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supreme court
Congress Must Fight Back Against Supreme Court's Anti-Democratic Crusade
Lawmakers should enact national redistricting rules that would ban partisan gerrymandering, bar mid-decade redistricting, and ensure fair representation for voters across the country.
Dec 15, 2025
The 2026 election will take place in a political system that is divided, discordant, flagrantly gerrymandered, and marked by widening racial discrimination. Thank Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues on the Supreme Court. And the supermajority of highly activist justices seems poised, even eager, to make things appreciably worse.
In 2019, in Rucho v. Common Cause, the Court refused to adopt any standard to police partisan gerrymandering, and it even prevented federal courts from hearing that claim. Fast-forward through a census, six years of line-drawing, and a flurry of lawsuits, and predictably, our democracy has become much less fair.
Redistricting is supposed to take place once a decade, after the census. In fact, that’s why the census is written into the Constitution. But earlier this year, Texas abruptly drew new congressional maps in a gambit to squeeze out five extra seats for Republicans. It was in the middle of the decade and at the behest of someone who doesn’t live there (President Trump) — and all at the expense of Black and Latino voters. Even though 95 percent of population growth in the state came from those communities, the map’s main feature was fewer districts where those voters can elect their preferred candidates.
Bad, right? A panel of three federal judges agreed, temporarily blocking the map from being used in the upcoming election until a full trial could be held. Texas first resisted allegations of a partisan gerrymander, then insisted it was actually acting at the behest of the Justice Department for racial reasons, then said it was, in fact, a partisan power grab. (“I don’t see race. Just Democrats.”) Talk about a Texas two-step! Amid these gyrations, the court found it illegal.
Enter the Supreme Court. Last week it blocked the lower court’s ruling, thus allowing the election to go forward with freshly gerrymandered maps. It’s yet another brazen use of the shadow docket — the Court’s supposed emergency docket (with limited briefing and no oral argument) — to hand Trump a win with only a few sentences of explanation.
Where does that leave things? The Texas seat grab set off a partisan arms race across the country. Furious Democrats acted. California voters overwhelmingly supported drawing new Democratic-leaning congressional districts there to counter the GOP gains in Texas. Republicans in Indiana and Florida are moving to redraw lines, while Democrats in Illinois, Maryland, and Virginia aim to do the same.
With all this headbutting, the gerrymander war of 2025 could turn out to be close to a wash in partisan terms. Moreover, voters may have their own ideas. If Democrats win big, as recent races have suggested is possible, the gerrymander might produce extra GOP losses. (The technical term for this, believe it or not, is a “dummymander.”)
All that sound and fury, in short, might signify . . . not exactly nothing, but not a decisive partisan gain.
That’s where the next big intervention by the Supreme Court would come in. And its impact could well be even more dramatic — and if possible, more harmful.
The Court seems poised to demolish the effectiveness of what’s left of the Voting Rights Act. Two weeks ago, in Louisiana v. Callais, it heard arguments about whether the law’s Section 2 remains constitutional. For decades, that provision effectively barred states, particularly in the South, from enacting maps that dilute or cancel out the voting power of racial minorities. As our friend-of-the-court brief pointed out, the provision has transformed both Congress and legislative bodies across the country. And the disparity in registration rates between white and Black voters dropped from nearly 30 percentage points in the early 1960s to 8 percentage points just a decade later. Now the justices seem ready to wreck Section 2 if not strike it down entirely.
This would not only mark a shameful retreat from federal action to protect racial equality and fair representation. It could have a dramatic and specific impact: A bad ruling, especially early, could be followed by another wave of redistricting in coming months, maybe even in time for the 2026 election.
As my colleague Kareem Crayton writes, “The argument invites a return to the era when race was a barrier to entry for political representation — the cruel and painful experience of political exclusion that made passage of the Voting Rights Act necessary in the first place.”
Nate Cohn of The New York Times has crunched the numbers and predicts that an extreme Supreme Court ruling could allow Republican states to eliminate between 6 and 12 districts currently held by Democrats. That would be a margin larger than the House majority either party has had in recent years.
When politicians pick voters — whether based on race or politics — instead of the other way around, our elections become less fair and less democratic. The country would slide toward even greater division and balkanization. Republican voters in Massachusetts (where there are no Republican members of Congress even though Trump won 37 percent of the vote) have no party representation in Congress, while Democrats in Texas (where Kamala Harris won 42 percent) would have only about 7 of the state’s 38 seats. John Adams famously said that the legislature must be an “exact portrait of the people at large.” The current portrait doesn’t bear much of a resemblance.
So what’s the answer?
There must, above all, be national standards that apply to red states and blue states alike. The Constitution gives Congress that power. It should enact national redistricting rules that would ban partisan gerrymandering, bar mid-decade redistricting, and ensure fair representation for voters across the country. In 2022, it almost did: The Freedom to Vote Act would have banned mid-decade redistricting and set other standards. And the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would have strengthened protections against racially discriminatory maps. Both came achingly close to enactment.
And then the ideologues on the Supreme Court should stop meddling in elections. Over the past 15 years, the Court demolished campaign finance rules in Citizens United, wrecked the Voting Rights Act starting in Shelby County, and gave ex-presidents vast and unprecedented immunity from prosecution for crimes committed in office — thus ensuring no legal accountability for candidate, now president, Trump.
In a season when it seems increasingly clear that the justices plan to hand President Trump even more power, inexcusable rulings and interventions in partisan politics will leave a very sour taste for many voters. The Supreme Court itself, increasingly, will become an issue in American politics. That’s as it should be.
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Trump's Denaturalization Rhetoric Violates the Laws and Spirit of America
Stripping citizens of their citizenship in the name of making the electorate more “American” is arguably one of the most un-American acts imaginable.
Dec 05, 2025
You might think that when you are a US citizen, you cannot have that status taken away. You would be wrong, it turns out. And behind that fact is a long and often ugly history.
On Sunday, President Donald Trump said that he would “absolutely” denaturalize American citizens if he could. It comes after a wave of harsh rhetoric directed toward immigrants after the tragic shooting of two National Guard members last week.
Yes, the words that the president says have been discounted. But there’s policy behind the rhetorical provocation.
Denaturalization is the process of stripping citizenship from someone who obtained it illegally, such as by not meeting the requirements or by committing fraud or lying during the application process. At first, government interpreted that standard loosely, leading to years of abuse.
As my colleagues Faiza Patel, Margy O’Herron, and Kendall Verhovek explain:
More than 22,000 Americans lost their citizenship between 1907 and 1967 based on political affiliations, race, and gender, according to denaturalization scholar Patrick Weil. President Woodrow Wilson’s administration began denaturalizing German- and Asian-born citizens during World War I, along with anarchists and people who spoke out against the war. During World War II, a push for denaturalization of naturalized citizens from Germany, Italy, and Japan intensified. A primary target included members of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund for disloyalty and insufficient attachment to the principles of the Constitution.
After the war, the Second Red Scare took hold of a country fearful of domestic communism amid its emergence abroad. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin led witch hunts, with denaturalization often used as a tool against accused communists or sympathizers. Among those targets was Harry Bridges, an Australian-born, nationally known labor leader accused of being a communist, who faced an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to revoke his citizenship. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor, not once, but twice.
As Weil puts it, a process that was intended to redress fraud and illegality in the naturalization process became used to “expel from the body politic ‘un-American’ citizens.” But even during wartime, the Supreme Court responded, limiting its use.
Throughout the 20th century, the court issued several rulings setting a high bar for denaturalization. In 1943, the court struck down a move to denaturalize Russian-born William Schneiderman over ties to the Communist Party, requiring a “heavy burden” for rescinding citizenship. And in 1946, the court warned against the use of denaturalization as a “ready instrument for political persecutions.” It’s why in recent decades, denaturalization attempts have been appropriately rare... until now.
Over the summer, Trump directed Justice Department lawyers to “maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings.” At the time, a spokesperson said that “denaturalization proceedings will only be pursued as permitted by law and supported by evidence against individuals who illegally procured or misrepresented facts in the naturalization process.” Trump’s parameters seem to be much broader. In his Thanksgiving Truth Social post, he said he would “denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility.”
Among his targets? Trump has repeatedly suggested that he is open to denaturalizing New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). When asked about Elon Musk, he told the press, “We’ll have to take a look.” It appears that crime isn’t so much a motivation as disloyalty; the law isn’t so much a motivation as impulse.
But we shouldn’t mistake impulse for foolishness.
It’s all part of a broader effort to target the rights of immigrants and redefine who is an American. That started on Inauguration Day with the effort to eliminate birthright citizenship, a right that is explicitly in the Constitution. And it’s part of efforts to reverse what top administration officials have called a conspiracy to alter the makeup of the electorate. In an interview, the director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Joseph Edlow, accused previous administrations of admitting immigrants to “make them all citizens and then spread them out to try to change demographics elsewhere in the country.” And on the campaign trail last year, Trump adviser Stephen Miller declared, “America is for Americans and Americans only.”
Stripping citizens of their citizenship in the name of making the electorate more “American” is arguably one of the most un-American acts imaginable. More than a century ago, the Supreme Court held that naturalized citizens are on the same footing as those born in the country, and for decades, the Supreme Court has made clear that stripping citizens of their citizenship due to their views or expressions “would run counter to our traditions.”
We are a nation of immigrants and also a nation of laws. The courts must continue to ensure that those laws protect naturalized citizens from being punished for speaking out.
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The Words We Use to Describe Homelessness Will Get People Killed
A huge swath of the political and media spectrum sees a person living on the street as either an aesthetic nuisance or criminal-in-waiting. We should see them for who they are: a person suffering and vulnerable, deserving of our empathy.
Dec 01, 2025
Last month, Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade said of people living with mental illness on our streets: “Involuntary lethal injection… Just kill ’em.” He apologized—after the clip ricocheted across the internet—but the words were said, on air, to millions.
I run a nonprofit that directly serves the homeless. We meet people where they are—under overpasses, on subways, in shelters and supportive housing. I see, daily, how language like “vagrant,” or “zombie” strips people of their personhood. It lowers the public’s guard against cruelty and raises the political ceiling for punitive policies. We cannot afford to pretend that words don’t matter.
“Vagrancy,” once a legal catch‑all used to police and punish poor and Black Americans, is being rehabilitated in public discourse; historians have warned what that signals. And major tabloids routinely label our neighbors “vagrants” in crime headlines, blending poverty status with criminal identity in ways that echo the past.
Even federal policy is now framed around “fighting vagrancy.” That phrase isn’t from a century‑old placard; it’s the heading and premise of a July 2025 executive order, which opens by declaring “endemic vagrancy” a public menace and directs federal agencies to prioritize encampment removals and civil commitment.
The best research shows people experiencing homelessness are far more often victims of violence than perpetrators.
A huge swath of the political and media spectrum sees a person living on the street as either an aesthetic nuisance or criminal-in-waiting. To them, a person living on the street is barely a person at all but rather an indication of broader disorder that must be swept away or removed. But where should they be removed to? What should happen to them when they get there? Those questions are unimportant to certain portions of the media and political ecosystem.
The Supreme Court’s Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling in 2024 cleared the way for cities to punish sleeping outside even when shelter is unavailable. Some jurisdictions have read that as a green light for broader crackdowns rather than investments in housing and health care—turning survival behaviors into ticketable or jailable offenses. The July executive order doubled down, instructing federal agencies to preference grants for jurisdictions that enforce bans on “urban camping and loitering” and to support encampment removals with federal dollars. Words like “vagrancy” aren’t just stigmatizing; they now allocate money and power.
This year we saw what happens when the politics of sweeps outrun basic safety. In January, Cornelius Taylor was killed by a bulldozer during an encampment clearance in Atlanta—first chalked up to overdose, later shown by autopsy to be blunt‑force trauma. And in my home city of New York, Debrina Kawam was fatally set on fire by a stranger while she was sleeping in a subway car. Vocabulary that treats people as nuisances rather than neighbors makes such tragedies more likely.
I know public disorder is real. But I also know—by data and by name—that most of the people you step past on your commute are surviving traumas you don’t see.
The best research shows people experiencing homelessness are far more often victims of violence than perpetrators. In California’s landmark CASPEH study, 38% of participants experienced violence during their current episode of homelessness, and nearly three quarters reported violence at some point in their lives. Mortality data tell the same story of precarity. In Los Angeles County alone, 2,508 people experiencing homelessness died in 2023—an average of nearly seven people every day. The rate remains multiple times higher than that of the general population.
As a sector, we’ll keep doing our part: street outreach, housing navigation, medical and behavioral health care, and prevention. But leaders in government and media must stop normalizing language that primes the public for harm. Phrases like “person without housing” or “person who is homeless” more accurately reflect that homelessness is a temporary status, not an identity or permanent state of being. And in most cases, we can refer to our neighbors in media stories or political policy without any reference to their housing status.
I know public disorder is real. But I also know—by data and by name—that most of the people you step past on your commute are surviving traumas you don’t see. They are sons, daughters, parents, veterans, and caregivers. Some are literally recovering from yesterday’s assault. They are not “vermin.” They are not “zombies.”
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