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The MAGA Republicans have total control of our national government. With the Felon in the WhiteHouse {FIWH} as president, they are leaving no stones unturned in their quest to end democracy in this country and leave us with an entrenched reactionary right wing entrenched majority in congress that will be nearly impossible to remove.

While most people look at the elective offices as the symbols of what a reactionary party can do to end democracy, the Supreme Court has been not too quietly making rulings that are geared to effectively put one party in power for the long foreseeable future.

Thus the party that wants to end democracy has been pushing its agenda on all fronts. As the FIWH illegally sends storm troopers into cities in a show of intimidation and the congress refuses to do even the simplest task (look MAGAs could end their shutdown in about an hour if they wanted to) the SCOTUS is in the midst of the perfunctory show as they go about making elections safe for MAGAs.

As most of you know, Wednesday the SCOTUS heard oral arguments in a case arising out of Louisiana that would pretty much kill any remaining powers that the 1965 Civil Rights Act had that would help ensure some power to minorities. You can almost bet that long before any arguments were heard that the vote next June will be 6 to 3 to kill the 1965 Act.

MAGAs have a group that looks, even creates, cases that challenge laws that have given minorities any extra help in achieving the American Dream. In recent years they have brought cases involving in particular Affirmative Action. Such cases have been decided almost 100% against minorities.

In this case, after the 2020 census Louisiana had 6 congressional districts. After much haggling, it was finally resolved that districts should be drawn such that minorities would have a great chance of winning 2 of the 6 districts or 1/3 since minorities in Louisiana were 1/3 of the population.

This decision was challenged and the SCOTUS decided to take the case. As the final arbiter the SCOTUS will often take a case where it wants to make a statement about the case that will guide any similar cases for a long time. In this case it was pretty obvious that the Court seemed itching to reverse any extra aid that minorities had gotten in any laws.

In an analysis, Moira Donegan of the Guardian ferrets out the driving force behind the Roberts Court’s desire to make a statement in this case.:

“The case reflects two major trends of the Roberts court: hostility to racial justice claims brought by minorities, and a willingness to invert civil rights law and the Reconstruction amendments alike to create interpretations in which these legal traditions function to entrench, rather than challenge, historical hierarchies of race and gender. Louisiana’s attorney general – who has switched sides in the case since it was initially argued last year, joining an opposition to the Voting Rights Act – claimed that to assume that Black voters would vote differently than white voters – which in Louisiana, they overwhelmingly do – would be to unconstitutionally impose a racial stereotype. This facile fiction elicited exasperation from Justice Kagan.

But the attorney general knew his audience. Roberts has long been an enemy of practices that attempt to remedy historical and ongoing racial discrimination, claiming that the law mandates that state and private actors alike take no interest in such projects and attempt facially race-blind policies in everything from voting rights enforcement to college admissions – no matter how racially discriminatory against Black Americans such practices prove to be in reality. “The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” he once memorably said, “is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” – that is, to stop trying to account for or combat racism with official policy. The result will be that if the court rules in Louisiana’s favor, it will no longer be illegal, in practice, to racially gerrymander congressional districts to minimize and dilute Black voter power. But it will be illegal to use race to redistrict in such a way that restores Black voter power.

It is apparently through this fanciful and motivated reasoning that Roberts and his colleagues have decided that any move to secure Black Americans’ voting rights and equality in fact violates the very constitutional amendments that were meant to secure their voting rights and equality. The Voting Rights Act does not violate the 15th amendment; it enforces it, and gave the United States, during the 60 years or so of its enactment, its only plausible claim to being a real democracy. To say that the VRA contradicts the 15th amendment is more than just bad reasoning. It is bad faith. But bad faith, increasingly, is what the supreme court operates under.

If the supreme court rules in favor of the “non-African-American” voters and vacates what is left of the Voting Rights Act, as they are expected to, then a decision will probably come down sometime in June, just a few months before the November 2026 midterms. The resulting racial gerrymanders are expected to net Republicans 19 House seats. “

Of course such a decision could lead to a flood of gerrymandering just before the 2026 election. Such redistricting would not only be at the federal level, but also at the state and even lower levels. Such gerrymandering could easily lead to MAGA control for a century or more.

While the FIWH is often and correctly cited for his anti-democratic positions he is only one of a machine of f a party hell-bent on seizing and retaining power long past their lifetimes. And as one of the rewards for his part in building such an authoritarian state is that he can commit crimes such as child rape or stealing state secrets and never be held responsible.

And let’s give a hand to Iowa’s own Chuck Grassley who had a major role in setting up the SCOTUS to be an apparatus of an authoritarian state. As head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Grassley refused to hold hearings for the very legal nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016. Then in a total about face he rushed through the nomination of the gawd-awful Amy Coney Barret in a very similar situation four years later.

Stand up and let the people see the man who undermined democracy, Chuck!