When can a big SCOTUS win turn into major strategic errors?
Texas recently gerrymandered its U.S. House redistricting map at the direct request of the president. Opponents sued and a three-judge panel declaring it unconstitutional. Just last week six conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the panel’s decision and declared it constitutional. No explanation was given and no justice signed his/her name. Texas Republicans believe the new map will add five new Republican seats.
The decision actually benefits Democrats.
The President and the Republicans desperately want to win the 2026 midterms. They are pulling out all stops to do so, legally or illegally. Republicans know that the Congress has not accomplished much this year. With the Big Beautiful Bill’s passage, millions of Americans in 2026 will lose their Medicaid benefits and S.N.A.P. payments. Immigrants, legal or illegal or even naturalized, are being thrown to the ground, cuffed, and carried off to jail by masked I.C.E. officers. In many cases, they are deported without the right to due process. Inflation is increasing prices for the basics because of tariffs while the ultrawealthy will be getting tax cuts. The Republican administration is withholding revelation of the Epstein Files.
The approval rating for the current administration is down to 36-41%. Their solution is to resort to rigging the midterm elections through gerrymandering and voter suppression.
According to Ari Melber in his YouTube video “Supreme Court Gives Democrats an unexpected Gift—and Trump Freaks Out!” Republicans made major assumptions about Latino voters. A high number of Latinos voted for Republicans in the 2024 elections. Republican leadership mistakenly believed that Latinos were now permanently in the Republican camp.
Those same “safe” Latinos have switched their votes back to Democrats because of the violent and illegal excesses of I.C.E. and C.B.P. toward immigrants and the illegal federalization of the National Guard in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago, Portland and Memphis.
In an effort to negate the Texas gerrymandering, the state of California voted overwhelmingly to redraw their state’s voting districts through a legal process, adding five to six seats to Democrats.
The administration’s D.O.J. then filed a lawsuit against the gerrymandering in California, arguing that its map is racist. SCOTUS followed up with a decision stating that California’s redistricting was based on partisan politics, not race. Partisan gerrymandering is now acceptable to the SCOTUS’s majority.
SCOTUS thus unwittingly awarded California Democrats an argument against the D.O.J. lawsuit. As Melber points out in his video, this was an unexpected gift to Democrats by SCOTUS.
“If Texas can do it, California can do it. The result: a decision meant to secure red seats in the South may end up fueling a blue surge in the West”, according to Melber. He argues this decision was accidental and unintentional and another Republican blunder.
The SCOTUS conservatives are also expected to strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act which requires voting districts to be formed based upon protecting minority population areas. Republican arguments are that the 1965 Voting Rights Act is sixty-years old and outdated. Racism, according to the Republican justices, is no longer an American problem. Never mind the racial profiling of I.C.E. and the C.B.P. in their arrests.
The President along with Congressional Republicans and SCOTUS justices have allowed their ignorance and arrogance to defeat their goal of creating an authoritarian government. Republicans want to end representative democracy by ignoring legal precedents dating back over a hundred years.
Republican blunders show Americans how Republicans are taking advantage of them through lies while stripping benefits to average Americans. Their illegal acts, firings, deportations, and price increases erode their credibility and popularity.
Republicans know that winning reelection in 2026 is very unlikely. At least 30 Republicans are opting not to run for another term. Representative Marjorie Taylor Green is just one of the first of that group. If enough Republicans in the House resign as Green did, it’s likely the Democrats will take the majority in the House in 2026.
The Republican problem is that appointments, whether judicial, or executive, were made based upon loyalty to the president rather than upon skill, competence, and loyalty to the Constitution. Republicans have rushed to authoritarianism. In that rush, they have tripped over their own feet and are falling hard.
