Michael Podhorzer SCOTUS thread

 This is one of the most outstanding commentaries on this year's presidential election.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the presidential immunity decision. If you’re wondering whether the MAGA majority on the Court will let Trump off the hook, they already have.
By doing so, they have already interfered in the 2024 elections.

They’ve forced a historic crisis—an irreconcilable showdown between the normal operation of the criminal justice system (which should find Trump in pretrial and trial proceedings for his January 6th crimes over the next five months) and the normal functioning of presidential elections (which should find him campaigning full-time during those months).

It didn’t have to be this way; it’s a crisis entirely of their own manufacturing.

Imagine you were told that in another country, a president who had been defeated in a free and fair election attempted a coup, for which he was indicted—but four years later, the very judges he had appointed have helped protect him from standing trial so he could return to office.

Whether it’s in Orban’s Hungary, Erdogan’s Turkey, Putin’s Russia, or now the United States, authoritarian movements consistently attempt to amass and consolidate power by hijacking courts to provide them with post-hoc impunity.

In the US’s case, the hijacking we now confront by the MAGA judges is the result of decades of hollowing out judicial independence by the Federalist Society and its revanchist backers.
Since Bush v. Gore, the GOP-appointed justices have consistently acted to benefit Republicans electorally.

Here are some of the biggest acts of election interference we’ve seen from MAGA/FedSoc judges:

1. SCOTUS shielding Trump from pre-election accountability for January 6th and the criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election. If the MAGA justices really thought this case was worth hearing, they would have said so when Jack Smith first asked them about it in December.

Now the MAGA majority has created an impossible bind: Proceeding with Trump’s trial in a timely fashion would supercharge his lies that the election wasn’t/won’t be free and fair. Yet NOT holding the trial before the election would surrender the imperative for voters to know the full extent of Trump’s legal accountability for the insurrection.

2. Judge Aileen Cannon shielding Trump from pre-election accountability in the classified documents case, with delays, delays, and more delays.

3. SCOTUS handing MAGA the House in 2022. Democrats would have held their House majority, or Republicans would have won by at most one seat (218 to 217), if the midterm elections had been conducted using the 2020 maps or the maps federal courts ordered states to use before the Federalist Society justices overturned them.

4. SCOTUS hearing the Fischer case, which could upend J6 charges against Trump, due to paper-thin concerns about suppressing legitimate protest (a concern they did not show in a recent case involving Black Lives Matter).

5. Now let’s start going back in time a decade or so. Thanks to SCOTUS gerrymandering decisions, Democrats won 21 seats fewer than their proportion of the vote in 2012—depriving Democrats of a trifecta in 2013 and 2014 during Obama’s second term.

6. In a series of cases beginning with Shelby County, the Court’s right-wing majority all but repealed the Voting Rights Act. The reasoning was embarrassingly bad, and the results have been catastrophic, including but not limited to opening the door to modern-day poll taxes and suppression of Black voters.

7. Citizens United brought a sea change in how our elections are run and who can influence them. Spending on congressional/presidential campaigns was barely more in 2008 than 2000, but 2020 spending skyrocketed.

8. Bush v. Gore: The original sin, which set the template for the strictly partisan electoral decisions to come. SCOTUS stopped valid ballots from being counted in Florida. But a comprehensive review found that if the disputes over the validity of all the ballots in question had been consistently resolved and any uniform standard applied, the electoral result would have been reversed and Gore would have won by 60 to 171 votes.

Whenever SCOTUS has made elections MORE democratic it was by large majorities, and almost exclusively by the Warren Court. However, SCOTUS has made our elections LESS democratic—on a straight partisan basis—repeatedly over the last 24 years.
The dark red bars in the image above represent election-related rulings that were conservative, AND were decided exclusively by GOP nominees.

Let's be clear: All six GOP-appointed SCOTUS justices, and Judge Aileen Cannon, have current or former associations with the Federalist Society. None of them can be impartial about cases involving Trump, because his defeat will also mean the defeat of their hard-fought ideological legacy.

Michael Avram Podhorzer is an American political strategist. He was the political director of the AFL–CIO, before becoming a senior adviser to its President Richard Trumka. Podhorzer is also the chairman of the board for the Analyst Institute and Catalist. He serves on the boards of America Votes, Committee on States, and Progressive Majority. Podhorzer was described as "the architect" of a "shadow campaign that saved the 2020 Election" by TIME.