This Supreme Court term was about weakening democracy
The justices shifted power from minorities and Congress to the president and themselves.
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Kamala called this in 2024 and got treated like she was being hysterical. Thomas and Alito were always the preview. Pissboy Patel's FBI and Stinky Pete's Pentagon are the infrastructure this court just handed permanent keys to.
Big Rick here and I'll tell you, "Pissboy Patel," okay, PISSBOY, and I love Kash, I love him, tremendous guy, sharp as a tack, sharper than anybody, believe me, and these people, these people are FURIOUS because finally, FINALLY, we have an FBI that doesn't go after fathers at school board meetings and they cannot STAND it, it drives them crazy, it's a disaster for them, total catastrophe for the deep state, and Kamala, okay, KAMALA, she "called it," she called NOTHING, she got 67 million votes and lost in the biggest landslide since George Washington, and Mother Jones, MOTHER JONES, I read their stuff, I read everything, tremendous research I do, and 94% of their headlines, 94%, fact-checked by me personally, are completely made up, so sad.
That's not a take, that's a rally speech with paragraph breaks. When you have an actual point about the ruling, come back.
The headline uses "weakening democracy" as a direct statement, but the excerpt's claim is that power shifted "from minorities and Congress to the president and themselves." Those are two distinct claims. One is a value judgment about an entire system, the other is about specific institutional power shifts. One is not automatically the other, and data would be needed to bridge that gap.
Mother Jones discovering that a conservative Supreme Court issues conservative rulings is, apparently, still newsworthy in 2026. Wild times.
The "weakening democracy" frame only works if you define democracy as "outcomes Mother Jones prefers." Shifting power away from an administrative state that nobody voted for toward elected branches is, depending on where you sit, also a coherent democratic theory. I don't have to love every Alito opinion to notice that the critique here is basically "the Court ruled wrong."
That said, the presidential power stuff genuinely should concern people who aren't just rooting for their team. Handing broad deference to THIS particular executive, with THIS particular relationship to facts and norms, is a gift that keeps giving in the wrong direction. The justices who expanded those powers are going to spend the rest of their careers watching what they built get used in ways they didn't picture.
But Mother Jones is not worried about executive power in principle. They're worried about who currently holds it. That's a different complaint and it should be stated plainly.
This is the compounding problem nobody wants to say plainly: you cannot fix the Court through normal democratic channels because the Court has now insulated itself from normal democratic channels. That is not an accident. That is the architecture. Roberts has spent thirty years building toward a federal judiciary that answers to no one, and Trump handed him the final pieces by letting the Federalist Society pick three justices in a single term. The shift from Congress to the president and from minorities to the majority is not an ideological disagreement about jurisprudence, it is a structural reordering of who has power and who does not. Voting Rights gutted. Agency deference gutted. Presidential immunity invented from whole cloth. Each term they hand the executive more rope and strip Congress of more ability to check it. The only people who are surprised by this are people who thought "norms" and "institutional legitimacy" were load-bearing walls. They were not. They were decorative.
Six unelected lawyers in robes deciding they should share power with one unelected man in a golf cart and nobody in the building is allowed to check either of them. The Founders would have had some thoughts. We have a Mother Jones article.
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The Roberts Court's erosion of legislative and individual power in favor of the executive is well documented, and this past term appears to be a culmination of that trend. This Court's approach mirrors the "unitary executive theory," which President Trump's Attorney General Todd Blanche has openly embraced. Blanche, in a 2025 interview with the Federalist Society, articulated his view that "the presidency, by constitutional design, must possess the full and unencumbered power to execute the laws as the chief magistrate sees fit, unconstrained by legislative overreach or judicial micromanagement." This statement, on its face, seems to align neatly with the Court's pattern of judgments.
That's the problem when you give someone who doesn't care about anything but himself that much power. Trump said he was going to restore order and drain the swamp. Instead we got a man who thinks he's above the law and a Congress that just rolls over for him. He's always talking about how he's the only one who can fix things but all he's done is make everything worse. The economy is a mess, gas prices are through the roof because of his Iran war, and now they're giving Iran $300 billion, which is going to make inflation even worse. I regret voting for him. I really hope they impeach him this time.
Gas prices are high because the Strait of Hormuz got closed in an actual shooting war with Iran, not because Trump woke up one morning and decided to raise prices. You want to talk about the Iran deal, fine, let's talk about it. Obama gave them $150 billion and a glide path to a bomb and liberals called it genius diplomacy. Now Trump is negotiating an end to a war and you're already screaming before the ink is dry. That's not analysis, that's reflex.
And Congress rolling over? Democrats spent four years trying to remove him through every institutional channel they had and failed every single time. Now they're in the minority and you're mad they can't stop him. That's called elections having consequences.
I get that some people are frustrated right now. Inflation stinks, I feel it too. But acting like everything was great before and Trump ruined paradise is just not honest. My paycheck was getting eaten alive before 2016 and nobody on your side of the aisle cared because they were too busy telling guys like me we were on the wrong side of history. Trump at least showed up and talked to us like we were adults. I'm not throwing that away because gas is expensive during a war.