In Part One of this three-part series, Pat Merloe explored the impact of the political environment, the need for constitutional defense against power-grabbing, and the malign effects of proof of citizenship on voting.
In Part Two, Merloe explored the harmful effects of Executive Orders, the reversal of the Justice Department on voting rights, and the effects of political retribution.Part Three: Attacks on the Courts, and the Need to Defend Universal and Equal Suffrage
As noted in Parts One and Two of this series, multipoint attacks against trustworthy elections are underway with just 16 months until 2026’s voting and less time before off-year elections this November. Awareness of the attacks – and those fortifying trustworthy processes – is crucial for defending democracy.
Unless we mount an effective defense of trustworthy elections and broader democracy, Donald Trump’s prediction that “We’ll have it fixed so good, you're not going to have to vote” could become reality. Determining how to join in that defense is a responsibility of democratic citizenship.
Increasing Belligerence in the Political Environment and Acquiescence to Overreach
Summer temperatures heated up in the last weeks, and so did belligerence in the political arena. President Trump referred to Democrats as evil, alongside other bellicose pronouncements, and the Defense Department withdrew from the Aspen Security Forum, which a Department spokesperson condemned as an “event that promotes the evil of globalism… and hatred for the president of the United States.” Such defamatory rhetoric vilifies political opponents and poisons the electoral environment.
The Administration is retaining 2,000 of the military troops it deployed to Los Angeles, despite the city’s mayor and the state’s governor wanting none, and is calling for all of them to be withdrawn. In the face of democratic socialist Zohran Mandani winning the Democratic Party mayoral primary in New York City, President Trump, in addition to making false claims about him, suggested at a Cabinet meeting that the federal government might take over the city if Mandani won the general election. That is yet another ominous indication that elections can be ignored if he chooses.
Following its passage of the MAGA One Big Beautiful Bill, Congress passed a bill rescinding $9-billion of previously authorized funds. It targets PBS and NPR, striking a blow to the integrity of information, which is vital to trustworthy elections, and it further undermines foreign assistance mechanisms. And, on July 17, Marco Rubio issued a memorandum severely restricting the State Department from commenting on foreign elections, further downplaying the importance of trustworthy elections in US policy.
Actions to implement Trump’s overreaching executive order on elections (EO 14248) also continue.
Predictably, the DOJ used the recent Supreme Court Decision in Trump v. CASA, which restricts lower court “universal” injunctions, to demand that the partial injunction against the EO be limited. Numerous “red states” are taking measures outlined in the EO, including at least 15 states using voters’ personal information obtained from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Social Security, DOGE, and other sources. And, some states are receiving requests for inappropriate access to voting technology under the guise of implementing the EO. Such developments underscore the importance of politically impartial and independent courts as a means to curtail illegal or otherwise inappropriate executive actions.
Attacks on the Courts Undermine Electoral Justice
Courts are a principal battleground in the arena of executive power-grabbing. Approximately 300 cases are currently active, and more than 180 rulings have limited the Administration’s actions in some respects. MAGA responses to unfavorable rulings include slow-walking court requests for explanations to the point of ignoring them, attacking the integrity of judges, and calling for their impeachment. MAGA proposals in Congress would limit judicial power, and the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has restricted lower courts and acquiesced to executive overreach.
Attempts to restrict judicial powers via the One Beautiful Bill were stymied when the Senate Parliamentarian determined that they were outside budget reconciliation rules. The House version of the bill would have retroactively limited courts’ powers to enforce judgments by holding an actor in contempt and imposing penalties for it. The Senate version replaced that with a draconian provision that would require plaintiffs seeking injunctions against the government to post a bond equal to the potential governmental “costs and damages” in the matter. Such multimillion-dollar bonds would block citizen groups, such as Democracy Forward and Protect Democracy, as well as civil rights organizations and pro bono law firms, from seeking injunctions against harmful governmental actions.
Similar attempts will likely be part of other proposed legislation. If such provisions become law, the ability of federal courts to constrain executive branch power-grabbing would be crippled. Nonetheless, recent Supreme Court rulings impede the ability of lower courts to contain power-grabbing.
The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Trump v. CASA severely restricted lower federal court powers to restrain executive branch abuses by issuing preliminary injunctions that have “universal” application, which apply throughout the nation for the benefit of all affected persons, even if they are not parties to the suit. While avenues, including class action cases, remain to challenge executive misconduct, the decision will likely encourage the MAGA practices of power grabbing and executive overreach. Judicial processes may be hampered by the need for multiple suits and/or elevated demands on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket. Improper federal actions in the elections arena – and many others – could consequently become much more difficult to constrain.
The July 14th Supreme Court ruling in McMahon v. New York allowed President Trump to mass-furlough Department of Education personnel while 21 states pursue their lawsuit against eliminating the agency. The one-paragraph order undermines the lower courts' ability to prevent harm. It would have devastating effects if applied to MAGA actions that hinder election administration and/or block the certification of election results.
The Court’s rulings and legislative developments are taking place amidst a barrage apparently aimed at destroying public trust in the judiciary. Attacking the credibility and patriotism of judges who rule against the Administration, possibly even baiting courts to rule against them to generate further ammunition to use against them, has electoral implications. Following the 2020 presidential election, the Trump campaign lodged more than 60 cases before state and federal courts, winning just once. There were, nonetheless, very few MAGA attacks on those courts, perhaps in part because the ground had not been prepared for such attacks.
The current environment is very different, including direct threats to the security of judges. Chief Justice John Roberts highlighted violent threats against judges in his December 2024 annual report. Ominously, hundreds of unsolicited pizza deliveries to judges' homes in at least seven states are under investigation, one of which included the fatal shooting of a judge's son by a fake pizza deliverer.
A significant effort to bolster public trust and appreciation of the crucial role of the independent judiciary, the Article-III Coalition, was recently launched by Keep Our Republic (KOR). The Defending the Judiciary initiative of Duke Law School’s Bolch Institute provides what-to-do resources, and the ACLU is sponsoring a letters-to-Congress effort. However, much more is needed to defend impartial and independent courts.
Defense of Universal and Equal Suffrage Is Key
A crucial arena of electoral defense is securing genuine opportunities for eligible people to register to vote. MAGA drives seek to deny that through overly burdensome ID requirements (including those less onerous than proof of citizenship). They also seek to block civic groups from conducting voter registration initiatives, and they propose mass voter list purges to stifle those opportunities. The pitched battle over North Carolina’s 2024 Supreme Court election demonstrates the comprehensive MAGA approach of challenging losses by attacking voter registration after election day.
Equal suffrage also includes trench warfare over the drawing of fair election districts at the congressional, state, and local levels. Equivalent ratios of voters to representatives and drawing district lines that do not divide and dilute the voting power of various population groups are key to equal suffrage. The DOJ filed a brief on June 20 in federal court, siding with Alabama, which is defending its congressional maps against allegations of racial gerrymandering. The DOJ action is significant in itself and a clear indication of the Administration’s hostile stance as fair maps are being fought for in multiple states. Organizations dedicated to ensuring fair electoral maps, like All On The Line and the Election Reformers Network, are mobilizing a defense on that front.
Universal and equal suffrage is more than just an electoral catchphrase. It embodies the democratic maxim that all individuals are entitled to an equal voice in choosing who represents them in government. It is a manifestation of the Declaration of Independence’s precept that all are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights. And, it is the foundation for genuinely democratic elections.
Honest elections are a sovereign act by the people, and the authority of democratic government derives from them. Like universal and equal suffrage, elections are much more than complex administrative processes of registration, voting, counting, and honoring the electorate’s will.
To be freely expressed, the people’s will must be free of administrative hindrances and subterfuge – and from interference in forming political choices. Intimidating, including: creating fear of political retribution for voting, properly administering elections, and providing impartial, independent electoral justice; portraying opponents as “enemies from within” and failing to condemn political violence against them; arresting those who speak out against policies; and fabricating false states of emergency – all bash the ramparts that protect free political choice, free and fair elections and democratic governance that is to flow from them.
The bombardment of genuine election processes is an attack against the democratic heritage of all Americans. Reinforcing the bastions of trustworthy elections, including aiding those who are taking up the front lines and enlisting those we can help mobilize, is crucial for our defense. Determining how to contribute to that should be part of contemplating our commitment to democracy.
Pat Merloe provides strategic advice to groups focused on democracy and trustworthy elections in the U.S. and internationally.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.