The Supreme Court is trembling over the next election

With its latest ruling on the Trump administration's attempt to seize control of the midterm election, the Supreme Court's right-wing majority once again advertised its contempt for democracy and the Constitution. By allowing the president to proceed with his bureaucratic war on mail balloting -- even as many states are about to send those ballots to voters -- the court majority not only violated the constitutional stricture against federal control of elections but threatened to impose partisan meddling and White House chaos on the democratic process.

While the high court has yet to deliver a final decision on the Trump executive order at issue, the majority bestowed an undeserved legitimacy on the president's openly stated and nefarious plan to derail an election that appears certain to deliver a negative judgment on him and his party.

The court's action, although temporary, raised the deepest concern about the intentions of Chief Justice John Roberts and the "conservative" bloc (whose version of conservatism no longer extends to upholding legal precedents or constitutional norms).

Americans rightly worry that the court will allow or even encourage President Donald Trump to deny voting rights, intimidate voters, and tamper with balloting, if only because the court majority has so relentlessly expanded his authority and exempted him from ordinary oversight.

In one decision after another, they have awarded him the powers and immunities of a monarch in a casual manner that would have made the founders retch.

Indeed, the majority has consistently lent its authority and reputation to his dictatorial ambitions, while increasing the power of the wealthy in politics and diminishing or eliminating the protections afforded to society's least powerful groups. Making many of these bad decisions worse is the justices' recent habit of issuing important rulings on the "shadow docket," unsigned and unexplained, which undermines their integrity and shields them from criticism. It is hard to know how to evaluate a decision when no logic or law is offered to undergird its validity.

It would not be unlike the Roberts right-wingers to upend this election with a shadow docket ruling, a cowardly maneuver they have adopted in more than two dozen cases since Trump returned to the White House -- and ruled in his favor in more than three out of four.

Everyone should understand that if the Supreme Court majority intercedes now to sway an election that may bring Democratic control of both houses of Congress, they are indulging a gross conflict of interest to protect themselves. No longer can these justices be regarded as disinterested umpires. The Republican justices in particular -- specifically Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and the chief justice himself -- must dread the advent of a Democratic Senate that will investigate their festering conflicts of interest.

The grossly unethical payments and benefits accepted by Thomas are by now notorious. But how many Americans are aware of the disbarment complaint now pending against Roberts before the District of Columbia bar? Evidence delivered by a whistleblower to support that complaint shows that Jane Sullivan Roberts, the chief justice's spouse, earned more than $10 million between 2007 and 2014 as a "legal recruiter" for a headhunting firm for elite firms that had appeared before the high court hundreds of times.

Roberts failed to recuse himself from cases argued by lawyers who firms had remunerated his wife's company -- and mislabeled her commission income from that outfit as "salary."

After Business Insider published the whistleblower documents three years ago, Roberts amended his public disclosure to reveal the commission deal and also admitted for the first time that he owned equity in his wife's subsequent employer -- information he had omitted in three previous filings.

How would a Democratic House and Senate confront the shifty characters who now adorn the top bench? Congress might consider and perhaps enact judicial reforms requiring the justices to meet the minimum ethical standards enforced in the lower federal courts. While those standards at present don't apply to the Supreme Court, Democrats have vowed to take up court reform as a top priority should they win in November.

Be assured that the justices have heard about that promise. Do not doubt that the court's majority fears a season of terribly embarrassing and possibly ruinous scrutiny could be just over the horizon.