trump v. United States (2024), which gave Trump presidential criminal immunity. The decision violated a guiding principle of our Founders that no person is above the law. The Roberts opinion placing Trump above the law and also giving him personal control of the Justice Department and FBI can be seen in such outrageous Trump pronouncements as the statement that he has “The right to do anything I want to. I’m the president of the United States,” and “I run the country and the world.”
It is unlikely that any Chief Justice in history played more of a role in destroying more of our nation’s democracy rules than Roberts. And that is how he will be remembered.
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Inside the Trumpian Plot to Rig the Midterms... and Every Election After
The fate of the American experiment with democracy will depend not on our institutions, but on our collective will to preserve it at the ballot box and beyond.
Aug 28, 2025
With the midterms more than a year away, US President Donald Trump and his enablers have launched a new war on voting rights. Its immediate target is November 2026; its ultimate goal is the institutionalization of one-party control of the federal government. This political “final solution” is the last step in MAGA’s quest to extinguish liberal democracy in America.
The war is being fought along legal and political fronts that stretch across the marble halls of the Supreme Court, Trump’s executive orders, Steve Bannon’s seedy podcast, the transformation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into a latter-day Praetorian Guard, and threats to invoke the Insurrection Act.
The Supreme Court, the Voting Rights Act, and Racial Gerrymandering
When it comes to voting rights, no single institution has been more destructive than the nation’s top judicial body under the hypocritical leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts.
In his 2005 Senate confirmation hearing, Roberts promised to serve as chief justice in the fashion of a baseball umpire, calling “balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.” That was nonsense then, and it’s nonsense now.
Roberts has always been a Republican insider and activist, dating back to his stint in the early 1980s as a crusading young lawyer in the Justice Department, where he wrote upward of 25 memos, suggesting strategies to limit the scope of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), the landmark legislation passed by Congress in 1965 to outlaw racial discrimination in voting.
Redistricting experts predict that if the GOP gambit in Texas and elsewhere succeeds, the party could hold the House until 2050.
In 2013, he made good on his lifelong mission by authoring the infamous 5-4 majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, one of the most regressive rulings in Supreme Court history. Shelby gutted sections 4 and 5 of the VRA, which had required state and local jurisdictions, mostly in the South, with histories of egregious voter suppression, to obtain advance federal approval—a process known as “preclearance”—before making changes to their election procedures. Roberts declared in Shelby that “things have changed dramatically” since the passage of the VRA and that racial discrimination in voting no longer took place.
Shelby left Section 2 of the VRA as the last remaining bulwark of the law. That section prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or language. Both the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts have long recognized the right of private parties and organizations to file lawsuits under Section 2 to challenge “racial gerrymanders,” which occur when a state uses race as the primary factor in redistricting to dilute the voting power of minority populations. Civil rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund have used Section 2 litigation to force the creation of numerous majority-Black or “majority-minority” voting districts to give minorities a fair chance to elect candidates that reflect their views.
All that could change when Roberts and his Republican benchmates hear oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais on October 15. The case stems from a complaint brought by a group of individuals who describe themselves in court filings as “non-Black voters.” They contend Louisiana violated their 14th Amendment rights to equal protection when it created a second Black-majority voting district in 2024 to give Black voters, who comprise nearly a third of the state’s electorate, proportional representation in the state’s six-member congressional delegation. If the court agrees with them, it could gut Section 2, leading to the elimination of an estimated 11 Black-majority districts, all held by Democrats, across GOP-controlled Southern states. Such a decision would neuter what little remains of the VRA.
Political Gerrymandering, Texas and California
Even if the court rules against the “non-Black” plaintiffs in Callais, it has given its blessings to another method of election rigging known as “partisan gerrymandering”—the practice of drawing state voting districts to benefit the political party in power. In 2019, by way of a 5-4 majority opinion penned by Roberts, Rucho v. Common Cause, the court held that partisan gerrymandering, no matter how disproportional or extreme, presents a “nonjusticiable political question” that lies beyond the jurisdiction of federal judges to alter or correct.
Both parties have traditionally engaged in partisan gerrymandering, but the GOP has perfected the technique in the wake of Rucho, with Texas as a prime example. Responding to a direct demand from Trump, the state has drafted a new congressional voting map designed to give Republicans an additional five House seats. Other Republican states, including Florida, Indiana, Missouri, and Ohio, are likely to heed Trump’s plea and revise their voting maps before the midterms.
The GOP’s moves have finally awakened a fighting spirit among Democrats, but the outcome of the counterattack is uncertain. Led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, California has set a special election for this November to consider a ballot proposition that would suspend the state’s current congressional map, which was drawn by an independent commission, and replace it with one that could give Democrats a five-seat boost to match the Texas power-grab. Democrats in New York, Illinois, and Maryland reportedly are exploring ways to follow Newsom’s lead.
Meantime, the Texas redo is a done deal, offering Trump and the GOP a clear path to retaining their stranglehold on federal power. Redistricting experts predict that if the GOP gambit in Texas and elsewhere succeeds, the party could hold the House until 2050.
Trump’s Executive Orders, Proclamations, and Rants
Emboldened by the Supreme Court’s 2024 Roberts-authored decision on presidential immunity (Trump v. United States), Trump has made good on his pledge to be a “dictator on Day One” of his second term, releasing a torrent of autocratic executive orders and proclamations. These include an executive order issued on March 25 with the Orwellian title of “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.” Among the order’s many directives is a requirement for voter ID to prove citizenship, and a prohibition on counting mail-in ballots that are sent in by Election Day but delivered afterward.
On April 24, federal district court judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a Clinton appointee who sits in Washington, DC, issued a preliminary injunction, blocking the ID requirement and other provisions, noting that “Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the states—not the president—with the authority to regulate federal elections.” Unfortunately, the judge’s order failed to address the constitutionality of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which in many respects tracks the executive order. The SAVE Act was passed by the House on April 10 and is now pending before the Senate.
A permanent one-party state controlled by Trump and the GOP will set back women’s interests indefinitely.
Undeterred by the courts, Trump has doubled down on his demands, vowing to impose nationwide voter ID by presidential fiat, ban mail-in ballots and replace voting machines with hand counting. In remarks delivered at the White House on August 18, he claimed that “mail-in ballots are corrupt,” and no other country permits them. In fact, some 34 countries allow them.
Trump has also demanded a new census that would exclude undocumented aliens to be conducted as soon as possible. The census is mandated every 10 years by the Constitution and is used to determine how many House seats are apportioned to each state. To date, no census has been conducted mid-decade, and never have the undocumented been excluded.
The Impact on Women
The election law changes demanded by Trump and the GOP will also undermine the voting power of women.
According to the Pew Research Center, despite the Democratic Party’s declining approval ratings, women remain 12 percentage points more likely than men to affiliate with the Democrats. Exit polling conducted by CNN after the last election found a similar gender gap, showing that women nationwide voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris over Trump by a 10% margin. Black women in particular have been the most reliable supporters of the Democratic Party. In 2024, a whopping 92% of Black women opted for Harris, continuing a decades-long trend.
Women also hold more liberal values than men on a variety of key political issues, such as abortion access, gun control, environmental protection, and racial justice. This is especially true of younger women between the ages 18 and 29. A permanent one-party state controlled by Trump and the GOP will set back women’s interests indefinitely.
Steve Bannon and ICE
On his War Room podcast on August 19, right-wing fulminator Steve Bannon upped the ante in the voting rights war, calling for the deployment of ICE to monitor polling places to ensure that “If you don’t have an ID—if you’re not a citizen—you’re not voting.”
It is, of course, illegal under federal law to deploy the military or armed federal troops to patrol polling places as monitors or observers unless they are needed to repel an armed invasion. A section of the US Code makes it a felony punishable by up to five years in prison to do so. The Voting Rights Act also prohibits federal agents from intimidating voters, and the Posse Comitatus Act of 1868 generally proscribes using the military as civilian law enforcement.
These safeguards could easily be circumvented by an ICE army that will be 10,000 strong by the midterms simply by staging high-profile immigration enforcement operations anywhere in blue cities on Election Day. The intimidation effect would be palpable.
The Insurrection Act and the Final Solution
Should all other options for election-rigging appear unavailing by 2026, Trump will have one final card to play: declaring a national emergency and invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to delay or even suspend the elections. The act provides an exception to the prohibitions of the Posse Comitatus Act, and as Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Justice Department will no doubt argue, all other federal statutes.
Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in 2020 in response to the George Floyd protests, and again this past June in response to protests in Los Angeles. Never in American history has the act been invoked to disrupt an election. But if Trump feels sufficiently threatened by a potential loss of power, there is little reason to believe he would not choose to become the first. Nor could we count on the Supreme Court to try to stop him.
In the end, as always, the fate of the American experiment with democracy will depend not on our institutions, but on our collective will to preserve it at the ballot box and beyond. Each of us has an obligation to spread the word and peacefully resist in whatever way we can.
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