The Court’s new term began today, which means that Court watchers like me have spent recent weeks pulling together our annual term previews. In the past, I considered this a service both to readers, who want to get a sense of the high-profile cases coming down the pike, and to myself, as I start processing the larger themes emerging out of the Court’s jurisprudence.
Lately, however, I have become dubious of the value of this exercise. A preview, after all, carries an element of speculation, of uncertainty, of possibility. We are making educated guesses about what may happen, but we don’t really know.
That’s the opposite of how it feels to observe and write about the Roberts Court in the 2020s. This Court, which has been forcibly twisted into a right-wing supermajority over the past decade, is doing exactly what it was built to do by movement activists, wealthy donors, and Republican senators: jettison much of the legal and social progress of the past century and remake vast swathes of constitutional law in the image of the modern conservative movement. With very few exceptions, it has issued predictable 6–3 (or, more rarely, 5–4) rulings that align closely with that movement’s top priorities — on guns, religion, abortion, race, labor, voting and representation, money in politics, and much more.
In the old days, Supreme Court previews could discuss impending oral arguments and decisions in the context of different justices’ established principles. But I have discerned only two consistent principles in today’s supermajority: 1) whatever outcome makes it easier to entrench Republican-favored policies, and 2) whatever arrogates more power to the Court itself.
Actually I can think of a third: whatever makes practicing democracy harder — including access to voting, fair representation, and full participation in self-government.
Major Questions has tackled all of these over the last year, but with the start of the term upon us, let’s zero in on that last one and try something a bit different; call it a re-preview.
For most of 2026, the Court has clearly and repeatedly signaled its hostility to democracy, on both its merits docket and its shadow docket. Those rulings, especially the 6–3 stake through the heart of the Voting Rights Act in Callais v. Louisiana, have done enormous damage, but the Court is not finished.
In their December sitting, the justices will hear arguments in an Arizona voting case that illustrates how much they have emboldened opponents of democracy. The case, Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota, is part of a years-long effort by Republican lawmakers in Arizona to require voters to prove their citizenship before voting.
Proof-of-citizenship laws are, like most anti-voter-fraud measures pushed by Republicans these days, a solution in search of a problem. Noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare, and when it happens it’s often accidental. (Even absent such laws, it’s still illegal to vote as a noncitizen; voters declare their citizenship under penalty of perjury and can be deported for lying. Those who do vote illegally are usually caught quickly.) On the other hand, tens of millions of Americans do not have ready access to citizenship documents like passports and birth certificates. As a result, these laws disenfranchise otherwise-eligible voters far more often than they prevent fraud.
When Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship requirement first came before the Court in 2013, the justices said that it violated federal law, which allows people to register without proof of citizenship. The Court ruled 7–2 that Arizona had to accept federal voter registration forms and allow those voters to vote in federal elections. But Arizona could continue to require proof of citizenship for state and local elections.
As a result, Arizona maintains two separate voter rolls: one for people who show proof of citizenship and may vote in all elections, and the other for those who do not show that proof and may vote only in federal elections. Complicating matters, a federal consent decree in 2018 ordered Arizona to allow voters to cast ballots for federal office regardless of which form they used to register.
Arizona’s Republican-led legislature wasn’t happy about this. In 2022, lawmakers took another bite at the apple, barring voters without proof of citizenship from voting for president and from receiving mail ballots.
These new requirements obviously violated federal law, not to mention the Court’s 2013 decision and the 2018 consent decree, and lower federal courts struck them down easily, leading to the appeal now before the Court.
Why would Arizona lawmakers think that they could flout a Supreme Court decision and get away with it? Because, increasingly, they have. Republican officials in states around the country, including Missouri and Alabama, have grown increasingly comfortable ignoring federal court orders or existing laws, because they believe, often rightly, that they will not be held accountable by the justices; in fact, they might even be cheered on by some of them. The officials can’t quite admit that out loud (yet), so instead they concoct laughable defenses. In Arizona, lawmakers claimed that Congress does not have the authority to regulate presidential elections, which is flatly wrong, as Supreme Court rulings to the contrary have made clear for nearly a century.
Either way, the Arizona lawmakers know that the Roberts Court of 2026 is very different from the Roberts Court of 2013. The earlier Court’s 7–2 result may seem decisive, but only three justices from that majority are still sitting, while both dissenters, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, remain. This new, Trump-ified Roberts Court, as I suggested above, is as antidemocratic as any Court in generations, and that’s a high bar to clear.
To take two of the most glaring examples from the past year alone: the Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in Callais — which was no less shocking for having been in the works for more than a decade — and its permitting Republican-led states around the country to draw new and more extreme partisan gerrymanders mid-decade and, in some cases, mid-election, despite its own (sensible) doctrine that election laws should not be changed close to when elections take place.
Yes, the Court has periodically done the right thing, as I covered in my last newsletter. It has thwarted Missouri Republicans from using a new Republican-friendly map not once but three times in recent weeks. It also blocked President Trump’s executive order that would have prevented millions of Americans from casting mail ballots this fall.
But both of those decisions were low-hanging fruit — it would have been outrageous had the Court ruled any other way — and they give me no solace that the right-wing majority has any broader commitment to democracy. Indeed, less than two weeks ago the six conservative justices let Trump move forward with his plan to use a centralized database to verify voters’ citizenship. (The three Democratic-appointed justices dissented.)
Once again, for those in the cheap seats: Noncitizen voting is not a thing, no matter how much Trump and Republicans want it to be. And the new database is far from trustworthy in identifying even those few cases that may exist. As one federal judge wrote, federal agencies tasked with rapid implementation of Trump’s order “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.” In short, resist the temptation to be lulled into comfort by sporadic rulings that turn out the right way. The Roberts Court is no friend to American democracy.
