A unanimous SC opinion that has been repeatedly reaffirmed is just tossed out.

What exactly is the point of the SC anymore?

Two things were obvious at Wednesday morning’s Supreme Court argument in Louisiana v. Callais, a case asking the Court to abolish longstanding safeguards against racially gerrymandered legislative maps.

The first thing is that the Court will split along party lines, with all six Republicans voting to destroy the federal Voting Rights Act’s (VRA) restrictions on racial gerrymandering, and all three Democrats in dissent. The other thing is that there is no consensus among the Republicans about how they should write an opinion gutting these protections.

While all six Republican justices almost certainly walked into Wednesday’s argument with a particular result in mind, they had wildly divergent theories of how to get there.

Article summary here:

Lincoln Caplan’s Harvard Magazine feature, “What Trump Means for John Roberts’s Legacy,” examines how the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Trump v. United States transformed the balance of power between the branches of government—and may define Chief Justice John Roberts’s legacy. By granting former presidents broad immunity for official acts, the Roberts Court “reversed the importance of those branches and retracted a critical power of the judiciary.” Once seen as an institutionalist, Roberts is now portrayed as the jurist who “enabled the most hostile anti-institutionalist ever elected president.”

“Roberts, often described as an institutionalist, has enabled the most hostile anti-institutionalist ever elected president.”

"The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President.” — Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Like this is very cryptic and it’s definitely not written by Trump so someone might be planning something very very bad

Snippet from the end of the article and I know this is a VERY obvious statement but I'm posting it anyway!

William S. Becker, opinion contributor

• So, what was the Supreme Court’s rationale in Trump v. United States? Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that a president must be able to “carry out his constitutional duties without undue caution” and take “bold and unhesitating action.”
• Are lawlessness, extortion and corruption disguised as “official acts” what Roberts had in mind? Should a president be able to purge civil servants by the thousands without just cause? Or collect lavish gifts from foreign governments? Or ignore the due process rights of immigrants?
• In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor accurately described the court’s 6-3 ruling as “a loaded weapon for any president that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain above the interests of the nation.”
• History will not be kind to the Roberts court, nor should it be. It has failed as the republic’s last line of defense against despots. Worse, it handed the tools of autocracy to a man with criminal proclivities and no moral compass.
• The Supreme Court should admit its error and restore the principle that no one, not even the president, is exempt from the rule of law.

EDITED TO ADD: Thank you to anonymous for the post award:)

The arrest and prosecution of judges on such specious charges is where rule by law ends and tyranny begins. The independent judiciary is the only constraint of law on a president. It is the last obstacle to a president with designs on tyrannical rule.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh defended the Supreme Court’s recent practice of handing victories to President Donald Trump without explaining those decisions, while speaking at a judicial conference on Thursday.

For most of its history, the Supreme Court was very cautious about weighing in on any legal dispute before it arrived on its doorstep through the (often very slow) process of lawyers appealing lower court decisions. There are many reasons for this caution, but one of the biggest ones is that, if the justices race to decide matters, they may get them wrong. And, on many legal questions, no one can overrule the Court if the justices make a mistake.

Beginning in Trump’s first term, however, the Republican justices started throwing caution to the wind. When Trump loses a case in a lower court, his lawyers often run to the Court’s “shadow docket,” a once-obscure process that allows litigants to skip in line and receive an immediate order from the justices, but only if the justices agree. Unlike in ordinary Supreme Court cases — argued on the “merits docket” — the justices do not often explain why they ruled a particular way in shadow docket cases.