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Thom Hartmann: 6 Unelected Justices Empowered Trump to Ignore Congress

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2026 //
4

Thom Hartmann is a brilliant researcher, author, journalist, and blogger. He writes incisively about American politics.

In this post, he explains that the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court on immigration was not about who gets to cross the border but whether the President can ignore laws passed by Congress. The rightwing majority of six is constructing and reinforcing the theory of the “unitary executive,” which makes the Presidency more powerful than the other two branches. Since the Reagan era, rightwingers have embraced this idea. This was not the intent of the Founders, who designed a government in which there was no sovereign, no king.

The rightwing majority on the Court are Originalists when it serves their purposes (didn’t everyone carry a gun whenever they went shopping?), but they are not shy about ignoring the Founders when it serves their purposes.

He writes:

Something happened inside the Supreme Court chamber on Thursday that almost never happens: Justice Sonia Sotomayor was so disgusted by what the six radical, on-the-take Republican appointees had just done that she read her dissent aloud from the bench, and Justice Samuel Alito, who’d written the majority opinion, snapped back at her in real time, a breach of the Court’s normally stage-managed decorum that left veteran reporters in the room visibly startled in slack-jawed amazement.

On the surface they were fighting about asylum seekers. But Sotomayor understood, as Alito surely did, that the real question wasn’t who gets to cross the border: it was whether the laws Congress writes still mean anything once a neofascist, imperial president (like Alito and his peers want) decides he’d rather not follow them because he’s above the law.

To understand this — and why it’s so insanely radical — look carefully at what the Court actually did in the two 6-3 all-Republican immigration rulings it handed down yesterday morning. 

Back in 1980, a bipartisan Congress passed the Refugee Act to bring American law in line with our promise not to send the persecuted back to be killed, and it laid out a specific, mandatory set of steps.

Under the law Congress wrote that year, a noncitizen who reaches our border and says she fears persecution gets referred for an asylum interview to determine the legitimacy of her fear of violence or death in her home country or the country she’s fleeing. The word Congress chose to write into the law was the administration “shall,” not “may,” hold that hearing and a judge “shall” make that determination. 

On Thursday the Republicans on the Court, however, ruled that Trump can erase or effectively ignore that law by simply ordering border agents to physically block people on the Mexican (or, presumably, Canadian or at an airport arrival) side of the line, so they never technically “arrive in the United States” and the law never kicks in.

Sotomayor called the reasoning illogical, because it is. A person standing at the threshold of a port of entry has plainly arrived. The Republican Trump toadies on the Court, however, pretended otherwise so Trump’s racial enforcers could essentially ignore both the intention and the letter of the law that elected members from both parties in Congress wrote.

The second ruling is even worse, albeit quieter.

Congress (whose job is to write laws for the United States) created Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in 1990 for people who can’t safely go home, and it built in court review of whether an administration followed the required procedures before yanking that status away. 

The Trump administration recently tried to strip TPS protections from hundreds of thousands of Black Haitians and brown-skinned Syrians as part of its “Make America White Again” program, and multiple lower courts found it had ignored those procedures the law requires, noting that Trump’s Haiti decision, in particular, was tainted by racial animus (hate of Black people from what Trump calls “shithole countries”).

As Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog wrote about Justice Elana Kagan’s reaction: 

“Kagan called it ‘plain to see’ that race played a role in the decision to terminate the TPS designation for Haiti. ‘The evidence’ that the Haiti TPS beneficiaries ‘have offered,’ she stressed, ‘includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print.’ But those ‘statements fairly shout,’ she said, ‘in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.’”

The Republican majority didn’t even bother to say if the Trump regime had or had not complied with the plain letter and clear intent of the law Congress passed. Instead, the six corrupt Republicans on the Court declared that no court anywhere in America is allowed to even ask if Trump, et al, are breaking that particular law (an oversight process by a court called “judicial review”).

As the American Immigration Council pointed out, that means even an openly illegal decision is now insulated from any review by any judge in the country, closing the courthouse door in a way that, in my opinion, even the most conservative of the Founders would have found astonishing and plainly unconstitutional. 

Congress, in other words, wrote a law that told the courts to check the legitimacy of asylum seekers claims to determine if they can or cannot stay here and apply for legal status; writing such laws is what the Constitution requires of an elected Congress. 

But the six radical justices that rightwing billlionaires have spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to get on the Supreme Court told all the rest of the courts in America to simply look away and ignore the law. They’re not allowed to enforce it any more, even though Congress passed it and a president signed it. 

Robert Reich put his finger on it yesterday afternoon, noting in his excellent newsletter that: 

“[A] majority of the current Supreme Court — the abominable Roberts Court — has bent over backwards to ignore those laws.

“This must be seen for what it really is — a systemic effort by the six Republican appointees on the court to shrink congressional authority and enlarge the authority of the executive branch.

“If there was any doubt before, there should be none now: The Supreme Court is part of the anti-democracy movement led by Trump and the billionaires behind him.”

This agreement with Trump’s racist efforts to purge America of Black and brown refugees aren’t only losses for those would-be immigrants. As Reich points out, these decisions are stripping power from Congress, from the basic idea that the people’s elected representatives get to write laws that the Constitution requires a president to obey.

The Court’s defenders will tell you I’m being unfair in that assessment, claiming that the justices are just neutral umpires reading statutes as written. But that’s a lie, and recent history proves it.

Back in 2021, this very same Court struck down Joe Biden’s pandemic eviction moratorium, the one keeping millions of struggling families in their homes during a deadly COVID surge, ruling that his CDC had reached “past what Congress allowed” and declaring that if such a moratorium were going to continue, Congress, and not the president, would have to specifically authorize it.

Just a few years later, the same conservative bloc reasoned its way to blocking Joe Biden’s student debt relief, insisting Congress would never hand a president that kind of authority without saying so in unmistakable language. 

When a Democratic president acts, in other words, they read laws Congress has passed with a magnifying glass and demand crystal-clear permissions. But when Trump (or, presumably, future Republican presidents) wants to shred the asylum process or wants his immigration purges of nonwhite people placed beyond the reach of any judge, the magnifying glass disappears and the words suddenly bend whichever way Trump wants.

These six lawyers in robes started from the outcome that today’s captured hard-right MAGA Republican Party and its white supremacist Dear Leader wants and reverse-engineered their reasoning to reach it, and the reasoning changes from case to case because the only thing that has to stay fixed is who wins. 

As Sotomayer wrote, pointing to that magnifying glass in her dissent to yesterday’s Mullin v. Al Otro Lado decision: 

“The Court’s illogical interpretation [of Congress’ written law] is driven almost entirely by a fixation on a single word: ‘in.’”

And the consequences of these decisions aren’t merely academic: people will die because of the actions these corrupt Republicans just took allowing the President and his whiteness enforcers to ignore the statutes that Congress wrote, both parties passed, and presidents signed into law. As Sotomayor also wrote in her dissent:

“One woman who had fled Honduras after receiving death threats from gang members was beaten, cut, and knocked unconscious by an unknown man after being turned back from a port of entry. Another asylum seeker who was turned back at a port three times was later raped in the presence of her child. 

“Those living in migrant camps were subjected to break-ins, robberies, and assaults, ‘fac[ing] serious harm at the hands of criminal organizations, including kidnapping, extortion, physical violence, and sexual assault.’ Some were ‘murdered in Mexico while waiting for an opportunity to be processed by U. S. officials.’ 

“Desperate to flee these conditions and secure the opportunity to apply for asylum, ‘[s]ome attempted to reach U. S. soil by other means,’ including by attempting to cross the border between ports of entry by trekking through deserts or swimming across the Rio Grande. Often, these efforts had tragic ends. 

“One couple that grew discouraged after a month of waiting in a camp near the border decided to cross the river and ask for asylum once they reached U. S. soil, but they were caught in a swift current and drowned. Another woman also drowned, along with her 2-year-old son, after she gave up waiting in a tent camp and attempted to swim across the river. Hundreds of others have met a similar fate, and many more died crossing the desert along the southern border, all making 2020 and 2021 some of the ‘deadliest year[s] for migrant crossings’ in various regions of the southern border.”

I lived and worked in Germany in the 1980s, and you couldn’t be there in those years without feeling how the entire postwar refugee framework — in America and across postwar Europe — grew out of one unbearable lesson, that turning desperate people away at the door and sending them back to die is something decent nations swore they’d never do again.

In 1939, the United States turned away the St. Louis, a ship carrying 937 Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s Nazi Germany purge of all “non-Aryan” people. The ship returned to Europe where the Nazis seized its passengers, ultimately murdering 254 of them in the “detention centers” Germany ran in occupied countries. 

Americans were horrified and humiliated as the story became known well after the war, and the Refugee Act of 1980 was our nation writing the promise that we’d never repeat such a horror into law; it passed with broad bipartisan support. 

On Thursday of this week five unelected men and one unelected woman in robes decided that promise is now optional for a president who welcomes white South African “refugees” but wants to purge American of people whose skin is darker than his.

I’ve argued for years, including in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, that Republicans on this Court long ago seized powers the Framers never gave it, and have — since Nixon flipped the court to the right and appointed Lewis Powell (of Powell Memo infamy) in 1972 — spent the last fifty years using them on behalf of the morbidly rich and the party that serves them. 

From Buckley in 1976 and Bellotti (written by Powell himself in 1978) through Citizens United in 2010, this generation’s Republican justices — each carefully placed on the Court by big money interests since the 1980s — rewrote our democracy and turned it into an auction; earlier this term they even gutted what was left of the Voting Rights Act to help solidify raw GOP political power. 

Now they’re telling Congress its laws are merely suggestions whenever a Republican president disagrees.

Justice Louis Brandeis warned us a century ago that, “[W]e can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.” The morbidly rich men who put these justices on the Court made their choice, and the justices are delivering for them, tearing another bite out of our democracy with every decision.

The good news is that the branch the Court just tried to sideline is the one closest to you. Ahilan Arulanantham, who argued the Syrian case, urged Congress to act to overrule the Court, and he’s right, because Congress can restore judicial review, can rewrite these statutes in language even Sam Alito can’t twist, can expand and rebalance the Court itself, and can be made to do all of it if enough of us demand it. 

Call your senators and representative at 202-224-3121 and tell them a Court declaring Congress irrelevant is a five-alarm constitutional emergency: we need a judicial code of ethics for SCOTUS so they have the follow the same laws as all other federal judges must; impeachment hearings for Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Roberts; 18-year term limits; and a rapid expansion of the Court to at least 13 members to bring it into line with previous, historic ratios to other senior courts. 

None of this changes unless ordinary people refuse to let it stand. So get loud, stay in it, and if this piece helped you understand what really happened yesterday, share it and send people to hartmannreport.com so more of us understand exactly what we’re up against, exactly who to hold responsible, and how.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Injustice, Racism

Slate: The Supreme Court Chose Gun Rights Over Property Rights and the Right to Life

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2026 //
3

The best part of subscribing to Slate is Mark Joseph Stern’s legal commentary. In this post, he explains the tortured and wholly inadequate logic behind the decision to strike down a Hawaii law that allowed owners of private property to prohibit people from bringing guns into their establishments. Property rights vs. gun rights. The six rightwing members of the U.S. Supreme Court chose gun rights over property rights and pretended that it was a traditional, well-established practice throughout American history. In the preface, Stern described Justice Alito’s opinion as “deranged.” Surely it is deranged to be so indifferent to human life, especially hypocritical from the six who banned abortion because of their devotion to a “right to life.”

I suppose the resolution is that fetuses have a right to life but human beings, once born, do not have a right to live. Thus, no place is protected from guns except courthouses, schools, and the Halls of Congress. How long will it be until it’s okay to carry guns in schools? The justices will never allow guns in their courthouses.

Stern writes:

The Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision in Wolford v. Lopez on Thursday confirms our worst fears about the supermajority’s Second Amendment jurisprudence: It is a freewheeling policy project utterly unmoored from history that allows the Republican-appointed justices to implement their preferred gun laws under the thin guise of judicial review. These justices struck down Hawaiʻi’s law restricting guns on private property not because the Constitution required them; to the contrary, the state proved beyond doubt that its statute was deeply rooted in history and tradition. Rather, the supermajority killed the law because it was offended that Hawaiʻi would dare try to mitigate the violence that SCOTUS has unleashed through its radical, incoherent gun rights jurisprudence. Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion for the court bristles with annoyance toward the state government’s attempts to protect people on private property from getting shot to death. Constitutional law has given way to six justices’ ad hoc nullification of any law that favors human life over the paranoid obsessions of gun enthusiasts.

Wolford involves a Hawaiʻi law that prohibits individuals from carrying guns on private property unless the owner affirmatively consents. (California, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York have enacted similar statutes—all now likely invalid.) The state intended this rule to respect property rights by creating a default rule that nobody takes a firearm onto someone’s land without their permission. Gun advocates promptly challenged it under Bruen, the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision holding that a burden on the right to bear arms is unconstitutional unless it has enough “historical analogues” from the distant past. They claimed that Hawaiʻi could not identify a sufficient number of these “analogues” to justify its law.

There are key problems with this argument, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson explained in dissent. First, Bruen ostensibly compels courts to figure out what conduct the Second Amendment protected when ratified; if a contemporary law infringes on that conduct, it is presumptively unconstitutional. But, Jackson wrote, “there is no right to carry a gun onto private property without the permission of the owner.” The majority did not even contest this point, because it is uncontestable. Instead, Alito ratcheted up Bruen’s level of generality: Rather than asking if Hawaiʻi’s law actually burdens a concrete, well-defined right, he merely asked if it “hampers” an individual’s ability to take their gun anywhere they want. Because it does, he concluded, it must be supported by appropriate “historical analogues.”

Then, having defined the right to bear arms as broadly as possible, Alito demanded granular specificity from older statutes that echo Hawaiʻi’s. The state offered many; its list included 18th-century laws in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York that required permission from a property owner before carrying a gun on his land, as well as 19th-century laws in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas that restricted the unapproved carrying of guns on “the premises or plantations of any citizen.” Even under Bruen’s stringent standard, aren’t these statutes enough to shore up Hawaiʻi’s modern version?

No, Alito wrote, because each is “distinguishable” from Hawaiʻi’s. The state’s true goal, he asserted, is to enshrine “local attitudes” and “a Hawaiian tradition” that “disfavor the carrying of guns” in public to prevent violence. By contrast, the 1700s laws were mere “anti-poaching” rules meant to mitigate “harms and risks associated with unauthorized hunting.” So, under Bruen, they are not “relevantly similar” to Hawaiʻi’s in terms of “how and why” they were enacted. Meanwhile, the 1860s laws were post–Civil War “Black codes” meant to oppress former slaves. So Alito dismissed them as a “tainted artifact” that did not qualify as Bruen “analogues.”

Each of these moves infuriated Jackson. To start, she bemoaned the majority’s “boundless” Second Amendment that “presumptively protects” the right “to carry anywhere and everywhere.” Alito’s “newfound understanding of the first step of Bruen,” Jackson wrote, “obliterates any need for reference back to original meaning.” After Wolford, “judges are now free to insert any meaning they desire into the text of the Second Amendment and then demand the government provide analogues to fit that interpretation.”

As to those analogues: Jackson ridiculed Alito’s refusal to acknowledge that they show how “states routinely required affirmative consent for armed carry onto private property” at the founding. The 1700s statutes were not, in fact, limited to poaching, but were also meant to prevent “armed trespass, property theft or damage, and gun violence, whether intentional or accidental.” Lawmakers helpfully wrote down these aims, which Alito ignored. The purpose of these laws, Jackson wrote, was to “vindicate property rights” by mitigating “concerns associated with violations of those rights by armed individuals on private land.” That, of course, is precisely what Hawaiʻi seeks to do today.

And what about the Southern laws from the post–Civil War era that protected private property from armed trespassers? Jackson acknowledged that “confronting the origins of these laws is certainly uncomfortable. The Black Codes were ugly. And racist. And deplorable.” But that does not “automatically render these laws irrelevant to a fair assessment of the right to carry firearms.” If the majority chooses to “tether its Second Amendment analysis to facts about America’s past, it must contend with our nation’s entire history, warts and all.” Excluding laws that appear “ugly” to modern eyes empowers the court “to cavalierly pick and choose which parts of the historical record count,” giving it “discretion to cull the history” in “service of a single goal: preventing the government from responding to issues arising from the possession of firearms.”

Categories Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Guns, Injustice

Colorado: Governor Polis Bends to Trump Pressure, Frees Tina Peters

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2026 //
2

Trump has spent a lot of time rescuing, pardoning and trying to reward the people who joined him in attempting to overturn his election loss in 2020. He is a giant baby. He is a sore loser. He lost decisively, and he refuses to accept it. More than 60 federal and state courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, rejected his appeals because there was no evidence of election fraud.

Someday, with time, we will look back on Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat as a low point in our history. Of course, we will look at his two terms in office as the absolute nadir of our history, as a time he spent rolling back civil rights, environmental protections, international alliances, access to healthcare, defunding medical and scientific research, bullying universities, and censoring the mass media.

Trump bullied Governor Jard Polis of Colorado to free Tina Peters, and Polis succumbed:

Tina Peters, the former clerk convicted of participating in a scheme to chase election conspiracy theories promulgated by President Donald Trump, was released from prison Monday after the president successfully pressured Colorado’s Democratic governor into commuting her sentence.

Peters’ release was confirmed by the Colorado Department of Corrections. The state agency said it would have no more information about the 70-year-old inmate. Her sentence was shortened by Gov. Jared Polis last month after Trump waged a lengthy pressure campaign against the governor and his state.

Peters served less than a quarter of her nine-year sentence.

Peters was the first local election official to be charged with breaching security after the 2020 election. She snuck in an outside computer expert affiliated with My Pillow Chief Executive Mike Lindell — who himself denied that Trump lost the White House in 2020 — and the person copied the county’s Dominion Voting Systems computer server as it was updated in 2021.

Peters then joined Lindell onstage at a “cybersymposium” that promised to reveal proof that the election was rigged. Video and photos of the computer system upgrade, including passwords, were posted online. The move stoked false claims that voting machines were manipulated to steal the election from Trump.

Peters was convicted in 2024 of attempting to influence a public servant, conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, violation of duty and other crimes by jurors in Mesa County, a Republican stronghold that supported Trump. An appeals court upheld her conviction in April, but ordered Peters to be resentenced because it said the judge who sent her to prison wrongly punished her for speaking out about election fraud.

Trump had championed Peters’ case, but because she was convicted under state law, he did not have the power to pardon her. Instead, the president pressured Polis to do so, lambasting him on social media and disinviting him to a White House meeting with other governors. The Trump administration also announced plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and relocated the U.S. Space Command to Alabama.

Polis commuted Peters’ sentence on May 15. In a letter, he wrote that although Peters was convicted of serious crimes and deserved to spend time in prison, the sentence was “extremely unusual and lengthy” for a first-time non-violent offender.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, called the move a “dark day for democracy” and said it amounted to “selling out our state’s justice system for Trump.”

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Colorado, Corruption, Cruelty, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Health, History, Injustice, International, Trump

Federal Judge Reopens Case That Led to Trump Slush Fund and Freedom from IRS Audits

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2026 //
11

Today, I read Robert Reich’s commentary on a remarkable event: A bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges asked Federal Judge Kathleen J. Williams to reopen the case that culminated in a deal between President Trump and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who had been Trump’s personal lawyer before the 2024 election.

The “settlement” between Trump and Blanche handed over $1.776 billion to a commission controlled by Trump, and in another part of the “settlement,” Blanche agreed that neither Trump nor his family members would be audited by the Internal Revenue Service.

The retired judges said that Trump and Blanche may have deceived the court and perpetrated a fraud.

Judge Williams agreed to investigate and gave Trump and Blanche until June 12 to respond.

Reich wrote:

I can’t overstate the importance of Judge Kathleen Williams’s decision on Friday to reopen Trump’s $10 billion case against the I.R.S. 

She said she wants to investigate “grievous allegations” that the hasty deal to resolve it was “premised on deception,” and she ordered Trump’s lawyers to tell her by June 12 whether the lawsuit should be formally reopened because “the court was the victim of a fraud.”

The “deception” and “fraud” Judge Williams refers to were allegedly carried out by Trump and his Justice Department.

This is a big deal. 

Judge Williams’s decision came in response to court papers filed on Wednesday by a bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges who urged her to revive the case and dig into the details of the agreement to settle it. 

The judges’ brief is also a big deal. They call it a motion for relief from judgement or order or, alternatively, “leave to appear as amici curiae by thirty-five former federal judges.” 

I don’t recall a similar instance of 35 former federal judges filing such a motion or amicus (friend of the court) brief. 

In it, the judges argue that the parties’ — Trump and the Justice Department’s — so-called “settlement” agreement was made to circumvent the court ‘s possible finding that the case presented no actual controversy, since Trump is on both sides of it. 

This, they conclude, constituted a fraud on the Court.

I wanted to read the brief by the 35 judges. I did. You should read it too. It is linked in the next paragraph from Reich’s post.

Judge Williams’s decision came in response to court papers filed on Wednesday by a bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges who urged her to revive the case and dig into the details of the agreement to settle it.

Read it yourself. The judge had previously raised the question of whether Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit was genuine, since he seemed to be suing himself. Had the case gone to trial, she might have tossed it, since there were not two genuine adversaries.

The parties decided to withdraw their lawsuit and quickly reached an agreement that was highly beneficial to Trump (the slush fund and freedom from audits).

The former judges smelled a rat and took the unprecedented step of joining together to petition Judge Williams.

Alan Feuer and Andrew Duehren wrote in The New York Times today:

A federal judge in Miami reopened President Trump’s $10 billion case against the I.R.S. in a striking turnabout, saying that she wanted to investigate “grievous allegations” that the hasty deal to resolve it was “premised on deception.”

The ruling by the judge, Kathleen M. Williams, on Friday to revive the case shortly after closing it was a significant blow both to Mr. Trump, who had voluntarily dismissed the suit last week, and to the Justice Department. After the president withdrew the suit, senior department officials released a pair of extraordinary agreements that settled the case by establishing a $1.8 billion fund to compensate people who claimed they were victims of government “weaponization” by Democrats.

The deal also conferred lucrative tax benefits on Mr. Trump, his family and his businesses.

Judge Williams’s decision came in response to court papers filed on Wednesday by a bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges who urged her to bring the case back to life and dig into the details of the agreement to settle it.

The former judges said that Mr. Trump’s settlement agreement raised serious questions about his “candor toward the court and manipulation of the judicial system.”

Before she closed the case, Judge Williams, an Obama appointee, had in fact questioned whether the lawsuit presented an actual conflict that she could adjudicate, given that Mr. Trump was on both sides of the suit, bringing claims against a federal agency that he controlled. When she closed it, she noted there was no “settlement of record,” but shortly after, the Justice Department released its agreement foreclosing the action.

In her brief but stern order on Friday, Judge Williams said that she wanted to investigate the circumstances surrounding Mr. Trump’s efforts to settle the lawsuit in a way that benefited him and his allies. If she succeeds in moving forward with her inquiry, it could ultimately result in questions being asked of the Justice Department leaders who signed the agreements to settle the suit — chief among them, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, and Stanley Woodward Jr., the No. 3 official in the department.

In her order, Judge Williams asserted that she was “empowered to investigate serious misconduct” in any case before her, and ordered Mr. Trump’s lawyers to tell her by June 12 whether the lawsuit should be formally reopened because “the court was the victim of a fraud.”

She also wanted Mr. Trump’s lawyers to respond to the question of whether he had colluded with his own government to settle the case “to avoid judicial scrutiny.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

Judge Williams pointed to reporting by The New York Times that described how the I.R.S. had prepared a 25-page memorandumoutlining defenses against the suit that the Justice Department did not take up in court.

Lawyers for the former judges hailed Judge Williams’s decision.

“The judges and their counsel greatly appreciate the seriousness with which the court is addressing these grievous allegations,” said Norman Eisen, who represented the former judges for the nonprofit group, Democracy Defenders Fund. “We stand ready to work with the court as it investigates this matter.”

Mr. Eisen was joined by the law firms Platkin and Susman Godfrey.

In their filing this week, the former judges claimed that Mr. Trump had improperly used his suit against the I.R.S. as a way to obtain “unlawful private benefits” for himself and his family, and to create a fund that would dole out taxpayer money “without constitutional or congressional authority.”

They also argued that the president had tried to shield the deal from judicial oversight by rushing a settlement and “short-circuiting” Judge Williams’s ability to examine its terms.

The $1.8 billion fund has faced separate legal headwinds. A federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia temporarily blocked the Trump administration from taking any further steps to set it up or disburse money from it. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill, including many Republicans, have also been critical of the fund, which upended G.O.P. plans to pass a party-line bill funding immigration enforcement efforts last week.

Mr. Trump, along with two of his sons and the Trump family business, first sued the I.R.S. in January, claiming they were owed at least $10 billion because a former contractor at the agency had leaked their tax returns (and hundreds of others) during the president’s first term in the White House. The Trumps claimed that the I.R.S. should have done more to prevent the contractor, Charles Littlejohn, from disclosing tax information to The New York Times and ProPublica.

Mr. Trump’s suit, as I.R.S. officials laid out in their memo and other lawyers have noted, had clear legal flaws. Potential defenses against it include that it was filed after the statute of limitations, and that it incorrectly faulted the I.R.S. for the actions of Mr. Littlejohn, previously a contractor employed by Booz Allen Hamilton. But the Justice Department never made an attempt to contest Mr. Trump’s suit. No government lawyer entered an appearance in the case.

That has fueled criticism that the deal the Justice Department struck with Mr. Trump was not a genuine attempt to avoid a loss on the merits to the president in court, but instead a scheme to provide him and his political allies with public benefits.

In a footnote, Judge Williams questioned the provision granting Mr. Trump, his family and their businesses immunity from I.R.S. scrutiny of tax returns they had already filed. She wrote that the audit protection may run afoul of Justice Department rules requiring legal settlements to directly relate to the issues in the suit.

She also noted that only Mr. Blanche signed the audit provision. The separate, nine-page agreement laying out the $1.8 billion fund was signed by Mr. Woodward and Frank Bisignano, who is serving as the chief executive officer of the I.R.S., a newly created role that is not subject to Senate confirmation.

Here is NPR’s summary.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Ethics, Fraud, Injustice, Justice, Trump

Rep. Steve Cohen Introduces Six Articles of Impeachment of Chief Justice John Roberts

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2026 //
4

The U.S. Supreme Court was designed to be a separate branch of government, the one that monitored the adherence to the Constitution by the other two branches. The Court disappoints sometimes, but it has never been as nakedly partisan as it is under Chief Justice John Roberts. The far-right wing of the Republican Party has a reliable friend at the Court.

It’s hard to say which of their decisions is the worst.

Some might say it was their recent decision to overturn the Voting Rights Act, which will sharply reduce the number of Black members of Congress.

Some might say it was their decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, despite promises by most of them not to do so.

Some would say it is their decisions that tear down the wall of separation between church and state.

I say it was their decision in Trump v. United States, in which the majority decided that the president was above the law and could not be charged for anything he did while in office as part of his official duties. We can be certain that the same court would claim that whatever he did was part of his official duties, including tearing down the East Wing of the White House without seeking anyone’s approval.

Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee has had enough. He introduced six articles of impeachment of Chief Justice John Roberts. Good for him!

Scott Dworkin reported on his blog:

Rep. Steve Cohen

Rep. Steve Cohen has represented Memphis, Tennessee, for 19 years. Republicans cut his district into pieces, and he decided to retire—but not without a fight.

Cohen told The Dworkin Report in 2019: “[Trump’s] life has been one crime after another. One misdeed after another. One lie after another.” Now he’s applied that same standard to the man who put Trump above the law.

On May 21, Cohen introduced six articles of impeachment against Chief Justice John Roberts. Charges include allowing the Court to become a partisan weapon, placing the president above the law, endorsing a corrupt campaign finance system, and failing to recuse himself while his wife collected millions recruiting attorneys for law firms with cases before the Court.

Cohen was direct: “Under Chief Justice Roberts’ stewardship, [The Supreme Court] is now understood as biased: with decisions designed to benefit Republicans at the expense of representative government.”

They gerrymandered Cohen’s district to silence him. John Roberts now has six articles of impeachment to his name—an award no other Chief Justice has ever received in US history.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, History, Injustice, Justice, Trump

Why the Voting Rights Act Was Passed: Watch LBJ Explain

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2026 //
4

The U.S. Supreme Court recently rendered the Caillais decision, which effectively gutted the historic Voting Rights Act. As soon as the decision was released, the Southern states that once formed the Confederacy began to redraw district lines to eliminate Black representatives from Congress and the state legislature. In some of those former-slave states, there is likely to be no Black representation of the state in Congress.

The Confederacy rises again, thanks to the six members of the Supremr Court appointed by Republicans. Once again, Justice Clarence Thomas votes to strip rights from Black people.

Please read this commentary by teacher Ken Bernstein. He includes a speech by President Lyndon B. Johnson, explaining why the Voting rights Act was necessary for our democracy.

This decision makes the case for Supreme Court reform, either by enacting an age limit, term limits, or enlarging the Court.

Categories Civil Rights, Elections, Injustice, Racism, Republicans

Jamelle Bouie: The Voting Rights Act Was a High Point of Our Democracy

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2026 //
0

Jamelle Bouie, columnist for The New York Times, wrote several columns (see here) about the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act in its Callais decision. This one is titled “The Law They Hate Was a High Point of Our History.” The high court majority, six hard-right Republicans, decided that partisan redistricting is just fine, but redistricting that takes account of race is not. Thus, a state legislature dominated by one party can justly produce a voting map that gives every seat to its own party, but it may not permit districts created to encourage representation of racial minorities.

In the wake of the Callais decision, some states of the Confederacy quickly carved up districts to eliminate seats held by Democrats and by Blacks. Some of these states will have only white Republicans in Congress.

Bouie wrote:

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 wasn’t the top-down dictate of a rogue, liberal Supreme Court — if such a thing has ever existed.

It wasn’t the brainchild of out-of-touch bureaucrats in Washington, nor was it some kind of martial settlement imposed on the states of the former Confederacy.

It was, instead, an achievement of the most effective social movement of the postwar United States. The Voting Rights Act revitalized American democracy and stands as one of its great achievements.

This, somehow, has been lost in the discourse around the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais. The court’s clear hostility to the law, as well as the glee with which conservative Republicans have dismantled the South’s majority-minority congressional districts in its wake, makes it seem as if the V.R.A. was a handcuff placed on American politics by some outside force.

The truth is that the Voting Rights Act was conceived, crafted and passed in order to further realize American democracy. And it was, itself, the product of an explosion of democratic energy.

The V.R.A. was forced onto the national agenda by the tireless work of the grass roots activists in the Civil Rights Movement, who struggled, bled and put their lives on the line in a fierce fight to secure their fundamental rights as Americans. It was signed into law by a president who had won election in one of the largest landslides in American history. It was subsequently reauthorized by Congress, after Congress, after Congress, after Congress.

The most recent reauthorization in 2006 was nearly unanimous, and there was broad support from the public — so much that to justify the Supreme Court’s attack on the law in Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice John Roberts had to fabricate a constitutional doctrine about the “equal sovereignty” of states, and Justice Antonin Scalia had to characterize the reauthorization as an unfair “racial entitlement” that politicians would never remove for fear of backlash.

If there is any single law that you could plausibly say represents the general will of the American people, it might be one that was reaffirmed nearly every decade for 40 years by the people’s representatives.

This isn’t just a historical point or a piece of idle trivia. It is essential. And it gets to what is so egregious about the court’s campaign against the law.

The Voting Rights Act was an attempt by the people of the United States, affirmed across two generations of voters and lawmakers, to make good the 15th Amendment to the Constitution — itself the hard fought product of war and reconstruction. It was an attempt to wield the authority of the federal government to secure the fundamental right to vote as well as the fundamental right to representation. It stood for substantive equal protection — the chance to make democracy real.

The V.R.A. was not, contra John Roberts and the rest, an expression of colorblindness, indifferent to the social realities of the United States. It did not pretend to treat supposed neutrality as truly neutral, nor did it place racial inequality outside the remit of the Constitution. And it was not, as this court would have it, the bland expression of a bloodless commitment to anti-discrimination. In fact, it was the most significant attempt in this country’s history to realize the promise of political equality.

The Voting Rights Act has more — much more — democratic legitimacy than this Supreme Court has ever enjoyed. After all, most of this court’s conservative majority was appointed by presidents who entered office as winners of the Electoral College but not the popular vote.

It is that relative difference in democratic legitimacy that makes this court’s voting rights jurisprudence so offensive.

Those voting rights rulings, from Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 to Callais in 2026, come from a court that has placed itself above the people at large. It is a court that will, according to its whims, ignore the clear commands, directions and intent of Congress. It is a court that treats voters and legislators as errant children to be corralled and disciplined by wise jurists. It is a court that doesn’t answer hard constitutional questions as they arise as much as it imposes constitutional meaning based on its narrow interests and ideological preoccupations.

It is a court that is trying to shape the political system to its liking, despite the claims of the chief justice, with no limits other than its partisan preferences. It is a court, in other words, that is wielding a cramped and parochial vision of the Constitution against American democracy, rather than treating the Constitution as a tool for realizing our democratic aspirations.

There have been many frustrating decisions from this Supreme Court. Louisiana v. Callais may not even be its worst decision — that prize might still go to Trump v. United States, where the chief justice conjured, out of thin air, an anti-constitutional doctrine of criminal immunity for the president.

Callais, however, might be the most emblematic of this court’s decisions: a flashing warning that our democracy is being crushed underneath the imperial authority of an arrogant and reactionary juristocracy. We can either discipline that court — and put it in its place — or accept our fate as its subjects.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Civil Rights, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Injustice, Racism

Dan Froomkin: The Court’s Voting Rights Decision Was Intended to Disenfranchise Black Voters

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2026 //
2

Dan Froomkin writes “Press Watch,” a blog that covers the media. In this post, he criticizes the mainstream media for treating the U.S. Supreme Court’s Callais decision as a partisan issue. It is that, but it is at bottom a decision that destroys Black political power. It allows states to divvy up districts in ways that eliminates Black representation. And former Confederate states wasted no time in breaking up districts that elect Blacks to Congress.

He writes:

States across the South are redrawing election maps to eliminate majority-Black congressional districts.

Much of the major-media coverage is casting this in purely political terms – as just another part of the partisan battle for the House in November.

So for example, a May 9 Associated Press article headlined “What to know about the latest wave of changes to congressional districts,” started off this way:

The remaking of the U.S. political map accelerated this week in courts and legislatures, all of it in this round expected to boost Republicans in their attempt to keep control of Congress in November’s elections.

A May 13 New York Times article started off like this:

Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia on Wednesday called lawmakers back to the capital next month to redraw the state’s legislative districts for the 2028 election cycle, and to work on changes to the state’s voting system.

The call for a special session, which will begin on June 17, comes as Southern lawmakers have been rushing to reconfigure congressional maps to be more favorable to Republicans for this year’s midterms in response to the recent Supreme Court decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But in the South, the significance of redistricting goes far beyond any partisan issue.

So let me rewrite that for you:

In a stunning display of racism, white Republican leaders throughout the South are stripping Black people of their franchise in order to retain political power.

The catalyst was a 6-3 Supreme Court decision on April 29 that gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, landmark legislation that gave Black people the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.

Six right-wing justices insisted that intentional voting discrimination is a thing of the past. Southern legislators immediately responded by redrawing election boundaries to dilute the Black vote, in many cases making it virtually impossible for Black people to be elected to Congress.

What has happened in a matter of days amounts to a wrenching reversal of 60 years of racial progress — a revival of the Jim Crow era when Black people had no political power, no matter their number.

On a personal level, Black voters in the South are struggling with the repercussions of having one of their essential rights being brutally ripped away from them.

In states like Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi, where they make up more than 30 percent of the population, Black Americans will have little to no say in who is elected to Congress. And as the effects of the court decision trickle down to the local level, they may get shut out of some of those elections as well.

Meanwhile, the leaders of the white nationalist movement known as MAGA are celebrating. In some cases, their racism is expressed openly. “For too long, Tennessee politics has been dominated by cosmopolitan communists and race hustlers imposing their corrupt will on a deeply rural and conservative state,” Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee posted on social media.

For the authoritarian leaders of MAGA, the dilution and nullification of Black votes is a crucial step in their quest to remain in power — even as most voters have turned against them.

MAGA’s future depends on suppressing the votes of groups that don’t support its white-male dominated Christian nationalist ideology. Reducing minority representation, to them, is essential to destroying majority rule. Destroying Majority rule is how they win.

Gerrymandering that leads to Southern states being almost entirely represented by white, right-wing elected officials dramatically improves MAGA’s political calculus. In the short run, it improves the odds of retaining Congress in November. MAGA’ strategy to keep the White House in 2028 includes yet more Black disenfranchisement, through voter intimidation, deception and disruption.

So far, MAGA’s plan is working, raising the prospect that Trump and his successors may remain in power for the foreseeable future.

But another way to characterize the current drive to disenfranchise Black voters is that it is the desperate – and maybe final — act of a white nationalist party that is being rejected by increasing number of voters.

For American journalists, this ought to be epic, tectonic stuff, worth aggressive and ongoing coverage.

And keep in mind that in the mid- to late-20th century, the struggle for civil rights was the dominant story in American politics, the subject of vast amount of journalism, some of it heroic. Ultimately it was journalism that brought the civil rights marchers into the American public’s breakfast nooks and living rooms, forcing the country to reckon with a brutal and sordid history of racism, and, eventually, try to move beyond it.

But today, as in the early days of the civil rights movement, too much of the media is averting its eyes from the experience of Black people. Too much coverage treats this extraordinary and consequential display of racism and societal regression as if it were just an ordinary political battle.

Some Reporters Get It

Some mainstream journalists have recognized the racial element of redistricting, and their work provides models of better, more appropriate coverage.

As evidence that you can address both the racial and political nature of the Republican moves in a news article, consider Emily Cochrane’s reporting in the Times about a new Tennessee map “that slices up Memphis to scatter Black voters into neighboring districts, a move intended to eliminate the state’s last Democratic House seat.” After several paragraphs of partisan framing, she wrote:

Democrats, noting that about two-thirds of Memphis voters are Black, said it was a blatant attack on hard-won gains for fair representation in a state shaped by slavery, segregation and the civil rights movement.

She described the scene in the state capitol in Nashville during the special session to pass the new map:

Black lawmakers delivered emotional speeches about family members, friends and colleagues who endured segregation or struggled with barriers to voting in the 1960s. State Senator Charlane Oliver of Nashville, a Democrat, stood on her desk right before the vote, holding a banner reading “No Jim Crow 2.”

And she quoted an attendee:

“My race is who I am and it informs my politics,” said Danyelle Norment, 30, who woke up early to drive in from Memphis. “It’s not something that’s separate or can be left behind.”

She added, “it’s really, really important to have folks who can understand our lived experience.”

In the Washington Post, Justin Jouvenal profiled Press Robinson, an 88-year-old civil rights pioneer. “That law passed in 1965 was the bedrock of improvement of life in America for people of color,” Robinson told Jouvenal.

Now, Robinson fears a wipeout of Black political power, much like the one that occurred after Reconstruction.

“History is now repeating itself,” he said.

On PBS Newshour, Liz Landers covered the story as part of the network’s “Race Matters” series, bringing us the voice of Leona Tate, a civil rights activist:

So now we move backwards with the Supreme Court decision that will go down as one of the most racist rulings in our nation’s history.

Tate was 6 years old when she became one of the first students to desegregate a New Orleans school, Landers noted. Then Tate continued:

I had no idea what racism was at that time, but I knew by third grade that it was the color of my skin that made a difference. I just can’t believe that it’s still happening 66 years later. It’s cheating, to me. That’s how I feel. It’s really cheating. And it’s really illegal.

It does bring back that feeling from a long time ago, and it’s not a good feeling.

Read the Black Press

As in the 1950s and 60s, the Black press is revealing what the white press is slow to acknowledge.

Brandon Tensley, writing for Capital B, explained “How One Supreme Court Ruling Is Rewriting 60 Years of Voting Protections.” “Most Black Americans reside in the South,” he wrote. Lawmakers in former slaveholding states dismantling majority-Black districts “could change the balance of power and the complexion of leadership in this country.”

Gerren Keith Gaynor, writing for TheGrio, headlined the fact that “Black legislators lead the resistance as Republicans rush to redraw maps after gutting of Voting Rights Act.” “It’s disturbing and disgusting to see how this administration and the white leadership here are trying to codify white supremacy and dilute Black political voting power because that’s what’s happening,” Tennessee State Rep. Justin J. Pearson told Gaynor. “I think none of us should make any mistake about what is going on. The attempt to remove Black representation and our ability to elect representatives of our choice is one of the most significant attacks on Black voter participation and Black voter representation since the end of Reconstruction.”

TheRoot published a viral video of Louisiana resident Marshan Camese delivering a powerful speech at a state Senate hearing over redistricting. “I believe the country as a whole is rebuking your party. Y’all are in a death spiral,” he said. “That’s why y’all have to redistrict. That’s why y’all have to cheat.” MAGA, he said, “is the last breath of the Confederacy.”

Civil rights leaders are headed to Alabama tomorrow for a rally they’re calling “All Roads Lead to the South.” As I wrote in my Heads Up News newsletter this week, this could be the birth of a movement that combines the battle for voting rights with the battle for democracy.

“Black folks from across the country are gonna be busing in, flying in, to show up and to really begin organizing to turn out in the November election,” Wisdom Cole, the Senior National Director of Advocacy for the NAACP, told TheRoot. “This is such an important moment to activate all of us.”

Note: the rally in Alabama was held last Saturday.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Civil Rights, Democracy, Elections, Freedom, Inequity, Injustice, Media, Racism

Heather Cox Richardson: The Fight for Democracy, from Brown to Callais

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2026 //
2

Heather Cox Richardson sums up the struggle for equal rights since the Brown decision of May 17, 1954. The struggle has continued in the years since then, aided especially by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The VRA enabled Black Americans to have a voice, representation, and genuine political power. The U.S. Supreme Court decided on April 29, 2026, in Louisiana v. Callais that there is no longer any need for federal protection of voting rights for Black Americans, and they made a decision that is certain to lead to the loss of meaningful representation for Blacks, who–the Court majority decided–no longer needed federal protection. The former Confederacy proceeded to enact redistricting that will wipe out many Black-held seats in Congress. Racism is alive.

Richardson writes:

Seventy-two years ago tomorrow, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That landmark decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional because segregated schools denied Black children “the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Three years after the Brown v. Board decision, in the face of massive resistance to desegregation in the South, President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to protect the right of Black Americans to vote, using the federal government to overrule the state laws that limited voter registration and kept Black voters from the polls. To prevent the passage of the first federal civil rights legislation since 1875, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond launched the longest filibuster in U.S. history, speaking for 24 hours and 18 minutes.

(Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) broke Thurmond’s record on March 31 through April 1, 2025, speaking for 25 hours, 5 minutes, and 59 seconds, but his speech was not a filibuster.)

Southern Democrats known as “Dixiecrats” managed to weaken the measure, but Senate majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson (D-TX) managed to wrestle the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through Congress, and Black Americans and their white allies began trying to register Black Americans to vote.

But the law proved too weak to force white registrars to allow Black voters onto the rolls, and by 1961, activists with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”) were at work in Mississippi to promote voter registration. In 1964 they launched the “Freedom Summer,” bringing college students from northern schools to work together with Black people from Mississippi to educate and register Black voters.

Just as the project was getting underway, three organizers—James Chaney, from Mississippi, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York—disappeared outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. Lyndon Johnson, president by then, used the popular rage over the three missing voting rights workers to pressure Congress into passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, designed to try to hold back the white supremacists and to make it possible for Black Americans to register to vote. The measure passed, and on July 2, Johnson signed it into law.

On August 4, investigators found the bodies of the three missing men. Ku Klux Klan members working with local law enforcement officers had murdered them and then buried the bodies in an earthen dam that was under construction.

And still, white officials refused to accept the idea of Black voting. In Selma, Alabama, where the city’s voting rolls were 99% white even though Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived there, local Black organizers had launched a voter registration drive in 1963, but a judge stopped voter registration meetings by prohibiting public gatherings of more than two people.

Selma voting rights activist Amelia Boynton invited the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the city to draw national attention to its struggle, and he and other prominent Black leaders arrived in January 1965. For seven weeks, Black residents made a new push to register to vote. County sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2,000 of them on a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.

Then, on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed man, 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson died eight days later, on February 26. Black leaders in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression.

On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured the skull of young activist John Lewis and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.

On March 15, President Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.

Under the protection of federal troops, the Selma marchers completed their trip to Montgomery on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people. That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.

A bipartisan majority of Congress passed the Voting Rights Act by a vote of 77–19 in the Senate and 333–85 in the House. Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August 6. Recalling “the outrage of Selma,” Johnson said: “This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.”

And yet, on April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court gutted the protections for the Black-majority districts Congress provided for in the Voting Rights Act after years of weakening the law in other ways. In its wake, Republican-dominated southern state legislatures are rushing to redraw their district lines to dilute the votes of Black Democrats.

Today, thousands of Americans, including eighteen members of Congress, traveled to Selma and Mongomery to call Americans to action to protect voting rights. Pastor Kenneth Sharpton Glasgow told Joseph D. Bryant of Alabama news site AL, “This moment is bigger than Democrats or Republicans. This is about democracy itself. This is about whether Black communities, poor communities, rural communities, formerly incarcerated people, and marginalized voices will continue to have representation and political power in America.”

Speakers united around the theme that those trying to gerrymander their way into control of Congress in defiance of voters had reawakened a movement. “They think they can draw us out of power,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told an audience in Montgomery.

“They do not know the sleeping giant that they just awakened. Because it is not a coincidence, and our whole country must understand, that it was not until voting rights were ratified in this country that we got the Great Society. Because when Black Americans have the right to vote and that vote is protected, our schools get funded. When voted rights are protected, healthcare gets expanded. When voted rights are protected, our country moves forward. And Montgomery, that’s what they’re actually afraid of. They’re afraid of us coming together. They’re afraid of us protecting one another.”

—

Notes:

https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/research/online-documents/civil-rightAs-act-1957

https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2026/05/mass-mobilization-expected-in-selma-montgomery-this-weekend-after-supreme-court-decision.html

https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2026/05/church-buses-and-charter-buses-are-heading-to-selma-and-montgomery-for-a-reclamation-of-power.html

https://www.booker.senate.gov/senator-bookers-marathon-speech

Bluesky:

indivisible.org/post/3mlyzqeapbs2g

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, History, Inequality, Injustice, Racism

Why Is the Department of Justice Prosecuting a Leading Civil Rights Group?

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2026 //
6

The Department of Justice indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center by paying informants to infiltrate extremist groups.

CNN wrote:

The Justice Department alleges in the criminal case brought last month that the Southern Poverty Law Center — which has drawn the ire of President Donald Trump and other Republicans for labeling right-wing organizations as hate groups — defrauded donors by not informing them of secret payments to hate group members to act as informants.

The Justice Department alleges that SPLC has funneled $3 million to hate groups like the KKK, Unite the Right, and the Aryan Nations. SPLC also listed Moms for Liberty as a hate group, and M4L said that SPLC should be shut down.

One of the specialties of SPLC is compiling a list of hate groups and individuals who spread hate.

As an organization that was created to oppose racial injustice in the South, SPLC became a natural target for the GOP vengeance campaign.

The odd thing about the suit is that SPLC paid infiltrators, not the groups themselves.

This is a brazen assault on a significant civil rights group that has tangled with hate-groups for more than 50 years.

It is also a demonstration of the Trump administration’s weaponization of the Justice Department, turning it into a partisan cudgel.

Some large corporations have paused their charitable gifts to SPLC, including a division of Schwab that manages charitable gifts, Fidelity, and vanguard.

It was noted on Twitter that Stephen Miller, Trump’s policy advisor, is in the SPLC list of extremists.

Categories Civil Rights, Corruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Injustice, Trump
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