Trump, John Roberts
and the Unsettling of American Politics
Aug. 14, 2025
By David Daley
Mr.
Daley is the author of “Antidemocratic: Inside the Right’s 50-Year Plot to
Control American Elections.”
President Trump, Vice
President JD Vance and Texas Republicans have reignited the gerrymandering
wars. The brazen power grab in Texas pushed Democrats to start their own
efforts to unravel independent commissions established by voters, and now it’s
threatening to tilt the whole country into chaos.
Mr. Trump and his G.O.P.
allies are surely the instigators, but the true architect of this mess, the
person who bears as much or more responsibility for it, is Chief Justice John
Roberts and his conservative Supreme Court. Over several years of rulings, this court has effectively rolled back laws that had for
generations protected the right to vote.
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.
Since he joined Ronald Reagan’s
Justice Department in 1981 as a young foot soldier in the nascent conservative
legal movement, Chief Justice Roberts has pursued the patient, steady bleeding
of the Voting Rights Act. In 2013, he wrote the 5-to-4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder that
effectively ended preclearance, the Voting Rights Act’s most effective
enforcement mechanism, and liberated states, many clustered in the South, from
federal oversight of legislative maps.
But the case that did
the most to bring us to our current impasse came six years later, Rucho v.
Common Cause. The gerrymander mayhem was created by the Rucho case. In that
decision — also 5 to 4 and written by the chief justice — the court ruled that
partisan gerrymandering is a nonjusticiable political question and shuttered
the federal courts to future claims. The decision incentivized extreme
gerrymanders nationwide and left voters all but powerless to challenge them.
The chaos we face today
could have been prevented. Instead, the court enabled it. At a time when
Americans might look to federal courts as honest brokers, the Supreme Court’s
conservative majority kicked away the best, even last, chance at enforcing a national
solution to a national problem.
The Rucho decision
arrived after federal judges nationwide, appointed by Republican and Democratic
presidents, had examined maps drawn by both parties during the 2011 cycles.
Many of those judges recognized that modern gerrymanders, devised on sophisticated
software with the help of voluminous voter data, were a serious threat to fair
elections, and that the federal courts had a unique responsibility to protect
voters. Judges tossed plans drawn by Democrats in Maryland and Republicans in
Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina.
The lower-court rulings
made clear that the same technology that allowed politicians to warp maps also
provided all the tools judges needed to knock them down.
But Chief Justice Roberts insisted
there was no clear, politically neutral standard. “Federal judges have no
license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties,”
he wrote, “with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no
legal standards to limit and direct their decisions.”
His decision feigned
ignorance of the difference between a gerrymander drawn in 1981 and one
sketched out on sophisticated supercomputers four decades later. He pretended
that voters can fix gerrymandering by tossing rascals out of office, a remedy
that doesn’t take into account how gerrymandering works.
The chief justice,
borrowing his move from the Shelby decision, even disingenuously suggested that Congress could
solve the problem if Americans wanted it fixed. This allowed him to erase his
own fingerprints and push a problem he did not want solved toward a branch he
knew would not solve it.
And while he praised
nonpartisan movements that prevailed in shaping nonpartisan redistricting
processes in Michigan, Colorado and elsewhere, he actually signed their death
warrant. Once the court took a national standard off the table, reformers
operating in good faith would be leading their state toward unilateral
disarmament during a blood feud with those using legal means but acting in bad
faith.
Not surprisingly,
egregious gerrymanders poured out. The 2021-22 redistricting cycle proved to be
a bipartisan gerrymandering orgy. The worst offenders from the decade before
managed to go further still. More insidiously, Republican lawmakers looked to get
away with illegal racial gerrymanders by claiming they were allowable partisan
gerrymanders. The combination of Shelby County and Rucho enabled this
regressive strategy.
Ever more partisan state courts have
provided little help. Ohio lawmakers felt confident that they could stiff-arm the
state Supreme Court when it tried to strike down partisan gerrymandered maps.
North Carolina voters actually turned to their state court, and they won a fair
and balanced map. But then the partisan balance on that court changed hands,
and the court reversed itself, citing Chief Justice Roberts’s ruling. By 2024,
the G.O.P.-led legislature had imposed a map with 10 safe Republican seats,
three safe Democratic seats and one swing district, netting the party three
more seats — enough to give it its current majority in the House. In theory,
state courts offer a place to bring complaints, but realistically, especially
in red states, they have offered very little recourse.
Now Texas looks to push
gerrymandering to further antidemocratic heights. Its audacious mid-decade
power play has fueled gerrymandering wars that may grow beyond containment.
Democrats in California and New York might end or suspend the citizen-won commissions
that Chief Justice Roberts suggested had solved the redistricting problem. The
gerrymander fever may soon spread to Ohio, Missouri, Indiana, North Carolina,
Florida, Illinois and perhaps Maryland, Georgia, Kentucky and New Hampshire.
The Supreme Court could
have controlled this. This is, after all, a court that usually has no qualms
about developing its own standards. Instead, on gerrymandering, it provided
gasoline for more gerrymandering conflagrations, and failed the nation.
The outlook is bleak for
national consensus, since Democrats and Republicans are engaged in a
destructive struggle for partisan advantage. Republicans have gone for broke.
Democrats, too, have now
cast aside a decade of anti-gerrymandering messaging. In 2021, all 50 members
of the Senate Democratic Caucus supported the For the People Act, which
contained strong, anti-gerrymandering provisions. The filibuster prevented it from
moving forward. Since polls show voters across party lines hate gerrymandering,
Democrats should have brought the legislation forward as a stand-alone bill
when they had trifecta power. They did not — but perhaps sometime in the
future, they can again.
Of course, there is no
guarantee it would pass constitutional muster with the Roberts court.
The serial gutting of the Voting
Rights Act (which will most likely see its final act in the
2025-26 term) shows that the Roberts court’s devotion to democratic politics is
selective. The last time elected officials weighed in on the law, to
reauthorize it, was 2006. In the House, the vote was 390 to 33. In the Senate,
not a single senator — not one, from any state — voted against it. The vote was
98 to 0.
Yet for a law with
overwhelming bipartisan democratic support, the Roberts court has shown that
justices do have
the tools to act — to overturn the overwhelming judgment of elected officials.
The combination that has
defined the unsettling politics of America in 2025 — a Supreme Court unabashed
about dismantling what was settled law on a range of issues, such as abortion,
independent agencies and the like, and an administration eager to push the
boundaries of executive power — has, in the gerrymandering chaos, struck again.
Realistically, voters have nowhere to
turn. John Roberts abandoned them long ago. The predictable destruction we are
sure to face belongs to him.
