The Supreme Court v. Democracy:

The Biden administration not only followed the letter and spirit of the Supreme Court’s various rulings, hobbling its own agenda; the president failed to use his bully pulpit to its fullest to turn public opinion against the court. The high court stymied one of Biden’s most popular initiatives, student-loan debt relief, and the administration did nothing. ProPublica handed the Democrats the largest Supreme Court corruption scandal in US history—the revelation that billionaire Harlan Crow had provided lavish, undisclosed vacations and other gifts to Justice Clarence Thomas—and the Democrats did next to nothing beyond writing a few angry letters and voting to issue some congressional subpoenas that were promptly ignored. Democrats refused to organize around court expansion or any other reform that could have reduced the power of this antidemocratic institution. They continued to prop up the court at the very moment there was an opportunity to cut it down to size.

Anytime I complained about this in print, on television, or at any bar in DC that would still offer me service, I was informed by establishment Democrats, left-of-­center lawyers, and even some progressives that protecting the independence and strength of the Supreme Court was necessary. They argued that the public would not accept a Democratic Party that openly defied the courts. They said that a strong Supreme Court was a necessary check against a potential Trump administration.

I told those people they were fools—and events have since proved me right. The Supreme Court has shown time and again that it will provide no resistance to Donald Trump. Quite the opposite, as the court has become an enforcement arm of Trump’s illegal, unconstitutional agenda.

The Supreme Court is not our friend. And I don’t know how often this court has to kick us in the face to get people to realize that. But the answer, for at least another term, appears to be “more.”

You have to learn, and grow, and the entire Republican media machine is designed to tell people they never have to learn anything they can’t noodle out from the vantage point of their own porch.

The Republicans on the Supreme Court do not think the Voting Rights Act should be constitutional. The Voting Rights Act is the most important piece of legislation in American history. It is the law that enforces the 15th and 19th Amendments and thus secures the belated promise of political participation for all. It is the thing that makes this country a democracy instead of a white, male, apartheid state.

But Chief Justice John Roberts hates it. He has spent much of his career trying to destroy it. Since he was elevated to the Supreme Court, Roberts has taken shot after shot at the Voting Rights Act, most famously in 2013 when, in Shelby County v. Holder, he and four of his conservative colleagues ruled that an entire section of the act was both unconstitutional and unnecessary because they decided that white people no longer need to be stopped from acting on their worst racist instincts.

American democracy cannot survive the Supreme Court’s attacks on the Voting Rights Act, because American democracy did not really exist before the Voting Rights Act. White rule existed. And that is what this court wants to return us to with this case.

Republicans can read. What they can’t do is care.