Mother Jones illustration; Leah Millisl/Getty
There will be endless ink spilled over the 2024 election, trying to sort out the overlapping reasons why the world’s oldest democracy placed its fate in the hands of a would-be strongman who promises to dismantle democratic norms. There are many culprits—rising costs, raw white supremacy—but among them, let’s not forget the role of Chief Justice John Roberts and the US Supreme Court.
Under Roberts, American democracy felt humiliating, looked like a joke, and became increasingly tenuous.
The Supreme Court has become a major force in American politics in recent years. Increasingly, it has stepped in not just to decide questions of legal importance, but to resolve heated partisan disputes. From abortion and gun rights to gerrymandering and voting rights, the justices have become the arbiters of our toughest political questions. This wasn’t a sudden change, though it has accelerated in the last four years, leaving Americans as the proverbial frog in the pot. The water is now boiling.
Why Americans chose a demagogue to helm their democracy may be partially explained by the fact that, in many ways, the United States isn’t a democracy any longer—and in many ways, that’s thanks to the Roberts court. Our system was never perfect; on a basic level, the US only became a democracy in 1965 when it finally gave all Black people the right to vote.
But for nearly two decades, Roberts and his colleagues have done immense damage to the underpinnings of the democracy Americans painstakingly built. They have reallocated political power from ordinary citizens to billionaires, worsened congressional paralysis, and transformed many elections into meaningless exercises. If you are looking to explain why America picked Trump, you could do worse than look to these five Roberts-era Supreme Court cases that weakened our democracy and faith in government. After all, voters seem to have decided that when there’s so little to protect, there’s much less to lose.
Citizens United
To understand why elections are now so expensive—and why Trump’s campaign in particular was waged with money from outside billionaires—you have to go back to January 2010, when a 5-4 majority set the country on a new political path. The court’s Citizens United decision allowing corporations to spend unlimited sums to elect candidates of their choosing was expanded two months later by an appeals court ruling allowing anyone to contribute infinite amounts of money, including untraceable money, to influence elections.
One of the most destructive forces in American politics in the last several years is how much is spent on them—and by whom. The 2024 election cycle was (in a record that is reliably reset every four years) the most expensive in US history. The presidential race alone garnered nearly $2.7 billion in donations, with the money raised split almost evenly between the candidates’ campaigns and outside groups attempting to influence the outcome. Former President Donald Trump’s campaign was powered by outside money, which totaled more than $710 million—compared to the $380 million his campaign took in directly. Eight years earlier, in 2016, Trump raised $333 million while outside spending on his behalf totaled just $100 million.
In his majority opinion in Citizens United, Justice Anthony Kennedy justified dispensing with a century of campaign finance limitations by arguing that outside spending—money not given directly to a campaign—does not create the only kind of corruption he considered valid: a quid pro quo. “Independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption,” Kennedy insisted.
Compare Kennedy’s words to what we just witnessed. In April, Trump promised oil executives he would roll back environmental regulations if they spent $1 billion to reelect him, which looks awfully like the quid pro quo scenario Kennedy denied was possible. In what appeared to be a concession to a billionaire backer, Trump changed his position on banning TikTok after meeting with Jeff Yass, a key investor in the app, who gave to pro-Trump outside groups. And then there’s Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who spent nearly $120 million late in the election backing Trump. Musk wanted the job of deciding which government regulations to eliminate, and, in September, Trump promised it to him. And Trump, ever obsequious to his biggest (outside) donor, praised Musk in his victory speech as a “genius” and a “star.” Never have billionaires played such a visible and important role in an American election, nor been promised so much in return.
It didn’t take long for the fallout of Citizens United to reallocate political power toward the richest Americans. (And through dark money groups, possibly wealthy foreigners too.) By 2015, a small coterie of the uber-rich were bankrolling a growing share of political spending. “In a time of historic wealth inequality, the decision has helped reinforce the growing sense that our democracy primarily serves the interests of the wealthy few, and that democratic participation for the vast majority of citizens is of relatively little value,” campaign finance expert Daniel Weiner wrote that year when assessing the decision’s impact.
That kind of democratic disenchantment can feed into authoritarian movements—even if they promise, like Trump’s, to further widen gaps in economic and political power.
Shelby County
Just three years after Citizens United, Roberts did something he’d been wanting to do since his days as a fresh-faced Reagan administration attorney: Gut the Voting Rights Act. The 1965 law had become the lynchpin of America’s multiracial democracy, but Roberts’ opinion in Shelby County v. Holder excising a powerful provision set the country back.
In his majority opinion, Roberts jettisoned the law’s preclearance regime, which required advance federal approval of changes to election procedures in areas with a history of voter suppression, including most of the south. As justification, he wrote that the country had changed and no longer needed such a strong federal intrusion to protect voting rights. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg analogized Roberts’ logic to “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
She was right. Unshackled, states rushed to implement restrictions on voting. Last year, on the 10-year anniversary of the decision, the Brennan Center for Justice counted at least 94 voter suppression laws across 29 states. It ushered in our current era of discriminatory voter ID laws, polling place changes, restrictions on mail-in ballots, and more. In Alabama, one of several states with new voter suppression laws, the Brennan Center found that the turnout gap between Black and White voters tripled after the court’s decision, from 3 percent in 2012 to 9 percent in 2022, a difference of tens of thousands of voters. In subsequent cases, Roberts continued to remove the VRA’s protections. This election cycle, the Republican Party fabricated a false narrative of non-citizens voting, in part to justify imposing or keeping burdensome proof of citizenship requirements when registering or voting. This is the next frontier of voter suppression—and the Supreme Court weighed in August with a thumbs up.
The court has also greenlit efforts to purge voter rolls in a manner that disproportionately affects poor and minority voters. In 2024, Trump and his allies launched discredited lawsuits seeking to force purges across the country, with the Supreme Court stepping in to allow one such purge despite a federal law prohibiting it so close to the election.
The Roberts court’s decisions also changed the experience of voting; many of the same urban voters of color who, in polls, expressed low confidence in American democracy and seem to have turned to Trump, also experienced the worst of the Shelby County fallout, including prohibitively long voting lines. In their communities, American democracy felt humiliating, looked like a joke, and was increasingly tenuous.
Rucho v. Common Cause
Gerrymandering has always been an issue in American politics. But in recent years, it’s become a serious problem. After Republicans’ well-timed nationwide sweep to power in 2010—the year of a decennial census, which is followed by redistricting—they drew political maps that aimed to lock in their majorities indefinitely. Thanks to unprecedentedly sophisticated computer models and granular data, their gerrymanders delivered historically lopsided results, distorting the partisan make-up of both state legislatures and Congress. A chorus of voices called on the Supreme Court to set some limits—and it appeared poised to do so.
But when a related case presented itself to the justices in 2017, Roberts wrote an opinion declining to touch the issue on a technicality. A year later, with Kennedy, one of the court’s sometime swing votes, replaced by Trump-appointee Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Roberts blessed partisan gerrymandering. Federal courts, he ruled, must stay out of the way.
The result is that several states have gotten away with partisan gerrymandering that not only warps their states’ politics, but also their congressional delegations—and with it, which party controls the House. The Brennan Center estimates that this cycle, gerrymandering gives Republicans a 16-seat advantage in the House of Representatives. That margin may be enough to determine which party controls the chamber next year—and consequently, whether Trump will have any check on his authoritarian ambitions.
There’s another way gerrymandering’s warping effect paved the way for Trump. Rather than competitive districts, conservatives in Congress are ensconced in bright red ones, only afraid that a more conservative challenger will come along. In the years after 2010, and coinciding with Citizens United, polarization deepened as more moderate Republicans were replaced with adherents of the Tea Party movement—the antecedent to Trumpism.
Biden v. Nebraska
By unleashing a gusher of money and allowing abuses of voting rights, the Roberts Court has made Congress more polarized and dysfunctional—essentially hobbling a co-equal branch of government. While politicians always campaign on policies they can’t or won’t deliver, if some voters soured on the Democrats because they didn’t do enough of what they promised, they may have been experiencing a very real effect of Congressional paralysis.
Student loan forgiveness is a perfect example: Biden wanted to keep his commitment to forgive some federal student debt, but getting it through Congress was a nonstarter. Finally, Biden’s Department of Education used its own authority to forgive $400 billion in student debt.
Not so fast, said John Roberts. In Biden v. Nebraska, Roberts blocked Biden’s loan forgiveness plan. To do this, he used a new doctrine the conservative justices had recently begun deploying to justify stepping in to stop executive policies they dislike. If voters are mad Biden didn’t deliver more on student loan forgiveness, they should be mad at Roberts and his colleagues.
The loan forgiveness program is a vivid example of a larger problem. Between congressional dysfunction and judicial veto, it’s hard to get stuff done. What’s the point in preserving a system where the policies politicians campaign on disappear into the ether? It’s certainly not a system that inspires trust.
Trump v. United States
After Trump lost the 2020 election, he attempted to stay in office by plotting to overturn the will of the voters, culminating in a violent insurrection at the US Capitol. In the summer of 2023, special counsel Jack Smith brought charges against him for his role in the scheme. A trial was scheduled for March 2024, during the Republican primaries. But the Supreme Court was there to help Trump.
The ex-president tried to delay and ultimately derail the trial by claiming that he is immune from prosecution for official acts made while in office. It was an outlandish claim. (Just imagine: a coup attempt is an unpunishable offense?) Between December 2023 and July 2024, the Supreme Court took multiple steps to delay the resolution of the immunity question, each time pushing a trial date further and further down the road, helping Trump sail through the primaries and, as the general election got underway, making it less likely a trial would happen before November.
Then, on July 1, John Roberts released a stunning opinion. He bought Trump’s argument—hook, line, and sinker. Former Presidents are now immune from criminal prosecution for anything deemed an official act. Even evidence of a crime is inadmissible if it involved official acts. The court, with Roberts in the lead, had not only removed a serious impediment to Trump’s reelection efforts—but ensured that should Trump return to the White House, he would do so with more power than any president ever before. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s chilling dissent laid out the stakes: “When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”
Now, we are there. Trump will be president again, immune from criminal liability, surrounded by loyalists, and likely with the GOP in control of Congress. In his first term, the Supreme Court was often called upon to limit Trump’s worst—and most obviously illegal—actions. But that was a different iteration of the Roberts court: In 2017 and 2018, it still had Kennedy and Ginsburg. Today, thanks to three Trump appointees, it has a hard right 6-3 majority.
When we think about the darkness of Trump’s second term agenda, from detaining millions of immigrants in camps to prosecuting his political rivals to using the US military to put down anti-Trump protests, we have to think about what the Supreme Court will do. As Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck wrote in his substack, One First, “it seems more than likely that the Supreme Court—this Supreme Court—will be the only institution standing between Trump and…whatever Trump wants to do.”
Roberts significantly shaped Trump’s campaign and the democracy we have today. Now that he will be one of the only Americans with power to temper Trump’s worst impulses, remember that he already enabled them.