Republicans plan to reverse progress made by the 1965 Voting Rights Act with racial based gerrymandering

Mapping Mississippi White published in The New York Review of Books by Jeffrey Toobin

Bennie Thompson’s trailblazing career came after the success of the Voting Rights Act and could end with its fall.

When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Bennie Thompson was just seventeen years old—short of the voting age—so his parents reaped its benefits before he did. The family lived in Bolton, Mississippi, a town of about five hundred people twenty miles west of Jackson. Thompson’s mother, a schoolteacher, and his father, an auto mechanic, had never been able to register and vote.

The VRA essentially put states with histories of racial discrimination into federal receivership to force them to comply with the Fifteenth Amendment’s guarantee that the right to vote could not be denied because of race. As a first step, the federal government sent workers to the South to register Black citizens like Thompson’s parents. To assure further compliance, Section 5 of the act required those states to get approval from the Justice Department or a court before making any changes to their electoral systems. The federal registrars “created an opportunity to get registered without intimidation,” Thompson told me recently as we wandered through Bolton, where he still lives. “And the result was people like Bennie Thompson.”

Thompson discovered politics in the mid-Sixties as a student at Tougaloo College, a historically Black school and a civil rights hotbed in Jackson. He graduated in 1968 and, thanks to the new voters enfranchised by the VRA, won local office in Bolton the following year. (Prior to 1965, roughly 28,500 Black citizens in Mississippi—6.7 percent of those eligible—were registered to vote; within two years of the act’s passage, that number had soared to 264,000—59.8 percent.) Over the next two decades Thompson won a series of races for county-level positions in Mississippi and then, in 1993, a special election to Congress. He’s been reelected sixteen times. Thompson and Mike Espy, his predecessor in the seat, are the only Black people to be elected to Congress in Mississippi since Reconstruction.

Thompson has been the chair and ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, but he came to broad national attention when then speaker Nancy Pelosi named him the chair of the special congressional committee charged with investigating the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In a series of televised hearings in 2022, Thompson’s committee laid out how a violent insurrection nearly upended the transfer of presidential power. “I named a lot of our most intelligent and skilled members to that committee,” Pelosi told me.

And you know how Congress is. They all thought they should be the chairman. But after it was over, they all came to me and said that Bennie was so fair and showed so much integrity and skill that they agreed that he was the right one to be the chair.

Thompson has lived his entire political life in the shadow—and, for a long time, under the protection—of the VRA. Throughout that period, Congress and the courts have wrestled with a central question about its meaning, one with fundamental implications for Thompson’s political career. Does the VRA protect Black voters and officeholders only from intentional discrimination by government officials, or does it also guarantee Black candidates a fair chance of victory at the polls? To put the question in voting rights shorthand, is it an “intent” law or a “results” law?

Earlier this year the Supreme Court appeared to settle the question. In Louisiana v. Callais, a 6–3 majority in effect established that the VRA prohibited only intentional discrimination. Republican-dominated states throughout the country, including Mississippi, took the decision as an invitation to gerrymander the seats of Black officeholders so they would have virtually no chance of winning reelection. Just two weeks after Callais was decided, Tate Reeves, the Republican governor of Mississippi, announced his intention to redraw the lines of Thompson’s district. “Congressman Bennie G. Thompson’s reign of terror on MS-2 is over,” Reeves posted on social media. “It is not a matter of ‘IF…’ Just a matter of ‘WHEN!’” The governor’s inflammatory language is revealing, especially because Thompson has had a scandal-free career; the only “terror” about Thompson, it seems, is that he’s Black and in Congress. While Reeves and his Republican allies in the state legislature ultimately decided against a new round of gerrymandering before the 2026 midterms, they are united in their determination to redraw not only Thompson’s district, but also those of Black officeholders in state and local positions across the state.

If the governor does end Thompson’s congressional career, it will mark more than the conclusion of a single politician’s time in office. It will signal the end of a grand experiment: a joint undertaking of the federal government and the courts to rectify enduring injustices in the American electoral system. More than half a century ago, the nearly absolute power wielded by white politicians in the South created the need for the VRA. Now, as a result of Callais and other Supreme Court decisions, the heirs to those politicians are reclaiming that power.

Just to mention Mississippi, to cross the state line from Alabama and go there, it just created all types of problems in my own mind,” John Lewis once said, recalling his early days as a civil rights leader. “Alabama is bad; Alabama is hell. But to go to Mississippi at the time was worse than hell.”

In Mississippi in the 1960s, racist violence was a horrible constant. In 1963 Medgar Evers, the first field officer of the NAACP in the state, was shot dead in the driveway of his house in Jackson. The following year, when caravans of students and others came to register voters during the Freedom Summer, their buses were torched and the passengers beaten. Three of them—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were abducted and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.

This was the Mississippi where Bennie Thompson grew up. In the months after the VRA was passed, there were two cross burnings in Bolton. As he took me through its streets, Thompson showed me the United Methodist church he first went to as a child. “I’ve been in one physical church my whole life. Not just one religion, one physical church—which just happened to be right next door to the Head Start center that the Klan burned down,” he told me. “So that was kind of part of my introduction.”

The Supreme Court purported to end segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, but a decade later, Thompson was taught in what was still called the Bolton Colored School, which it was in fact if not in law. Most of Bolton’s white children eventually went to a private school called Central Hinds Academy just outside town. We took a drive to Central Hinds and happened on a football practice that featured, by my count, about two dozen white kids and one Black player. Thompson smiled and gestured at the lone figure: “He’s an athlete.”

A short distance from Bolton’s main drag, which has just a handful of storefronts, Thompson slowed down in front of a modest swimming pool. When he became mayor of Bolton in 1973, he learned that the town had donated $2,500 to the local nonprofit that had built the pool a few years earlier and then decreed that it was whites only. “My position was, the public money was donated, therefore, it’s a public pool,” he told me. “I closed the pool and said unless you make it a public pool, you can’t open.” In response, the nonprofit simply refunded the town’s $2,500: “They kept it all white.” (The pool is now in private hands.)

Meanwhile, the white politicians in charge of the Mississippi state government fought the VRA in every way they could. The local authorities could no longer stop Black citizens from registering, but the state had many other tools to preserve white rule. In 1966 the state legislature gerrymandered the state’s congressional districts so that Black voters in the Mississippi Delta region were split among three districts and were thus powerless to elect one of their own. (Then as now, Mississippi has the highest percentage of Black residents of any state: about 40 percent then and about 37 percent now.) The state also rewrote the rules in many white-majority cities and towns so that officials were elected at-large rather than by neighborhood, which might have given Black candidates a chance. 

In eleven communities, Mississippi changed school superintendent positions from elected to appointed to prevent Black candidates from running and winning.

Some of those changes were challenged by the federal government. The early years of the VRA, when Thompson came of age, unfolded in a national political environment very different from today’s. The law enjoyed bipartisan support. Even though Richard Nixon embraced the “Southern Strategy,” playing to white racism in the South to win the presidency in 1968, he signed a reauthorization of the VRA in 1970; Gerald Ford did the same in 1975. During the administrations of these Republican presidents, the Justice Department used its authority under Section 5 of the VRA to veto some of the attempts by Mississippi and other states to thwart the intent of the law.

Still, progress for Black Mississippians often came slowly, including for Thompson. When the VRA was passed, Black residents were in the majority in two of the five supervisors’ districts in Hinds County, which includes Jackson. But county officials changed the election for supervisors to an at-large system. Black voters sued, and eventually, in 1977, the full Fifth Circuit declared that Hinds County violated the VRA. As Frank R. Parker, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, wrote in his book Black Votes Count (1990),

The board of supervisors was forced to adopt a new plan that contained two districts that were over 65 percent black. In the 1979 county elections—after eight years of litigation—two black county supervisors, Bennie G. Thompson and George Smith, were elected as the first black county supervisors in Hinds County since Reconstruction.

The Supreme Court offered an initial answer in City of Mobile v. Bolden (1980). According to the Court, it was not enough if Black voters failed to elect one of their own; they had to prove that the white majority intended to violate their voting rights. Civil rights supporters denounced the Mobile decision, asserting that in the modern era, white legislators knew better than to display racially discriminatory intent. Proving again the bipartisan support for voting rights at the time, Republicans and Democrats joined forces in 1982 to pass a twenty-five-year extension of the VRA that was revised to effectively overturn the Mobile decision. Conservative senators like Orrin Hatch and Robert Dole voted for the extension, and Ronald Reagan signed it into law. It established a “results” test: plaintiffs needed to show only that a state’s action produced discriminatory outcomes in order to win their cases.

Again, Thompson owed the next step in his career to the VRA. After the 1982 changes to the act, Black plaintiffs challenged the 1966 gerrymander of the state’s congressional districts. Now they had to prove only that the creation of the districts led to discriminatory results, which they did. The courts compelled the state at last to establish a majority-Black congressional district, and Mike Espy won the seat in 1986. In 1993 President Bill Clinton appointed him secretary of agriculture. In the special election to fill the vacancy that year, Thompson won.

By this point, even though the makeup of the Supreme Court was almost the same, the justices had changed course on voting rights. In Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), they ratified—and strengthened—the results test established in the revision of the VRA by holding that states had to acknowledge when they had a history of “racially polarized voting.” In establishing district lines, they had to consider “whether whites vote sufficiently as a bloc usually to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate.” If white residents did vote that way, the states had to include enough Black voters to give a Black candidate a chance to win election. In other words, the Court recognized what Thompson told me about voters in Mississippi, and it thus ensured that districts like his would remain intact.

It’s now clear that the crucial event in the eventual demise of the VRA was President George W. Bush’s appointment in 2005, of John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice. In the early 1980s, after Roberts had completed his clerkship with then associate justice William H. Rehnquist, he took a number of junior positions in President Reagan’s White House and Justice Department. There, in a series of memos, Roberts expressed his opposition to what became the 1982, reauthorization of the VRA. In strong language for a young staffer, Roberts endorsed the Court’s decision in the Mobile case and voiced his passionate belief that the law should protect Black voters only from intentional discrimination, not from unfair results. For example, in a January 26, 1982, memo to Attorney General William French Smith, he wrote that adding a results test to the law would lead to a “quota system in electoral politics.”

Roberts lost that battle, but his appointment to the Supreme Court put him in a position to win the war, especially once he was joined by other conservative justices. To Roberts and the other conservatives, the VRA was another way the government sought to privilege Black citizens over others, much like affirmative action, which they also eventually outlawed. Combining a narrow reading of the rights of Black voters under the VRA with an expansive understanding of the rights of whites under the Constitution, the conservatives began chipping away at the act.

The first great blow came in 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, in which Roberts’s opinion for the Court effectively overruled Sections 4 and 5. In both the original version of the VRA and in every subsequent reauthorization, Congress held investigatory hearings and, based on the results, established a formula for determining which states and localities had histories of discrimination and thus were subject to the act’s provisions. The theme of Roberts’s opinion, however, was that the nation had changed. He wrote that after the passage of the VRA, “voting tests were abolished, disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race were erased, and African-Americans attained political office in record numbers.” The statutory formula did not, in his view, take these changes sufficiently into account, even though Congress had looked at the same facts and concluded otherwise. According to Roberts, the law violated “the tradition of equal sovereignty” among the states and was thus unconstitutional. Unless Congress changed the formula (which it was unlikely to do and never has), there would be no more jurisdictions subject to Section 5, which was now a dead letter.

Immediately after the Shelby County decision, several states formerly covered by Section 5, now freed from Justice Department oversight, changed their election laws to make it harder for Black people (and others) to vote. On the very day that the decision was announced, the Texas legislature announced that it would tighten the photo ID requirements for voting, which a court had earlier said burdened minorities. Mississippi and Alabama passed similar laws. North Carolina enacted a series of voter restriction measures, including a requirement of a government-issued ID, and a limitation on early voting. As a result of the Supreme Court’s decision, none of these changes had to be submitted to the Justice Department for preclearance. The southern states immediately showed that they had changed less than Roberts claimed they had.

In theory, Shelby County left open the kind of VRA lawsuits that made Thompson’s career possible. Under Section 2 of the law, individual plaintiffs, not just the federal government, could sue localities for violating the rights of Black voters. It was private Section 2 lawsuits during the Sixties and Seventies that forced Mississippi to reverse the gerrymandering that had ruled out Black candidates like Thompson for the Hinds County seats and his congressional district. But in the past few years the Supreme Court has shut down Section 2 lawsuits, too. And crucially the Court in 2019 allowed state legislatures to design districts that gave an advantage to a ruling party, holding in Rucho v. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandering is a “political question” beyond the remit of federal courts. The decision gave Republican map drawers in the South the perfect way to avoid being accused of racial discrimination. They could eliminate the seats of Black officeholders on the grounds that they were targeting only Democrats.

The coup de grâce came earlier this year, when the Court decided Callais, which made Roberts’s memos from the early 1980s, the law of the land.

Samuel Alito’s opinion for the Court said that its purpose was to “update the Gingles framework and realign it with the text of §2 and constitutional principles,” but the effect of the ruling was to overrule Gingles and invalidate the results test entirely. Citing Rucho, Alito said that henceforth “litigants cannot circumvent that rule by dressing their political-gerrymandering claims in racial garb.” But the truth was that he was inviting Republican state legislators to dress their racial gerrymandering in political garb, with likely fatal political consequences for Black officeholders like Thompson. As Justice Elena Kagan put it in her dissent, Callais was the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”

In taking up the Supreme Court’s invitation in Callais, Governor Reeves and the Republican-dominated state legislature in Mississippi are proceeding in an orderly fashion. State legislative elections take place there in 2027, and the Republicans are moving first to gerrymander those seats to the advantage of Republican, and thus mostly white, candidates. According to an analysis of prospective maps by Fair Fight Action/Black Voters Matter, a liberal advocacy group, an aggressive post-Callais map by Republicans could eliminate twenty-nine—nearly half—of Mississippi’s Black-majority legislative districts. When that task is complete, Reeves and his colleagues will turn to congressional maps and the fate of Thompson’s district in 2028. Other longtime African American members of Congress, including Emanuel Cleaver in Missouri, James Clyburn in South Carolina, and Sanford Bishop in Georgia, are similarly at risk of losing their seats in 2028. In all, in the next two years, the Congressional Black Caucus, which began the current Congress with sixty-two members, could lose as many as nineteen because of the kind of redistricting now permitted by the Supreme Court.

In addition to his security responsibilities in Congress, Thompson also serves as a custodian of institutional memory of the civil rights movement. For the past twenty-seven years, he has hosted an annual Mississippi Policy Conference, sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus, at which he introduces colleagues of all races and backgrounds to a part of the world they may not know and a history they may not remember. “I take folks and show them what cotton looks like growing in the field,” he told me. “I mean, some folks think cotton comes from Walmart.” The conference takes place in Tunica, which Robert Kennedy toured in 1967, when it was known as perhaps the poorest city in America. (The town’s fortunes have improved since the opening of a nearby casino.)

“I had never been to Mississippi before Bennie invited me to the conference,” Joe Neguse, a four-term congressman from Colorado, told me. Neguse, who is forty-two, belongs to a generation of Black politicians whose experiences differ greatly from Thompson’s. “It was one thing to read about what happened in Mississippi,” he said, “but it was another to go there and learn from Bennie and others who had to grapple with such obstacles.”

For now Thompson will campaign as usual in his so-far-unchanged district. He is cautiously optimistic about the future, too, pointing out to me that breaking up his district, which is roughly 64 percent Black, might involve some peril for the Republicans: “The $64,000 question for the Republican leadership in this state is, what are you going to do with the Black people? You gonna push them in the Mississippi River?”

To change Thompson’s district, the mapmakers would have to move its Black voters into the three other districts, which are all currently represented by white Republicans. That might give Democrats chances to win those seats: “So ultimately, you could create two purple districts and end up with two Democrats rather than one.” Republicans might not want to take that chance and thus might leave Thompson’s district more or less intact. (There’s also a chance that Thompson might not run again in 2028.)

Given the number of Black voters in Mississippi, it will not be easy for Republican state legislators to gerrymander every one of their districts into oblivion, but the party is clearly going to try. The tools to fight back are very different today from what they were in the first decades after the passage of the VRA. Even if the Justice Department were inclined to protect the gains of Black voters and officeholders (which it clearly is not under the Trump administration), the Supreme Court’s invalidation of Section 5 has made such an effort impossible. And the Court itself, which was at least sometimes an ally of the VRA, has turned into an implacable foe. As a result, there will soon be fewer Black elected officials, perhaps a lot fewer, than there have been in the recent past. Representative democracy will look, and be, less representative, which is the problem that gave rise to the VRA.

“The issue is not whether Bennie Thompson represents this district or not,” Thompson said. “It’s whether or not the people who live in this district have a shot at representing and electing the candidates of their choice.”

Whenever the subject of race and voting in Mississippi came up, Thompson always offered the same straightforward explanation: “If you look at the historical voting patterns, especially in the South, Black people vote for white and Black candidates, but for the most part, white voters still vote for white candidates.” To Thompson, enforcement of the VRA must take those facts into consideration or the law would have no meaning at all. If states are allowed to gerrymander legislative districts so that Black candidates have no chance of winning—regardless of what could be proved about the legislators’ racial intentions—then white domination of the political process would continue as before 1965. Still, in the early versions of the VRA, the text was ambiguous about whether it was an “intent” or a “results” law.

Excellent history review essay describing who is an American and the value of birthright citizenship supported by SCOTUS

Echo opinion essay published in the Business Standard*. 

By Howard Chua-Eoan:  Once upon a time, the French were the most enthusiastic aspirational Americans. 

Magical realism of the American dream: 

Birthright, belonging and hope

Inspired by the revolution of 1776, as well as the victory of the Franco-American alliance over the British in the 1781, battle of Yorktown, French polemicists, patriots, philosophers and plebs waxed idealistic about migrating to the brand new nation to share in its promise — la félicité publique of the Enlightenment transformed into “the pursuit of happiness” of the United States (US) Declaration of Independence. The vast possibilities of the future compelled one enthusiast to rhapsodise, “What then is the American, this new man❓” 💜💗☆

The question has been asked again and again in the 250 years since July 4, 1776. On Tuesday, the US Supreme Court rejected the Trump Administration’s attempt to place curbs on the 158-year-old 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which gives anyone born in the country citizenship by birthright. The debate seems to renew with each generation, if not with each year. By naturalization, the US adds about 800,000 new citizens annually — over a decade, a cohort bigger than the population of Hong Kong. 

In fact, the US produces far more freshly naturalized citizens than any other nation.  That’s apart from the estimated 3.5 million baby-citizens delivered each year. There is a metaphysical dimension to being born American in America. It means you are as American as anyone else born anywhere else in America. From Manhattan to Miami to Montana, Americans — as the late 18th century French pondered with awe — are privileged with geographical equality, and enter the world carrying an identity founded on place, not blood, with possibilities as immense as their landscape. Each is a plurality of one.

For now, though, let’s put aside the magic for realism. Americans have always been at odds with each other — often viciously — over who belongs to their promised land. Indeed, despite this week’s ruling, the US has become a much less welcoming place because of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) assaults on migrants (and almost anyone actually) driven by the populist rhetoric of Donald Trump and his (evil❗) acolytes. 

Today, even some newly-naturalized citizens advocate pulling up the ladder to curb immigration. Lawyers for skilled foreign job-seekers are now counselling their clients not to come to the US, reversing advice they’d provided for years.

And yet the American dream continues to draw people from around the world. Government statistics substantiate that magnetic power — in a backhanded way. Applications for immigration visas based on employment and family are backlogged for years, if not decades, as Bloomberg News notes. Depending on the applicant’s country of origin, the H-1B visa — which has been key to cheaper high-tech labor for Silicon Valley — continues to be heavily oversubscribed, in spite of lawyerly advice. It was perhaps the swiftest and most meritocratic way to prove your worth to a country you weren’t born in, but wanted to belong to. No longer. “It is far easier to obta-in any other type of major visa than an H-1B visa,” says a March 2025, report by the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonprofit research group focused on immigration, international trade, globalization and the economy.

Well, not quite every other type. Most family-sponsored would-be immigrants are stuck in the torturously long process for “green cards” that designate legal residents and put them on the road to naturalization. There’s an annual cap of 226,000 for those who aren’t immediate relatives of their sponsors; with about 7.1 million people currently waiting in that queue, many may not live to see the land they yearn for.

Moreover, the other evidence of America’s continuing pull is anecdotal. Even with the toll of (evil❗) ICE, people are still drawn to the US, even from supposedly blasé Europe. I track the restaurant industry on both sides of the Atlantic, and I know of cooks, sommeliers and servers in the United Kingdom (UK) who will jump at the first opportunity to show what they can do for an American kitchen. The continuous flow of Japanese chefs is evidence that economic powerhouses in East Asia are not immune to American magnetism. Often, the Brits try a short stint, an informal pop-up or hang around as unpaid stagiare (a controversial type of culinary internship) — all in the hope of convincing a US outfit to sponsor them through the costly paperwork required to win a long-term visa, perhaps even an O-1 for “individuals of extraordinary ability.”

It’s a long shot, but those from the 40-some countries in the US Visa Waiver Program (VWP) (including Japan, the UK and most members of the European Union) can use its provisions to enter and stay for as long as 90 days per visit. The VWP is meant to ease tourist travel but it also allows business-types to attend conferences and engage in dealmaking — just not paid labour. That’s leeway enough for anyone — not just restaurant folk — to make professional contacts. But there are limits: If the Border Control Protection agency decides there’s a pecuniary pattern to your travel, you may be served with a long-term ban.

From my perspective as an American abroad, I also find it revealing that the politics and events back home are often central to ordinary conversations in the UK as well as Europe and Asia. Mine are fully caught up in the latest developments as if related to their own well-being. It’s almost personal and domestic. It’s also bipartisan. While there is umbrage about the administration, there is also approval among the more MAGA-ty citizens of the world, who see a country finally aligned with their political proclivities. The recent run of right-wing victories in Latin America is an indicator that Trumpist America has become the spiritual promised land for a growing audience.

In fact, the US was also both beacon and caution back when there were only 13 states of the union. The Frenchman who asked wondrously about “the new man” was once an immigrant farmer in upstate New York and was appalled by slavery. The supposedly class-free republic wasn’t that at all and had embarked on the segregation of society by race. 

Indeed, the 14th Amendment was inspired by the dilemma faced by the children of slaves in the wake of emancipation and the Civil War. Speaking in all-encompassing language, it declared with constitutional authority that every child born in the US was a citizen. It was a remarkably judicious act for a country that would cruelly continue to impose racial identity — and thus social and economic status — based on “a drop of blood” well into the 20th century.

And the sequel was just as momentous. In 1898, the US Supreme Court decision upheld the language of the amendment to apply to the case of Wong Kim Ark, born in California to migrant Chinese parents. He sued after he was barred from re-entering the US after visiting China. This took place at the height of violent pogroms surrounding the imposition of the Chinese Exclusion Act. His victory ensured that citizenship was available to immigrants and their offspring, not just to the established communities of the country — and once again affirmed by the Supreme Court this week (in 2026).
Wong would work as a cook and vanish into obscurity after an itinerant life. The pursuit of happiness did not guarantee dreams would come true. That’s the irony of the “American Dream,” which was coined by the historian James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America. Writing amid the Great Depression, he said the notion isn’t just about prosperity “but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

Tensions about who gets to be American are unabated. In the wake of this week’s SCOTUS birthright decision, Trump declared he’d try to get his way via legislative sleights of hand. For now, it is the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, that hold sway: “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to every free-born person in this land. We keep that promise today.” That is an appropriate gift to the country on this momentous birthday: the dream, and the chance, are continued.

Howard Chua-Eoan is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion covering culture and business. He previously served as Bloomberg Opinion's international editor and is a former news director at Time magazine

*Business Standard is an Indian English-language daily edition newspaper,[5] also available in Hindi. Founded in 1975.

American justice is holding a finger in the dyke of Trumpziism's onslaught of wrong minded calls for judiciary impeachment

Echo opinion column published in the Kansas City Star, Missouri:

By Stephen L. Carter: "Roberts was right to chastise Trump" 

Chief Justice John Roberts had to take the extraordinary step of chiding Donald Trump and his cult cheerleaders for their demands that federal judges who stand in the way of the administration's decrees be impeached. 

But the abhorrent Trump sort of behavior isn't new; the insistence by politicians that judges stand aside and let them have their way has been a depressing feature of our political landscape since the beginning. But in the current moment, with Trump issuing so many orders, no small number of which may be illegal, it's particularly important that we observe the forms of law. Currently in Trump's crosshairs is James Boasberg, the chief judge of the federal district court in Washington. The president is upset because the judge had the temerity to instruct the administration to cease the mass deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members until he decided on the legality of the program. Courts do this all the time - ordering parties in effect to stand still pending argument and decision. But on this occasion, Trump took to social media, calling Boasberg a "Radical Left Lunatic" and "crooked" and demanding his removal. TOP VIDEOS The video player is currently playing an ad. You can skip the ad in 5 sec with a mouse or keyboard That's outrageous and, from the leader of the free world, inexcusable. The holder of the highest elective office in the land owes the American people the highest regard for our fading democratic norms.

Chief justice pushes back against calls to impeach judges who rule against Trump. Chief Justice John Roberts issued a statement following President Donald Trump's call for a judge to be impeached for ruling against the administration.

Justice Roberts's response was straightforward and forceful: "For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose."

Has this sort of thing occurred in the past? Of course, it has, far more often than we might care to admit. Early in the 19th century, believing Justice Samuel Chase to have been biased against them in key cases, the Jeffersonians went after him with a vengeance. (Chase survived his impeachment trial by the narrowest margin.) During the Reconstruction, members of Congress threatened to impeach Supreme Court justices who were considered hostile to their program. Instances abound. The enemies of the Warren Court made no secret that their enmity stemmed from the justices' decisions. Online you can still buy colorful "Impeach Earl Warren" buttons dating back to the era. During the 1960s, an effort to impeach Justice William Douglas picked up sufficient steam that some predicted might succeed.

Prefer a more recent example? Here's the New York Times in March of 1996, describing President Bill Clinton's response to a decision by federal Judge Herbert Baer to suppress evidence in a major drug case: "The White House put a Federal judge on public notice today that if he did not reverse a widely criticized decision throwing out drug evidence, the President might ask for his resignation." 

Jon Newman, then chief judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, fired back that the criticism reflected "extraordinary intimidation." By that time, Senator Robert Dole, Clinton's opponent-to-be in the approaching presidential election, had called for Baer's impeachment and removal. 

Newman had harsh words for Dole too: "A ruling in a contested case cannot remotely be considered a ground for impeachment."

Examples go on and on. What they have in common is the realization by politicians and activists that judges are cheap and easy targets. 

But when the criticisms suggest punishment, the rule of law begins to flail. Since the Trump administration began ramping up its rhetoric, federal judges have faced rising levels of reported threats. Small wonder the chief justice felt compelled to speak up. But in taking on Trump, Roberts isn't taking sides. He's trying to protect the judicial branch against political assault, just as he did in 2020 after then-Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer launched his dreadful headline-grabbing attack on two justices of the Supreme Court: "You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price." Roberts replied, correctly, that those at "the highest levels of government" had no business threatening judges. 

As a matter of fact, Trump, then in his first term, also weighed in: "There can be few things worse in a civilized, law abiding nation, than a United States Senator openly, and for all to see and hear, threatening the Supreme Court or its Justices."

Exactly. Perhaps Trump II should read Trump I. No, judges shouldn't be free from criticism, and sometimes the criticism will be harsh. That's life in the rough and tumble of government affairs. But there's a world of difference between an online activist calling a judge a nasty name and the President of the United States calling for the judge to be removed from office. Only the second violates democratic norms.

The bipartisan National Commission on Judicial Discipline and Removal, on which I was privileged to serve, addressed this issue in its 1993, final report, writing: "[F]ederal judges should not be impeached for judicial decision-making even if the decision is an erroneous one." Let's not forget that what keeps norms alive is consensus. The more we ignore democratic norms, the weaker they become. I've written before about the way those norms of democracy have been threatened in recent years by the left's assault on the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. 

But the right has been laboring in those fields a lot longer. And the recklessness with which the labor is being done by the Trump administration and its supporters - yes, some backbencher has filed actual articles of impeachment against Judge Boasberg - is without parallel in our recent history. The norms matter particularly at this moment because the administration's flurry of sweeping orders has been met by a flurry of lawsuits. Maybe most of what the administration is attempting will survive judicial review. Maybe not. The way we find out is by trying the cases. That takes time. Impatience with the pace of law is a commonality of our history, but is, almost always, the enemy of democracy.

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of "Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America's Most Powerful Mobster."

Judicial point of view - Donald Trump does not understand the judiciary

Colleen K. Connell- an echo opinion published in the Chicago Sun Times (the hardest working newspaper in America!)

Illinois - As a lawyer who has practiced in courts including the Supreme Court of the United States, and as part of an organization that vindicates our clients’ rights in our courts, it is clear to me that we are in the midst of a constitutional crisis.

Donald Trump, the president of the United States is engaged in a campaign to erode public confidence in our federal courts — so he can rule in an unchecked fashion.

The president’s nefarious and dangerous campaign emerged in plain sight this week in an ACLU case involving the Trump administration’s efforts to rewrite our nation’s asylum law. 

In fact, Donald Trump recently signed an executive order which purported to deny the ability to claim (immigrant) asylum to anyone who did not make the request at a port of entry. 

Asylum seekers are migrants and immigrants who are following the law

Congress has not made this requirement part of immigration law, so the president’s order was clearly in violation of law.

A district court judge, in response to a lawsuit by the ACLU and another human rights organization, temporarily blocked enforcement of the president’s order for a few days while the court considers more detailed arguments on the matter. This is a perfectly normal process — giving the parties time to make their case but blocking enforcement of a measure that could do harm to vulnerable individuals.

Donald Trump's response was predictably over-the-top. He called the decision a “disgrace” and suggested that the judge (and all the judges of the Ninth Circuit even though they were not involved in this decision) was political since he was appointed by former President Barack Obama. He claimed he would be putting in a “major complaint” and suggested that the temporary bar on enforcement risked national security.

Seemingly disgusted by Donald Trump's wrong minded remarks, the usually taciturn Chief Justice John Roberts issued a measured, but strong rebuke making clear that one of our nation’s great hallmarks is an independent judiciary that carefully and faithfully interprets our laws and the Constitution. Again predictably, the president lambasted the chief justice on Twitter (after having called Roberts a “disaster” during the presidential campaign).

Putting aside the lack of decency and decorum from the Oval Office and the reality that the president gets nearly everything wrong about this situation, this latest attack on the judiciary must be seen in the larger context. Donald Trump simply does not understand our system of government with its checks and balances. And, his love for dictators and despots across the globe reflects his own desire to operate without limits or accountability.

In the nearly two years that Donald Trump has occupied the White House, we have seen this tendency grow and become less subtle. Trump’s attack on the media as the “enemy of the people” is evidence of his aversion to anyone who questions his policies, his misstatements and the malfeasance of his administration. When someone points out questionable activity by the White House or his cabinet, the president blames others and denies the right of the media or others to question him.

And when the courts seek to enforce the rule of law by holding the president accountable, he lashes out, suggesting to his shrinking base of supporters that the actions of the court, rather than the White House, are motivated by politics and self-interest. It is especially dangerous that this campaign against the courts is ramping up now that the administration will be held accountable by a House of Representatives led by a majority of the opposite party.

Let me be very clear. I do not agree with every decision by every court across our state and federal systems. But it is clear that the men and women who preside in courts across the nation do their best to make decisions on the basis of the law and the facts. It is a difficult job in the best of circumstances. It is made even more difficult when a demagogic president uses decisions he disagrees with to sow disrespect for the rule of law and division in our country.

We need an independent judiciary as a check to protect basic rights. It is exactly the role our founders designed for the courts. It is a threat to that constitutional order — and our very republic — when the president attacks the judiciary in an attempt to justify lawless actions. And, like the chief justice, we must be stirred to action and resolve. Our nation must not bend our principles to the autocratic will of Donald Trump. Instead, we must hold him accountable within that system.

Not doing so presents a fundamental threat to our the constitutional system that is the foundation for our democracy.

Colleen K. Connell, a lawyer, is the executive director of the ACLU of Illinois. (American Civil Liberties Union)

Media thrives on Donald Trump buffoonery

“What does every kid want for his birthday? A clown!”- Bill Mayer

Honestly, it's not fun to be "funny" anymore about Donald Trump. He now has access to nuclear codes and Russians are "vodka toasting" his failed inauguration event.

Nevertheless, although I wish it weren't the case, the facts clearly show how Donald Trump, when presented in any capacity, is a subject that attracts attention, like garbage attracts rats.

Comic news pundit Bill Mayer "got Trump for his birthday"

Bill Mayer can verify this observation, even though, it doesn't need much fact checking. He's a comedian, writer, producer and political commentator, who asked for "Donald Trump for his birthday". Unfortunately, he described the proverbial cliche of "getting what you wish for". 

The Daily Beast: NEW ERA
Bill Maher Denounces Trump’s ‘Joyless, Ugly, Divisive’ Inauguration- In the first ‘Real Time’ of the Donald Trump presidency, Bill Maher told us how he really felt about the inauguration- by Matt Wilstein

In fact, Bill Maher joked earlier in the week, he got Donald Trump for his birthday. Yes, Friday, January 20th marked both the inauguration of the 45th president of the United States and the Real Time host’s 61st birthday. He wasn't exactly in the mood to celebrate when his show returned to the air for the first time since the week of the 2016 election.

With a new theme song, new opening credits and a brand new stage set, Maher took the spotlight and made one more joke about getting Trump for his birthday. It made sense, he said, because, “What does every kid want for his birthday? A clown!”

“It happened. It really happened,” Maher said. “We Americans have a new leader: Vladimir Putin.” While some Trump fans are calling this election a “reckoning,” Maher agreed, adding, “I reckon we’re all fucked.”

Instead of “raise your right hand,” he joked that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts told Trump to “raise your right pussy-grabber.” And despite promises from the Trump transition team, Maher didn’t find the inauguration “classy” or “uplifting” and “unifying,” but rather, “joyless and ugly and divisive.” 

If there was a theme, he said it was, “Once you go black, you can go back. Mic drop!”

Amid all the “hoopla,” Maher reminded viewers that Trump was inaugurated as the FBI and five other agencies are reportedly probing ties between his campaign and the Kremlin. 

For the record, Maher said, “I do not believe our new President Donald Trump paid Russian prostitutes to pee on him.” After a pause, he added, “I believe they did it, I just don’t believe he paid them!”

Following a chat about the “predator-in-chief” with “the most gorgeous old lady in the world,” Jane Fonda, Maher welcomed his panel for the night. And on this night, he decided he didn’t need any Trump supporters with him.

Things didn’t really heat up until he brought on his mid-show guest, Keith Olbermann, who has clearly been itching to get back on TV to talk politics. 

Comparing the “inauguration” to a “coup d'état” by a “Russian puppet,” Olbermann urged those who oppose Trump to “fight” everything he does at all costs.

Olbermann confirmed that he agrees with Congressman John Lewis, saying “I am on that page, because he’s not a legitimate president.” And he went even further: “We were invaded,” he said, adding, “just because there’s not blood on the streets” doesn’t change that fact. While Maher was not willing to call Trump a “Russian puppet,” he did say, “He’s acting exactly like a man who they do have a pee tape of.”

Maher also had a message to Bill and Hillary Clinton, who graciously showed up at the inauguration despite everything they’ve been through over the past two years: “Thank you for 30 years of service, and now I never want to see either of you ever again.” He marveled at the fact that the Democratic candidate showed her face in public after Trump and his followers threatened to put her in jail. (MaineWriter: Love Hillary! #I'mstillwithher)

For his final “New Rule” of the night, Maher implored liberals to stop calling Trump voters “idiots and fools” and instead “call them what they are: fucking drug addicts.” Then he said something he never thought he’d have to say: “Kids, don’t do heroin, it’s a gateway to being a Republican.”

(MaineWriter- it's ironically true, I might eventually be writing about +Realdonaldtrump Official from a prison cell in Guantenamo, but wherever I am, there will plenty of people ready to read about this dangerous baffoon.)

Health Care Reform : This Supreme Court Defined "Tax" is Already Being Paid By People Who Buy Health Insurance

Kudos to Supreme Court Justice John Roberts to define the penalty for not buying health care insurance as a "tax". Indeed, he's right.  Republicans already pay a big tax on their health insurance benefits when their premiums are calculated to pay for the cost shifting already going on among providers who pass the charges for the uninsured on to private payers.  So, now, the people who DON'T buy health insurance will pay this tax rather than having it shifted to those who already pay.

As for the expansion of Medicaid in the Supreme Court Ruling, this provision has always been a regulatory implementation under the authority of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the same government agency that oversees the reimbursement of Medicare.

In summary, the Constitutionality of the Health Care Reform Act (HCA) has been thankfully upheld!  This mandate, or now a "tax", is essential, because, in the absence of the supported requirement for everyone to buy insurance, the insurers would plead for being unable to afford to provide for coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions.

Already, without taking a breath, enemies of President Obama are blasting the airwaves with anti health care reform negative advertisements. Yet, even the voice over by authority figures are saying they "don't know" what the law will mean in the long run.  What the HCA law means, absolutely, without reservation, is that people will pay for their own health care insurance or risk being penalized or "taxed", while those who already pay will not see costs for the uninsured shifted to their premiums.

HCA Medicaid coverage discussions and arguments will be figured out in the context of the authority CMS has to promulgate rules for reimbursement as published in the Federal Register.  Pundits should take time to interview CMS executives rather than political operatives if they want to get an authoritative opionion about this reform provision.

Regardless of how politicians feel about the Health Care Affordability Act, the Supreme Court has declared it to be Constitutional and millions of Americans will now be required to buy health insurance. What in the world do Republicans have against people buying insurance?

Those who oppose this Supreme Court ruling are the people who already have coverage. News pundits and right wing extremists should speak with the millions who will finally have access to health care denied due to their insurance status, before speaking to repeal and replace.

By the way, "Repeal and Replace" - with what? With Romneycare?