The sharply conservative Supreme Court that President Donald Trump’s three appointees remade is the first since at least the 1950s to reject civil rights claims in a majority of cases involving women and minorities, according to a detailed analysis conducted for The Washington Post.
The shift brings to an end a streak of successive courts expanding such protections that began with the dawn of the civil rights era. But the historic nature of the current court is also evident in other key areas of the law over the five terms since the third of Trump’s appointees joined the bench.
Thus begins a Washington Post report of the high court’s hard shift to the right. The story continues:
The court has also entered a new era of extreme partisanship. None over the past seven decades has been as starkly polarized.
“There is no center now,” said political science professor Lee Epstein, who performed the analysis with her Washington University colleague Andrew D. Martin and Michael J. Nelson of Penn State.
Note that, “Overall, the Supreme Court has consistently leaned to the right for 50 years. That pattern has persisted despite the country being closely divided politically and the White House and Congress regularly changing hands between Democrats and Republicans.”
Republican presidents have chosen every Chief Justice since Eisenhower’s appointment of Earl Warren in 1953. Republican-appointed justices have comprised the court’s majority since 1970 — over half a century.
Nonetheless, the Roberts Court — packed with 3 Trump appointments — has set itself apart by its crusade against the rights of women and racial minorities.
Assault on democracy
The Roberts Court has also made history in attacking voting rights; attacking fair small-d democratic representation by enabling gerrymandering; and opening the floodgates of money in American politics. In the words of Adam Liptak
In the two decades Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has led the Supreme Court, the justices have reshaped American elections not just by letting state lawmakers like those in Texas draw voting maps warped by politics, but also by gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and amplifying the role of money in politics.
Gutting voting rights has been a career-long mission of the Chief Justice since he served in the Reagan White House, where he sought vainly to undermine the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Roberts has found considerable success in the past decade leading the court, beginning with Shelby County v. Holder (2013), decided 5-4. This was an especially cynical ruling, with Roberts writing for the majority, striking VRA’s pre-clearance requirement: “Racial disparity in those numbers was compelling evidence justifying the preclearance remedy and the coverage formula. There is no longer such a disparity.”
Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s dissent was on the mark, “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Within 24-hours of the decision Texas gloated that it would enforce its voter photo id law. Other Republican-led states followed with a range of voter suppression measures (closing polling places; cutting back on early voting; purging the voting rolls).
In Citizens United v. FEC (2010), McCutcheon v. FEC (2014), and a host of other decisions, the Roberts Court shredded campaign spending limits. The sums of money from billionaires (aka oligarchs) are staggering (“The Scale of Billionaires’ Campaign Donations is Overwhelming U.S. Politics”). And dark money compounds the problem.
In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) the Roberts’ Court not only refused to uphold lower court rulings striking down gerrymandered redistricting schemes, it forbade federal courts from consideration of constitutional violations resulting from partisan redistricting. Justice Elena Kagan dissented:
For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities.
And not just any constitutional violation. The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives. In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people. These gerrymanders enabled politicians to entrench themselves in office as against voters’ preferences. They promoted partisanship above respect for the popular will. They encouraged a politics of polarization and dysfunction. If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government.
The Rucho decision has led to mid-decade redistricting across the country to amplify gerrymandered Congressional districts. “The current frenzy is just the latest example of the most antidemocratic feature of American politics in 2025. It’s the toxic combination of the conservative Supreme Court majority and a political party that believes longstanding norms are for suckers and that lacks any commitment to fair play and majority rule.”
Enabling an off-the-rails wannabe strongman in the White House
Trump v. United States (2024) took the cake for the most outlandish, anti-constitutional decision of the Trump era. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent:
Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.
Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for “bold and unhesitating action” by the President, ante, at 3, 13, the Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more. Because our Constitution does not shield a former President from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent.
…
Looking beyond the fate of this particular prosecution, the long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding. This new official-acts immunity now “lies about like a loaded weapon” for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation.
Since that 2024 decision, the Roberts Court’s supercharging of Trump’s authoritarian ambitions and lawless conduct have often come through the shadow docket — in rulings without full briefings, oral arguments, or explanation. Often the majority’s reasoning is mysterious (if the Republican-appointed justices actually agree on a rationale). The lower courts are denied guideance and often the authority to act. Trump wins again and again, while the court’s GOP majority preserves exclusive right to decide such controversies on a case by case basis.
Former judge and conservative scholar J. Michael Luttig has taken the court to task: “The supreme court was never intended to function like this. Never before has it entertained such challenges from the president, and never before has it decided them so flippantly.” Luttig again:
“The supreme court has pulled the rug out from under the lower federal courts, and it has done so deliberately and knowingly,” Luttig said. “The chief justice has no higher obligation than to protect the federal judiciary from attacks by this president, and in my view he has utterly failed.”
