Welcome to our weekly “Trumptastrophe” series that serves to remind us of the destructive policies, decisions, and actions we encountered during the Trump presidency and the threats that he and others in the MAGA movement still pose – and to keep those moments clear in our memory as we fight to defeat Republican extremists during the upcoming elections.
This week’s Trumptastrophe focuses on how former President Trump transformed the Supreme Court by nominating right-wing justices to the bench: justices that would ultimately issue rulings that advanced a wish list of far-right priorities to reshape the country – undermining many of our rights and freedoms in the process.
On Sept. 26, 2020, Trump nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg a week earlier.
In naming Barrett to the Court, Trump completed the terms of the deal he made with religious-right leaders in 2016—if they helped put him in power, he would give them the Supreme Court of their dreams. Barrett, Trump’s third Supreme Court nominee, was the top choice of anti-abortion activists. Some of them had proclaimed for years that God had anointed Barrett to join the court and overturn Roe v. Wade.
People For the American Way and other civil and human rights groups opposed Barrett’s confirmation, but Republican senators were intent on rushing her onto the court before voters could end Trump’s presidency.
Barrett would soon join her fellow MAGA justices in overturning 50 years of precedent and stripping American women of the right to abortion. Republican legislators and governors rushed to impose increasingly draconian bans, defying strong public support for legal access to abortion.
The right-wing legal movement that backed Barrett’s nomination has far more in mind than overturning Roe. They want to dismantle a century’s worth of precedents, effectively repealing the New Deal and making much of what the federal government does unconstitutional.
Since Barrett solidified the Supreme Court’s MAGA majority on the court, the justices have gone to town, resulting in disastrous rulings for voting rights, workers, consumers, immigrants, and supporters of church-state separation. They have drastically undermined the ability of federal agencies to protect Americans’ health, safety, and environment. They will have more opportunities to create harm with the cases they have accepted for their upcoming term.
All eyes are now on the upcoming presidential election, and what role the MAGA justices might play in supporting the efforts of the election subversion machinery that MAGA leaders and donors have built since Trump’s 2020 loss. This network of lawyers is far more prepared to overturn a Trump loss than the ragtag and frankly embarrassing legal team that rallied around him in 2020. The MAGA machinery is positioning itself to launch a wave of lawsuits that could delay election certification and ultimately prevent some states’ electoral votes from being counted.
In 2023, Supreme Court justices rejected MAGA lawyers’ request that they adopt an extreme version of the right-wing “independent legislature theory,” which would have completely removed state courts from questions involving disputed presidential elections. But the MAGA justices left themselves an opening to intervene and override state courts—a move that NYU law professor Richard Pildes told NPR would “hang over the 2024 election.”
It’s hard to have much confidence that the MAGA justices will do the right thing and ensure that the will of the voters is respected. While it’s true that they did not intervene in 2020 to help Trump overturn the election, they have proven themselves all too willing to help him out since he left office, handing him victory after victory.
This year, the MAGA justices ruled that presidents have a broad degree of immunity from accountability for criminal wrongdoing in office—potentially a terrifying green light for a future President Trump to indulge his vengeful ambitions. University of Pennsylvania law professor Kate Shaw called the opinion “fundamentally lawless.”
The best way to make it harder for the right-wing election subversion machine or the MAGA justices to override a victory by Vice President Kamala Harris is to make sure that her Electoral College victory is convincing enough that such efforts would be widely understood as illegitimate.
That’s something we can all make happen.
These are just some of the reasons we need YOU in this fight. So, find your favorite way to unwind after reading through this week’s recap, and then make a plan for how you will fight back this week, this month, this election cycle.
