The Supreme Court is back in session this week, and the docket for the new term includes two cases that could fundamentally shift the state of democracy in the United States.
The nine justices will hear arguments on one case involving the Voting Rights Act and its protections for minority voters. The other tests whether state courts can remain a check on legislative authority when it comes to making election laws.
These and other cases will further test a court that continues to receive poor marks from the American public, while the spouse of one justice was recently interviewed by the Jan. 6 committee regarding her role in attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
So it’s not going to be a quiet session for the nation’s highest court.
The first of these two cases to be heard by the court is Merrill v. Milligan and while it concerns redistricting in Alabama, it’s really about the Voting Rights Act. On Tuesday, the justices are hearing arguments over whether the state engaged in an illegal racial gerrymander by drawing a new congressional map that is expected to result in just one of seven districts electing a Black person to the House. More than one-quarter of the state population is Black, so opponents of the new maps argue the districts should be changed to rebalance congressional representation.
In January, a three-judge federal panel tossed out the map, ruling it does in fact violate the VRA. However, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the map should be allowed to stand while the justices consider the case.
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act bans states from engaging in election practices that discriminate on the basis of race. The state of Alabama argues there was no intent to do so and that the map should be allowed to stand.
But Eric Holder, who was attorney general under President Barack Obama and now runs a Democratic redistricting organization, believes the Alabama map is a “textbook violation” of Section 2, and the leader of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law warned about further erosion of the VRA.
“If the Court accepts Alabama’s argument, it will be rejecting 40 years of precedent and effectively telling voters of color that the Voting Rights Act provides no remedy for racial discrimination in the redistricting process,” Damon Hewitt, president of the Lawyers’ Committee. “Such a decision will further neuter the Voting Rights Act, which has for decades helped to ensure that Black voters and other voters can exercise political power and self-determination in choosing their representatives.”
The Supreme Court has already stripped away some provisions of the Voting Rights Act. In the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder, the court ruled that Section 4 of the VRA was unconstitutional, thereby ending the practice of “preclearance.” The VRA, first passed in 1965, required states with a history of racial discrimination to get prior approval from the Justice Department before changing any election laws.
Democrats in Congress have been trying to codify a new version of preclearance that would pass the court’s constitutionality test, but the legislation has been blocked by Senate Republicans.
The second democracy-defining case to be heard this term, Moore v. Harper, may alter the system of checks and balances at the state level.
This case originated in North Carolina, where the state Supreme Court knocked down the congressional map drawn by legislators, ruling it violated the state Constitution. The lawmakers who brought the case are using a recently developed conservative argument known as the “independent state legislature theory.” Adherents point to a line in the U.S. Constitution – stating that rules governing elections “shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.”
As they note, that clause makes no mention of oversight by state or federal courts.
Opponents say that language defies the work of the Founding Fathers.
“Such a doctrine would be antithetical to the Framers’ intent, and to the text, fundamental design, and architecture of the Constitution,” former U.S. Judge J. Michael Luttig wrote in The Atlantic.
These cases are being heard in the wake of new polling that shows Americans’ trust in the Supreme Court to be at a historic low.
Just 40 percent of Americans say they trust the judicial branch of the federal government and 58 percent say they disapprove of the work the court is doing. Both numbers are the worst since Gallup began asking those questions in 1972.
Last week, Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist and the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, was interviewed by the Jan. 6 committee. Members of the panel wanted to question her about her efforts to support actions designed to overturn the 2020 election, both through state leaders and the White House.
The interview took place behind closed doors, and Thomas reportedly answered the members’ questions while stating her work is separate from her husband’s service on the court.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.