Several news items are calling much-needed attention to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Trump criticized the U.S. Supreme Court for rejecting his administration’s emergency request to enforce new U.S. Postal Service requirements for mail ballots before the November 2026 midterm elections. Those rules would have required voter lists and approved envelopes, expanding a clearly unconstitutional federal role in elections.
“These are not the people I interviewed,” the President fumed on social media, portraying the ruling as a personal betrayal by the three Supreme Court justices he appointed after the Court ruled against him on mail ballots, tariffs, and birthright citizenship. “These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court; they are merely a shell of their original selves,” Trump wrote on social media, reacting to the court’s most recent ruling on mail-in ballots.
Trump’s harsh criticism of the court underscores his selection of three picks as a partisan political act, suggesting that these “interviews” included discussion of each nominee’s position on certain issues. Even without specific issue discussions, the Federalist Society selects most nominees Republicans put forward for the U.S. Supreme Court and all the lower federal courts.
The Federalist Society is an American conservative and libertarian legal organization that advocates a so-called textualist and originalist interpretation of the United States Constitution.
The organization’s stated objectives are “checking federal power, protecting individual liberty and interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning.” It plays a central role in networking and mentoring young conservative lawyers.
It has chapters at every U.S. law school and features student, lawyer, and faculty divisions; the lawyers division comprises more than 70,000 practicing attorneys in ninety cities. Through speaking events, lectures, and other activities, it provides a forum for members of the legal profession, the judiciary, and the legal academy. It is one of the most influential legal organizations in the United States. Significantly, they “recommend” most, if not all, Republican federal judge nominees.
Also, Senator Mitch McConnell has recently returned to Washington in a wheelchair after a long absence due to an undisclosed illness. It was this Republican Majority leader in the U.S. Senate who dishonestly manipulated the placement of two of Trump’s appointees to the Court – blocking Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland from being considered nearly nine months before the presidential election in 2016, saying it was too close to the election, and then hypocritically rushing through Amy Coney Barrett with less than two months before the presidential election in 2020.
And then there is the Chief Justice Roberts protesting that the Court does not make political decisions as the public thinks it does. The gentleman doth protest too much, methinks. Of the current nine members of the Supreme Court, at least five are current or former members of the Federalist Society – Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett. Chief Justice John Roberts previously served on the steering committee of the Washington, D.C., chapter, but denies ever being a member. Their ideology, or, more put, their political position, must be in line with the philosophy of the Federalist Society or they do not get recommended. Thus, they hold a partisan political orientation.
If you have wondered
why, or how, Trump seems to operate as if he is above the law, the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling is at least partially responsible. On July 1, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. United States that former presidents have broad criminal immunity for official actions taken while in office.
Legal experts, historians, and Democratic politicians widely criticized the decision as anti-democratic, and some introduced constitutional amendments to undo the ruling. In a scathing dissent calling the majority’s reasoning “utterly indefensible,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that “The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”
