God won’t save this Supreme Court: That job belongs to all of us

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts attends President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address in the House Chamber of the U. S. Capitol on Tuesday, February 24, 2026. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images) The current Supreme Court, more precisely the right-wing court majority solidified with three Donald Trump justices, is failing Americans in catastrophic fashion. It’s time to do something about it. The recent decision to complete the Roberts Court’s long and torturous gutting of the Voting Rights Act — while pretending that’s not what they were doing — is a clarifying moment. Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent in Louisiana v. Callais was appropriately unsparing. She noted that the Voting Rights Act “was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers” and “ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality.” She lamented that the “now completed demolition” of the Voting Rights Act “threatens a half-century’s worth of gains in voting equality.” This is an enraging and deeply discouraging moment for supporters of civil and voting rights. And it is far from the first. A recent letter to Congress from dozens of civil rights and pro-democracy organizations notes that the court’s “rolling back voting rights, reproductive freedoms, environmental protections and commonsense gun laws, and dramatically expanding presidential immunity,” puts it “out of step with the American people while enriching wealthy right-wing political donors and corporate interests.” It adds that the court majority has “encouraged and enabled Trump’s most authoritarian instincts,” often via rulings on its shadow docket, enabling massive harm without the benefit of public airing of arguments for and against. Indeed, the Roberts Court has become a partisan and ideological tool of the right-wing legal and political movement that nurtured the careers of the Republican justices. Those movements have a long-term goal of rewriting the Constitution and taking us back to a time before the 1960s civil rights laws, before the New Deal and even before the progressive reforms of the early 20th century. Roberts himself has been an opponent of the Voting Rights Act since he was a young lawyer working in the Reagan administration. In 2013 he led the court in overturning a section of the law that protected voters in areas with a long history of denying Black people the ability to exercise their right to vote. That unleashed a surge of voter suppression laws across the southern U. S. And now that the court majority has finished eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, governors in several of the former Confederate states are rushing to eliminate congressional districts with Black representatives, just as Trump is demanding. As if that wasn’t enough, the court went even further, abandoning its normal procedures to endorse Louisiana’s rush to create new congressional districts even though primary elections were already under way. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted in dissent, the court chose to abandon a previously announced policy of not inserting itself into active campaigns. In short, what is happening is that the Roberts-Trump majority is actively participating in a naked partisan power grab to preserve an obedient Republican majority in the House, so that Trump can continue to avoid accountability for his abuses of power. They’re doing it by imposing more harm on people long and wrongfully denied the ability to participate fully in our democracy. And the very independence of the judiciary is being further dismantled with each Trump judicial nominee who refuses to say what the Constitution clearly says: that Trump is not eligible to run for a third term. In other words, our system of structural checks and balances is failing because the people who currently have power in that system are failing to do their duty. That failure is too damaging to simply stand by and watch it continue. We need to make structural changes that will protect the court, the Constitution, and the country. The group I lead is part of a broad pro-democracy coalition that is promoting a set of reforms to the Supreme Court designed to restore ideological balance, accountability and legitimacy to the court. Those reforms are imposing 18-year term limits on Supreme Court justices with the TERM Act, establishing an enforceable code of ethics for Supreme Court justices and expanding the size of the Supreme Court under the next pro-democracy president. Congress, a coequal branch of our federal government, has a responsibility to protect the integrity of the court. Democrats must prepare to restore and strengthen federal protections against racial discrimination in voting via legislation like the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. In addition, they must begin planning now to address the corruption of the court when they take political power. Without that step, legislative solutions are unlikely to survive a court bent on undermining a truly representative democracy. Resigning themselves to the illegitimate overturning of progressive legislation by an out-of-control court would mean abandoning their constituents and betraying their oath to uphold the Constitution. We’ve had more than enough of that from the Republican Congress. Svante Myrick is president of People For the American Way. Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.