Four years have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with its June 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization — a ruling that, according to conservative GOP consultant Sarah Longwell, continues to be a political liability for Republicans.

Writing in the conservative website The Bulwark, Longwell — founder of Republican Accountability (RA), formerly Republican Voters Against Trump — explains, "Amid all the talk of inflation, war, and artificial intelligence, people are underestimating just how important abortion could still be to this fall's elections. That seems like an insane sentence to type because, after all, abortion proved decisive in 2022, when Democrats dramatically overperformed expectations. The consensus quickly formed that the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was the key contributor. But when the Democratic Party put a heavy emphasis on abortion in the 2024 elections, it didn't pan out. That's because voters were more motivated by economic issues."

Longwell adds, "Fights around abortion moved to the states — where Republican- controlled legislatures were passing sweeping bans — and receded from the federal level. Today, Dems may have over-learned the lesson of 2024."

Although Longwell is on the right politically, she is very much in the Never Trump school of conservatism and rooted for Joe Biden in 2020 and Kamala Harris in 2024. And she emphasizes, in her Bulwark piece, that not all conservatives want abortion to be illegal.

"I can't tell you how many times I've heard voters — even swing voters and conservatives — say some version of 'I'm pro-life, but I believe in a woman's right to choose,'" Longwell notes. "Translation: Voters can be personally uncomfortable with abortion and still believe that the state-level bans are a bridge too far. In recent focus groups I've conducted, abortion still pops up as an issue. That's especially true in states with very restrictive abortion bans — including some that have key Senate and gubernatorial races this year, like Iowa and Texas."

In Texas, outgoing Sen. John Cornyn — who recently lost a U.S. Senate primary to far-right Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton — is anti-abortion, but not as extreme on the issue as the Donald Trump-backed nominee.

"Paxton is a weak candidate for a lot of reasons, including his association with Texas' extreme abortion laws," Longwell observes. "This is something Democrats can and should hang around his neck. Sure, Texas is still Texas. But Paxton's liability on abortion, among his other indiscretions, could prove a major drag. In Iowa, Gov. Kim Reynolds also received plenty of fire. She isn't running for a third term. But Republican Zach Lahn is on the ballot, and he supports a total abortion ban with potential implications for IVF, which is even more extreme than the current law…. Dems seem aware that abortion itself isn't enough to tip any one race. Instead, it’s folded into a candidate's broader profile — and that can make all the difference."

Longwell continues, "Governors like Brian Kemp in Georgia and Mike DeWine in Ohio managed to get reelected in 2022, even though in 2019, both had signed 'heartbeat' abortion bans similar to Texas'. But they benefit from a broader 'normie' appeal. By contrast, patently insane candidates who supported near-total bans — like Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, Tudor Dixon in Michigan, or Kari Lake in Arizona — all lost their races. Extreme positions on abortion are often, though not always, a leading indicator of extreme positions on other issues, like whether or not the 2020 election was stolen."

President Donald Trump’s sometimes-ally in Congress, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), was just blasted in an op-ed from a major Maine newspaper for her role in overturning abortion rights.

“Mainers cannot and will not forget Sen. Susan Collins’ critical role in dismantling the nearly half-century-old constitutional right, causing cruelty and chaos to ensue,” wrote civil rights attorney Azaleea Carlea in the Portland Press Herald on Monday. “Either she was foolish or a hypocritical [sic]. Either way, she is not fit to serve another term in the U.S. Senate.”

Carlea detailed how Collins, despite promising to not vote in favor of confirming a Supreme Court Justice who would overturn Roe v. Wade, accepted Brett Kavanaugh’s word that he accepted the abortion rights ruling as “settled law.” After being confirmed, Kavanaugh joined four other judges to overturn Roe v. Wade in a 5-to-4 ruling. Three of those judges — Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — were appointed by Trump.

“Either she fell for it, or she secretly wanted the end result, but either way Americans across the country suffered and continue to live with this catastrophic attack on reproductive justice,” Carlea explained. “When the Supreme Court overturned Roe, it opened the floodgates to abortion bans across the country. Currently, 63 million women live in states with bans. Sen. Collins was crucial to the process for ensuring that SCOTUS was in a position to overturn Roe and for the subsequent fact that now 20 states have banned or significantly restricted abortions.”

In addition to reversing the right to abortion, the 2022 decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization also made it easier for states to ignore the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) that told hospitals to provide emergency care to all who require and seek it.

“Because of Susan Collins, women in the United States have been left to ‘bleed out’ in parking lots,” Carlea wrote. “They have been airlifted out of state to get the care they urgently needed and they have been left to deteriorate to the point where their health, future fertility, organ function was in grave danger.”

Carlea added, “Collins has also placed even greater barriers in the way of survivors of domestic violence and other forms of gender-based violence in accessing this form of healthcare. With reproductive coercion on the rise, abortion bans and reproductive healthcare restrictions make it even harder for victims to exert agency over their own lives, their own bodies and leave abusive relationships.”

The attorney reviewed how abortion restrictions have exacerbated America’s maternal health crisis and widened racial disparities in pregnancy outcomes.

“All this because Sen. Collins cast a critical vote to appoint Kavanaugh to the court,” Carlea wrote. “Four years later, in the wake of the devastation, suffering, cruelty and confusion she helped set into motion, she doubled down and said she did not regret voting the way she did. On Monday, June 22, she went on national television, dodged accountability for her vote and lied about how many Supreme Court justices overturned Roe.”

Because of Collins’ decisive vote and refusal to accept accountability for it, Carlea concluded that “Mainers deserve a senator who will take accountability, and fight for what two-thirds of Mainers are asking for — the right to an abortion. Graham Platner will do just that and more, all with a spine to stand up to the Trump administration’s attacks on bodily autonomy and our healthcare system. It’s well past time for Susan Collins to go. Mainers deserve better.”

This is not the first criticism Collins has received in June 2026 for her seeming ability to cozy up to Trump without wanting to take full responsibility for doing so. Even though many Senate Republicans came out to oppose Trump’s Memorandum of Understanding, which proposed to end the Iran War on terms perceived as favorable to Iran, Collins claimed she had not even read the 14-point agreement. It had been available for nearly 24 hours at that point and Collins is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. She has also been criticized for, like Trump, being too close to billionaires, with at least 79 billionaires donating to Collins’ network between January 2025 and May 20, 2026.

Despite these potential political liabilities, Collins could benefit from the presence of oysterman Graham Platner as her Democratic opponent in the general election. Platner has been accused of multiple infidelities toward his wife and exaggerating his working class background. He also had a Tottenkopf tattoo on his chest, which he claimed to not know was a Nazi symbol, although he has since gotten it covered up.

You might think that an arch-conservative who has used his lifetime seat on the Supreme Court to send U.S. law back to the 1920s would take a victory lap and maybe chill just a bit. But no. Despite his success in helping to dismantle abortion rights, attacking public-sector labor unions, elevating gun rights, promoting “religious liberty,” and destroying the Voting Rights Act, Justice Samuel Alito Jr. is still seething mad, motivated by ideological extremism and a stack of personal grievances, some dating to his childhood in Trenton, New Jersey.

Alito’s well-established pattern of outbursts was on full view during the court’s June 26 announcement of several late-term rulings. He set the tone for the session by reading a summary of his cruel 6-3 majority opinion that denied political asylum seekers the right to enter the country before reaching the U.S.-Mexico border (Mullin v. Al Otro Lado). Finishing quickly, he paused before moving on to summarize another of his opinions. Justice Soto Sotomayor apparently took the break in the action as a cue to read a synopsis of her dissent. Dissenters often refrain from reading their summaries, but there is nothing unusual about them opting to speak up, provided they give advance notice of their intentions.

Sotomayor blasted Alito’s handiwork. “The consequences of today’s decision are predictable,” she said. “More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not.” Her remarks apparently enraged Alito, making him look, in the words of NPR’s legal affairs correspondent Nine Totenberg, like “he had just bitten into a lemon.”

“There is much that I would have added to my bench statement had I known there would be a dissent read,” Alito said, uttering remarks that, in the staid confines of the nation’s most august judicial body, were veritable obscenities that prompted audible gasps from spectators and reporters in the gallery. A court spokesperson later clarified that Alito was in fact notified of Sotomayor’s plans, but to date, he has not publicly apologized. Like the president whose policies he almost always supports, Alito invariably overreacts and never recants.

Justice Samuel Alito Jr. is still seething mad.

Who can forget Alito sneering on live TV during Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address, mouthing the words “not true” as the president decried the court’s Citizens United opinion and the impact it would have on future elections, including greater foreign influence? Since then, Alito has only gotten more unhinged and offensive, becoming a regular featured speaker at Federalist Society events, railing against the legalization of gay marriage, labeling the Second Amendment and freedom of religion as “unfavored” constitutional rights, and condemning liberals as a threat to civil liberties.

In September 2021, Alito went ballistic after The Atlantic magazine staff writer Adam Serwer penned a column accusing the court’s right-wing majority of releasing a 5-4 shadow-docket ruling on Texas’ newly enacted vigilante abortion law in the middle of the night to minimize public outcry. In an hour-long live-streamed speech delivered at University of Notre Dame, he excoriated the press for portraying the court’s conservatives as “a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its ways,” and for feeding “unprecedented efforts to intimidate the court or damage it as an independent institution.”

In June 2023, Alito again went off the rails with an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal that lambasted a ProPublica report that in 2008 he took a luxury fishing trip to Alaska, flying for free aboard a private jet owned by Republican megadonor Paul Singer. The problem, according to ProPublica, wasn’t just that Alito had failed to recuse himself from reviewing lawsuits involving Singer’s hedge fund, but that he also failed to note anything about the excursion on the annual financial disclosure forms required under the Ethics in Government Act of 1978.

Claiming he had no duty to reveal the junket, he argued that his spot on the private jet “would have otherwise been an unoccupied seat” if he had not accepted the billionaire’s offer of a free ride, and that gifts of “hospitality” need not be reported. In a follow-up interview with the Journal, he added, “Congress did not create the Supreme Court” and “No provision in the Constitution gives them the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period.”

Alito’s official court opinions have been equally acerbic and hyperbolic. They arguably reached a crescendo in his 2022 majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization). Not content with simply overruling the 50-year-old precedent on which U.S. women had come to rely as an essential part of their health care, he wrote: “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.”

When used by a high court justice, the phrase “egregiously wrong” is an insult and a sign of contempt. And to add further insult, Alito reached deep into the bowels of Anglo-American common law to override Roe, citing the work of Henry de Bracton, a 13th-century English cleric and judge who condemned abortions as homicide, and a 17th-century English jurist who sentenced at least three women accused of using witchcraft to death.

So many of his hang-ups have become the law of the land.

What’s behind Alito’s fury and habit of issuing norm-breaking invective? As Georgia State University law professor Eric Segall told The Wall Street Journal in an article published this month, “Alito thinks of the other side as the enemy.” And true to Segall’s observation, Alito unwittingly admitted as much at the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner in 2024, when documentary filmmaker Lauren Windsor asked whether there was any way the country could overcome its terrible polarization, then surreptitiously recorded Alito’s answer that “there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised.”

Like most extremists, Alito has views that derive not just from his abstract political beliefs, but from his lived experiences growing up in a predominantly white Christian community as the son of deeply religious Catholic Italian immigrants, and later as an out-of-place right winger at Princeton University and Yale Law School.

In a revealing new biography, Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement, journalist Peter S. Canellos offers a compelling psychological portrait of Alito as a man dismayed by the demographic and secular changes that have transformed and, by his estimation, degraded the country of his boyhood. Alito has been on a mission to reverse those trends ex cathedra from his perch on the Supreme Court.

The problem is not that Alito has personal hang-ups — we all do — but that so many of his hang-ups have become the law of the land. On June 30, NPR’s Totenberg erroneously reported that Alito planned to retire so that President Donald Trump might nominate a younger right-wing zealot to the bench. The story turned out not to be true and was promptly retracted. Too bad for her — and even worse for the country.

The anti-abortion movement has been a major ally of President Donald Trump, applauding him for appointing three U.S. Supreme Court judges who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade after 49 years. But on Sunday night, May 3, the Wall Street Journal published an article detailing tensions between Trump and a top anti-abortion activist: Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.

Dannenfelser told the Rupert Murdoch-owned WSJ, "Trump is the problem. The president is the problem."

Patrick T. Brown, director of anti-abortion policy for the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, highlighted Dannenfelser's quote in a Sunday night post on X, formerly Twitter.

According to WSJ reporters Philip Wegmann, Liz Essley Whyte and Jennifer Calfas, "The ubiquity of abortion pills during the second Trump Administration has led anti-abortion advocates to decry the president's appointees, including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary, and promise cash and political firepower to politicians who oppose the drugs."

When the High Court overturned Roe v. Wade with its 5-4 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling in 2022, Trump applauded the decision as a victory for states' rights. Abortion is now banned or greatly restricted in many Republican-leaning states, while remaining legal in other states.

Some blue states, in fact, have strengthened their abortion-rights protections since the Dobbs decision. But Dannenfelser and other anti-abortion activists are hoping for a national anti-abortion law. And Dannenfelser recently said that the anti-abortion movement "as we know it is finished" without such a national ban or restriction.

"Now, Dannenfelser's group is preparing to spend $160 million in the coming midterms and the 2028 presidential primary. The hurdle for candidates looking to tap in to that support: They must commit, Dannenfelser said, 'to pro-life action at the national level,'" the WSJ journalists report. "Leaders in the anti-abortion movement are quick to credit Trump for nominating the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe, but their frustration has been building for months. They hoped that the (Trump) administration would roll back (Joe) Biden-era rules allowing the abortion pill, mifepristone, to be prescribed online and shipped through the mail."

Wegmann, Whyte and Calfas add, "The regulations have allowed clinicians in states with liberal abortion laws, such as New York, to prescribe and send pills to women in states with strict abortion bans, such as Mississippi. The Food and Drug Administration has instead left those rules intact."

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council — a major Religious Right group — told the WSJ, "You have Republican states that are challenging a Republican administration over this because their laws are being undermined. Pro-life voters are going to be wondering what’s going on when they head into the polls in November."

Clarence Thomas went more than 10 years without asking a single substantive question from the bench. His silence between 2006 and 2016 prompted commentators to call his courtroom quietude embarrassing, a sign of fatigue and a lack of intellectual candlepower. Even earlier in his career, he had earned the nickname of “Scalia’s Puppet” for his habit of joining majority opinions written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the outspoken and reactionary “originalist” who shared the dais with him until his death in 2016.

But the characterization of Thomas as an inattentive echo of Scalia is wrong. Thomas has always been more extreme and dangerous than Scalia, and his influence has never been greater.

After his bruising 1991 confirmation hearing, Thomas set his eyes on the goal of moving American law backward to the laissez-faire era of the Gilded Age, undoing the regulatory state of the New Deal, weakening the civil rights legislation of the 1950s and ’60s and undermining many of the forward-looking precedent decisions issued by the Warren Court. As Thomas reportedly told two of his law clerks in 1993, he planned to serve until 2034, and until then would continue to make the lives of liberals “miserable.” He has already made good on that pledge: He is now the second-longest serving Supreme Court justice in history.

Thomas has always been more extreme and dangerous than Scalia, and his influence has never been greater.

Thomas is best known for concurrences and dissents that seemed culled from the lunatic fringe when he wrote them, but were later embraced by the majority as the court moved hard right.

On affirmative action, in a 1995 case on government contracting (Adarand Constructors v. Pena), his concurrence denounced “remedial racial preferences” in federal hiring as a form of “racial paternalism.” This was an astonishing choice of words for the nation’s second Black Supreme Court justice, who overcame childhood poverty and after a brief flirtation with Black nationalism, became the beneficiary of affirmative action at Yale Law School. Twenty-eight years later, however, in a majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard), the court ended affirmative action in higher education.

On abortion in a 2000 case (Stenberg v. Carhart) that invalidated Nebraska’s late-term abortion ban, Thomas dissented, arguing that the Roe v. Wade decison was “grievously wrong,” and that nothing in the Constitution “dictates that a State” must legalize abortion. Twenty-two years later, Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization adopted Thomas’ view.

Ditto for the Second Amendment. In Printz v. United States, a 1997 gun-regulation case, Thomas contributed a concurrence arguing that the amendment encompassed a personal right to keep and bear arms rather than simply a right connected with service in state militias, as prior case law had clearly held. Eleven years later, in District of Columbia v. Heller, the court recognized the personal right in an opinion authored by Scalia. Thomas went on to expand the personal right in 2022 with his majority opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, a decision that severely handicaps state and local authorities from enforcing gun-control laws.

Thomas is also on record advising the court to revisit its precedent decisions on the right to court-appointed counsel in criminal trials (Gideon v. Wainwright, 1963); the right of married persons to contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965); the right of adults to engage in private consensual sex (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003); and the right to same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015). He has also called for the court to reconsider 1964’s New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark case establishing First Amendment protections in defamation cases involving public officials and public figures, which is widely considered the lynchpin of freedom of the press in America.

In a recent column published by the influential Scotusblog website, constitutional law scholar Erwin Chemerinsky noted that “Thomas is the only justice … who has openly said that precedent deserves little weight in constitutional law.”

Despite his laid-back courtroom demeanor, Thomas has also been an active and loquacious speaker out of court on the right-wing banquet and convention circuit, especially in meetings of the Federalist Society and events hosted by Hillsdale College, the Michigan-based private Christian institution long recognized as a hub for conservative thought leaders and a breeding ground for the right-wing’s ever expanding culture wars.

Supreme Court justices typically attend academic, judicial and bar-related conferences, and initially, Thomas’ public remarks were fairly judge-like, focusing on time-honored topics like judicial independence. But as his stature grew and the court’s lurch to the right accelerated, he shed whatever inhibitions he once had about voicing his personal beliefs, becoming in time a full-fledged and open culture war combatant.

Thomas is now unbound and unrestrained.

In a 2011 address at a law student symposium sponsored by the Federalist Society in Charlottesville, Virginia, he devoted most of his time not to expounding on legal doctrine but to defending his tea party activist wife Ginni against adverse press coverage. He also exhorted his young audience to be wary of the “fundamental changes” wrought by the left that aimed to distort the original meaning of the Constitution. In a 2016 commencement speech at Hillsdale, he went further, urging graduates “not [to] hide your faith and your beliefs under a bushel basket … in this world that seems to have gone mad with political correctness.”

Thomas is now unbound and unrestrained. In a speech on April 15 at the University of Texas, he went “full Monty” in an unhinged broadside against liberals and progressives. “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government declaring,” he declared, continuing:

It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God but from government. … [Progressivism] was the first mainstream American political movement — with the possible exception of the pro-slavery reactionaries on the eve of the Civil War — to openly oppose the principles of the Declaration.

He went on to blame progressives for the 20th century evils of racial segregation and eugenics, insisting that “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Mao” were “intertwined with the rise of progressivism.”

All this from an angry and embittered ideologue who is also arguably the most corrupt justice in the Supreme Court’s history, having failed for 13 years to report his wife Virginia’s earnings on his annual financial disclosure forms, and who has been on the gimme end of lavish vacations funded by billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow.

Thomas celebrated his 78th birthday on June 23. He may not make it to his projected retirement date of 2034, but until he actually steps down, whether voluntarily or post mortem in the fashion of Scalia, there is no telling how much more jurisprudential carnage he will cause or how much more disgrace he will bring to the reputation of the world’s most powerful judicial tribunal.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the conservative majority’s opinions in two of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions in recent years: 1) Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—overruling Roe v. Wade; and 2) Louisiana v. Callais—neutering the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In both cases, Alito recited and relied on asserted “facts” that did not exist.

Alito Rewrote History to Ban Abortion

Ohio State University Prof. Treva Lindsey observed, “From the nation’s founding through the early 1800s, pre-quickening abortions—that is, abortions before a pregnant person feels fetal movement—were fairly common and even advertised.”

But Alito claimed incorrectly in Dobbs that “no common-law case or authority... remotely suggests a positive right to procure an abortion at any stage of pregnancy” and, in the United States specifically, “an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.”

Writing for the three dissenters, Justice Elena Kagan called Alito “embarrassingly” wrong. There was no such “unbroken tradition,” and historical evidence undermined his claim. But the conservative majority got its desired outcome.

Roberts Began the Assault on the Voting Rights Act

In 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts and the conservative majority began undermining the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County case. Prior to that decision, states and localities with a history of racial discrimination in voting had to obtain federal approval before making changes to election rules—a process known as preclearance. The state or locality had to prove that any changes would not disadvantage racial and ethnic minorities.

Rewrite history; distort reality; make up facts; overturn longstanding precedent. For Justice Alito—with an occasional assist from Chief Justice Roberts—it’s all in a day’s work.

Roberts argued that the elections of 2008 and 2012—when there was no difference in voter participation rates between Black and white voters (i.e., no “turnout gap”)—meant that the Voting Rights Act had done its job and preclearance could be suspended.

Even at the time, Roberts’ reasoning was suspect. The elections of 2008 and 2012 were anomalies—not the end of the turnout gap—because Barack Obama’s candidacy had driven up Black turnout.

In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted another flaw in Roberts’ logic: “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.”

Justice Ginsburg was correct, and now democracy is getting wet. A 2024 study concluded:

The formerly covered states [subject to preclearance] have large nonwhite populations and large turnout gaps, leading to some of the largest statewide turnout distortions in the nation. Put differently, a decade after Shelby County, the turnout gap continues to have a disproportionate impact in precisely the parts of the country that were once covered due to their histories of racially discriminatory voting practices.

Stated simply, “[S]ince 2013, the racial turnout gap around the nation has exploded.”

Alito Finished the Job

Justice Alito ignored the exploding turnout gap in striking the fatal blow to the Voting Rights Act on April 29, 2026. For decades previously, the court had ruled repeatedly that a state could not undermine minority voters’ power to choose their desired candidates by drawing legislative districts that dispersed such voters across majority-white districts. Instead, states had to create “majority-minority” districts, thereby assuring minority representation in statehouses and Congress.

In its amicus brief to the court in the Callais case, the Department of Justice (DOJ) ignored the trend after 2013 and argued that majority-minority districts were no longer necessary because “the racial gap in voter registration and turnout had largely disappeared, with minorities registering and voting at levels that sometimes surpassed the majority. Shelby County, 570 U.S. at 547-548.” To emphasize the point, the DOJ observed, “Since 2004, black voters have turned out at higher rates than white voters in two of five presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana.”

Armed with the Callais decision, Republicans are now racing to eliminate majority-Black districts throughout the country.

Alito parroted the DOJ’s sophistry: “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent Presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana.”

As election experts have observed, Alito’s claim that Black and white turnout reached parity in 2 of the 5 most recent presidential elections “represents egregious cherry-picking. [H]e was not referring to recent elections, but to those in 2008 and 2012—the years that Barack Obama ran for president. In the three most recent presidential elections, the trend shows exactly the opposite. The indisputable fact is the racial turnout gap is widening, and the Roberts Court is partially responsible [because of its Shelby County decision].”

Armed with the Callais decision, Republicans are now racing to eliminate majority-Black districts throughout the country.

Rewrite history; distort reality; make up facts; overturn longstanding precedent. For Justice Alito—with an occasional assist from Chief Justice Roberts—it’s all in a day’s work.

President Donald Trump has been able to ram through much of his controversial agenda thanks to the acquiescence of the Supreme Court, where Republican judges outweigh Democratic ones by a 6-3 majority. Yet according to a libertarian editor, Trump may actually have a problem — two of his oldest judges seem unwilling to retire.

“Democratic strategists are probably jumping for joy at the news of Alito and Thomas sticking around on the bench for a bit longer,” Reason senior editor Damon Root wrote on Tuesday. Root was referring to Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, who at ages 76 and 77 respectively are near the average retirement age for Supreme Court judges. Both are staunch conservatives who consistently support Trump’s agenda, yet historically judges who do not retire around that age will pass away in office. If Alito and Thomas died near the end of Trump’s second term — much as Justice Antonin Scalia passed away near the end of President Barack Obama’s second term a decade ago — Trump would need to go to a possibly Democrat-controlled Senate to confirm their replacement… and, like Senate Republicans after Alito’s death, they would likely refuse to confirm anyone.

“If either Alito or Thomas did retire this year, after all, his Trump-picked successor would almost certainly sail through the confirmation process in the Republican-controlled Senate,” Root explained. “But now, if the Democrats manage to take control of the Senate in this year's midterm elections, any future SCOTUS nominee from Trump will stand about zero chance of ever getting confirmed.”

He concluded, “That's a pretty good campaign message if you happen to be a Democrat running for the Senate.”

Indeed, Democrats do not even need to win control of the Senate to hinder Trump’s agenda in the second half of his last term. CNN recently observed that "even if Senate Democrats come up short in November, there could be a big difference between Trump nominating a justice with 53 Republican votes this year and trying to do so with 50 or 51 in the second half of his term."

"But the president may have other reasons, apart from the confirmability factor, to try and usher things in this direction," CNN added.

Writing for AlterNet, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich harshly criticized both Alito and Thomas, although he was clear about which one was worse.

“I’ve long assumed that Samuel Alito was the worst,” Reich wrote. He observed that Alito wrote for the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), which effectively overturned a woman’s right to choose for millions of Americans by overturning Roe v. Wade (1973), going on an initially-undisclosed 2008 luxury fishing trip to Alaska with hedge fund billionaire and GOP donor Paul Singer and not recusing himself when Singer had business before the court and flying an inverted American flag outside his Virginia home shortly after January 6th.

“But I’ve come to revise my view of the court’s worst Justice,” Reich wrote. “Clarence Thomas is 77 years old. He has now served on the Supreme Court for over 34 years, making him the longest-serving member of the Court. He is a bitter, angry, severe hard-right, intellectually dishonest, ideologue.” Reich reached this conclusion after reading Thomas inaccurately conflating progressive ideas with fascism and authoritarianism generally by tracing it to the administration of a Democratic white supremacist, President Woodrow Wilson.

I’ve long assumed that Samuel Alito was the worst.

Alito — who authored the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), the case that ended constitutional abortion rights by merely asserting that the high court’s prior opinion in Roe v. Wade (1973) was wrongly decided; who accepted a 2008 luxury fishing trip to Alaska, including private jet travel, from hedge fund billionaire and GOP donor Paul Singer yet failed to disclose it on Alito's financial forms and didn’t even recuse himself from decisions involving Singer’s subsequent business before the Supreme Court; who hoisted an inverted American flag outside his Virginia home shortly after the January 6 Capitol riot, a symbol of support for Trump's false claims of a stolen 2020 election — has the moral and intellectual stature of a poisonous toad.

But I’ve come to revise my view of the court’s worst Justice.

Clarence Thomas is 77 years old. He has now served on the Supreme Court for over 34 years, making him the longest-serving member of the Court. He is a bitter, angry, severe hard-right, intellectually dishonest, ideologue. After reading his latest thoughts on America, I’ve concluded Thomas is even worse than Alito.

Last Wednesday, Thomas gave a rare public address at the University of Texas in Austin that began as a banal tribute to the Declaration of Independence before degenerating into a misleading screed against progressivism.

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream,” Thomas intoned. “The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism.”

Thomas went on to blame progressives for the worst crimes of the 20^th century, insisting that “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao” were all “intertwined with the rise of progressivism,” as was “racial segregation,” “eugenics,” and other evils.

This is pure rubbish.

In reality, America’s Progressive era emerged at the start of the 20th century from the corruption and excesses of America’s first Gilded Age (we’re now in the second, if you hadn’t noticed) — its record inequalities of income and wealth, its “robber barons” who monopolized industries and handed out sacks of money to pliant legislators, it’s dangerous factories and unsafe working conditions, its violent attacks on workers who tried to form unions, its corporate control over all facets of government, its widespread poverty and disease, and its corrupt party machines.

In many ways, the Progressive Era — whose most prominent leader was Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, not Woodrow Wilson, by the way — saved capitalism from its own excesses by instituting a progressive income tax, an estate tax, pure food and drug laws, and America’s first laws against corporate influence in politics.

Then, under Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin (Franklin D.), came Social Security, the 40-hour workweek (with time-and-a-half for overtime), the right to form unions, and laws and regulations that limited Wall Street’s ability to gamble with other people’s money.

Clarence Thomas got it exactly backwards. Had we not had the Progressive Era and its reforms extending through the 1930s, America might well have succumbed to fascism — as did Germany under Hitler, and Italy under Mussolini, or to communist fascism, as did Russia under Stalin. Progressive and New Deal reforms acted as bulwarks against the rise of fascism in America.

In fact, it’s been the demise of such reforms since Ronald Reagan that have opened the way to Trumpian neo-fascism.

Over a third of American workers in the private sector were unionized in the 1950s, giving them bargaining leverage to get higher wages and better working conditions. Now, fewer than 6 percent are unionized, which has contributed to the flattening of wages, a contracting middle class, inequalities of income and wealth rivaling the first Gilded Age, and an angry and suspicious working class that’s become easy prey for demagogues.

Wall Street has been deregulated — allowing it to go on gambling sprees such as the one that produced the financial crisis of 2008, which claimed millions of working peoples’ homes, savings, and jobs.

America’s social safety nets have become so frayed that almost a fifth of the nation’s children are now in poverty. Yet Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump have slashed taxes on the rich and on big corporations and have allowed giant corporations to merge into giant monopolies rivaling the trusts of the first Gilded Age. And Trump has ushered in an era of corruption the likes of which America hasn’t seen since that earlier disgraceful era.

Thomas claims that “The century of progressivism did not go well.” Baloney. It helped America create the largest middle class the world had ever seen, while also extending prosperity to millions of Black and brown people.

The tragedy is that America turned its back on progressivism and on social progress, in part because of the Supreme Court and Justice Clarence Thomas.

Flashback: I was in law school in 1973 when the Supreme Court decided Roe, protecting a pregnant person’s right to privacy under the 14th amendment to the Constitution.

Clarence Thomas was in my law school class at the time, as was Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Clinton) and Bill Clinton.

The professors used the “Socratic method” – asking hard questions about the cases they were discussing and waiting for students to raise their hands in response, and then criticizing the responses. It was a hair-raising but effective way to learn the law.

One of the principles guiding those discussions is called stare decisis — Latin for “to stand by things decided.” It’s the doctrine of judicial precedent. If a court has already ruled on an issue (say, on reproductive rights), future courts should decide similar cases the same way. Supreme Courts can change their minds and rule differently than they did before, but they need good reasons to do so, and it helps if their opinion is unanimous or nearly so. Otherwise, their rulings appear (and are) arbitrary — even, shall we say? — partisan.

In those classroom discussions almost fifty years ago, Hillary’s hand was always first in the air. When she was called upon, she gave perfect answers – whole paragraphs, precisely phrased. She distinguished one case from another, using precedents and stare decisis to guide her thinking. I was awed.

My hand was in the air about half the time, and when called on, my answers were meh.

Clarence’s hand was never in the air. I don’t recall him saying anything, ever.

Bill was never in class.

Only one of us now sits on the Supreme Court. And he has shown no respect for stare decisis.

Nor has he respected judicial ethics.

A federal law — 28 U.S. Code § 455 — requires that “any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Thomas’s wife, Ginni, actively strategized with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on overturning the election results. Between Election Day 2020 and the days following the January 6th attack on the Capitol, she exchanged 29 text messages with Meadows, in which she spread false theories about the election, urged Meadows to overturn the election results, and called for specific actions from the White House to help overturn the election. She also served as one of nine board members of a group that helped lead the “Stop the Steal” movement and called for the punishment of House Republicans who participated in the U.S. House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attack.

Yet Clarence Thomas has repeatedly participated in cases that have come to the high court directly or indirectly involving the 2020 election results, refusing to disqualify himself.

In addition, he failed to disclose his wife’s income from her work at the Heritage Foundation, in violation of the Ethics in Government Act.

Finally, there’s his speech last week in Austin. How can Americans be expected to believe in the impartiality of the Supreme Court in general and Clarence Thomas in particular when he condemns an entire philosophy of government — progressivism — and all the people who continue to call themselves progressives, in effect labeling them neo-fascists?

At the start of his speech last week in Austin, Clarence Thomas noted that “My wife Virginia and I have many wonderful friends and acquaintances here, and it is so special to have our dear friends Harlan and Kathy Crow join us today.”

He was, of course, referring to the Republican mega-donor who has spent the last twenty years lavishing Thomas with personal gifts, luxury yacht trips, fancy vacations, and funding for Ginni Thomas’s political organization.

Small wonder that Clarence Thomas prefers the Gilded Age over the Progressive Era. He’s the living embodiment of The Gilded Age’s public-be-damned excesses.

Hence, he’s my nominee for the worst justice in modern Supreme Court history.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.