New Civil War just dropped...at the Supreme Court | Will Bunch Newsletter

The calendar is deep into April, so why does it still feel like Groundhog Day? What can one write that’s new about the same stories — the on-again, off-again stupidity and deceit around the Iran War, Donald Trump’s descent into madness — that just keep happening over and over? Then we have the White House Correspondents Association dinner, a yearly embarrassment that I’ve been criticizing since I started blogging in 2005, and which will hit a new low Saturday with an appearance by a president determined to crush press freedom, Donald Trump. Cancel this monstrosity before it starts. There, have I covered it?

If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

Ever since the ink started drying at Appomattox 161 years ago this month, Americans have wondered what the next civil war will look like. It was only two years ago that millions ventured out to theaters to see the Hollywood version of Civil War, with bombed out malls, gas-station hangings, and refugee camps in football stadiums.

But what if the first shots of the next great battle for the soul of America aren’t happening on a cinematic battlefield, but come from nine angry men and women in black robes?

Almost every day, there are new signs — from shocking news leaks to surprisingly indecorous public jabs, and legal opinions that read like cries for help — that the U.S. Supreme Court is at war ... with itself. Looming large over this soft civil war inside one of America’s three branches of government is our most fundamental liberty, the right to vote.

It’s been easy to miss the escalating conflicts among the High Court’s six conservative and three liberal jurists, because of the shooting war over in Iran, as well as the daily unraveling of a coequal branch of government, the White House, under an increasingly unstable president. But last weekend, with a shaky ceasefire in Iran, the biggest bombshell wasn’t dropped in the Persian Gulf but in the pages of the New York Times.

The Times obtained a batch of secret memos between the Supreme Court justices over five days in early 2016 that exposed the rise of the so-called “shadow docket,” in which the conservative-dominated court has increasingly issued hasty and little-explained rulings in cases that haven’t even been argued in public. For more than a decade now, these emergency rulings have largely constrained Democratic presidents and boosted the power of Donald Trump on major issues.

The scoop was hugely significant in two ways. The first is that the memo exposed the hypocrisy of Chief Justice John Roberts, who has argued during his two decades overseeing the court that its justices are not political actors but impartial umpires “calling balls and strikes,” based on sound interpretation of the law,

The secret memos reveal Roberts as less an umpire and more the manager of a team desperate to win the World Series for corporate America. The issue at hand in February 2016 was an effort by Barack Obama’s environmental regulators to force U.S. power plants away from dirty fuels like coal, because of the climate crisis.

Roberts pressed the court to issue an unprecedented ruling to block Obama’s Clean Power Plan — no lower court had even ruled yet on its legality — and sounded more like a corporate lobbyist than an unbiased judge in doing so. The George W. Bush-appointed chief justice argued the court must act swiftly on “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector.” His words seemed to confirm the decades-long, big money plan for a capitalist capture of the judiciary as described in the recent Master Plan podcast.

The Times exposure of the memos that led to the High Court’s 5-4 ruling that blocked Obama’s climate agenda is hugely significant in showing how and why the judicial branch has become the ultimate backstop for protecting corporate power in an age of billionaire wealth. But the story behind the story was almost as revealing.

The breach of secrecy in revealing these memos which, to many, cast Roberts in a negative light is just the latest in a series of news leaks and public statements coming from the Supreme Court that lack any precedent, legal or otherwise. This has happened at a time when revelations of alleged corruption — such as the lavish gifts heaped upon Justice Clarence Thomas, and billion-dollar efforts by wealthy conservatives to shape and then lobby the court — have already caused a crisis of credibility.

The Mother of All Leaks happened in 2022, when the draft of the opinion that would overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling on abortion rights was given to the media weeks before the ruling was announced. An investigation failed to reveal who leaked that decision, although there’s been much speculation that it came from the conservative wing hoping the news coverage would prevent last-minute defections.

Since then, as the right-tilted Supreme Court has played an increasingly visible role in the erosion of American democracy — highlighted by the 2024 decision that gave Trump and other presidents sweeping criminal immunity for “official acts” — there has been even less decorum and more overt verbal warfare.

Sometimes, the warnings and criticisms can be found in the justices’ written dissents and opinions, as when Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in response to that ruling on presidential power that POTUS is now “a king above the law,” signing off “with fear for our democracy.”

But it was more shocking earlier this month when Sotomayor, the longest-tenured justice of the court’s liberal wing, lashed out during a University of Kansas event at its recent ruling that seemed to expand racial profiling powers for immigration cops. She said that the opinion had come from “a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”

Sotomayor has since apologized to Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote that controversial opinion. But the increasing verbal jousting among the justices is happening in a year when its nine members are under even more pressure than ever over the electoral process.

Over the next six weeks or so, the Supreme Court is expected to rule in a case that could complete its unraveling of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, by stopping the use of congressional district maps to boost Black and brown representation. That’s ahead of even greater fears that the corrupted court will be pressed into service this fall, when Trump has threatened unprecedented and constitutionally dubious federal involvement in the critical midterm elections.

That brings us back to this weekend’s leaks of the secret 2016 memos. Like in 2022, we do not know the identity of the leaker, but the timing here is critical. Someone very high in the judicial pyramid is trying to send a “bat signal” to the American public — that things at the nation’s highest court have gone off the rails.

Just like in 1861, tensions over the true meaning of the American Experiment are on the brink of boiling over. Just like in 1865, the outcome may determine whether we can again become a freer society.

Question: Which Senate seats do you think have the best chance of flipping from R to D this fall? — Kat O’Brien (@lavidagata.bsky.social) via Bluesky

Answer: Thanks, Kat, for a timely question. For years, the conventional wisdom was that 2026 was an impossible set-up for the Democrats (now down by a 47-53 margin) to recapture the Senate, because many of the potentially competitive races are in states that Donald Trump won just two years ago. That conventional wisdom looks increasingly unwise. On Monday, a shock poll from blood-red Mississippi showed a Democratic challenger only 3 percentage points behind GOP incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith — reflecting the massive swing of roughly 20 points towards Democrats we are seeing coast-to-coast. In a world where Republicans are defending the Deep South, many good things are possible for Dems. Flips look all but certain in North Carolina (with popular Dem ex-Gov. Roy Cooper) and Maine (a state Kamala Harris won), but that only gets them to 49, two short of a majority. But the expanded playing field now offers real shots in once unlikely places like (my ranking here) Ohio (with Dem ex-Sen. Sherrod Brown), Alaska, Iowa, and Texas. Winning two of those four states in a “wave” year could absolutely happen, plus maybe some wild cards no one saw coming. Like Mississippi?

As I expected, the kind of people who read this newsletter are the kind of people who know about upstart Maine Democrat Graham Platner and have opinions about him. The results were fascinating. I took a lot of...guff for posting my column on Bluesky, where about 30 people unfollowed me for not sharing their zero tolerance for his past mistakes, such as his now-regretted tattoo associated with Nazism. Among newsletter readers, however, views of Platner were mostly positive, citing his firmly progressive stands and his appeal to young voters — and also offering redemption for past mistakes. Wrote Connie Steinman: “As a 79-year-old, lifelong Democrat who’s fed up with today’s Democratic Party ‘leadership,’ I’m going with a breath of fresh air.” But reader lisabrazzle@verizon.net (please sign your name if possible) was less forgiving. “Does a leopard change his spots so soon?” she asked. “Or ever? Retrograde attitudes don’t endear me to him at all.”

📮 This week’s question: Hard to believe, but soccer’s World Cup is finally returning to North America in just 50 days. Are you excited, or do you share the view of a growing number of fans that corruption, crass capitalism, and the embarrassment of Donald Trump’s America has ruined it? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “World Cup attitude” in the subject line.

The race for a Silicon Valley-led regime of artificial intelligence, or AI, to dominate American society from the workplace to the classroom to the battlefield to the halls of government, is sprinting forward. The timing of two major stories this week relating to AI and the massive electricity-and-water guzzling data centers needed to run these supercomputers seemed not a coincidence.

First, it’s looking like Big Tech, which has funneled some $300 million into an unprecedented political war chest, is aiming to become the biggest player in the 2026 midterm elections, with the hope of electing industry-friendly, anti-regulation lawmakers. That should be good news for Donald Trump’s Republican Party, as his GOP has relentlessly sought an unfettered path for Big AI and its data centers.

For the supposedly opposition Democrats, AI is a conundrum. Will the party follow the money, or the voters, with more than half of rank-and-file Democrats telling Pew Research Center last fall they are more concerned than excited over AI’s surge. The early indications are disturbing.

Last week, the Financial Times reported that Democratic Party leaders have been advising its midterm candidates not to antagonize Silicon Valley by backing AI or data-center regulations, unless they want a cascade of money donated to their opponent. “You are definitely seeing a chilling effect [on campaigns],” Alex Jacquez, an ex-White House adviser and head of policy at Groundwork Collaborative, a left-leaning think tank, told the paper. “There’s just not a lot of upside in the potential of getting $20 million [spent by pro-AI campaign groups] in your race… in a lot of cases it is going to be easier to say nothing.”

Say nothing, or do nothing? At almost the exact moment the Financial Times article dropped, a landmark first-of-its-kind bill passed by the Maine legislature that would impose an 18-month statewide moratorium on new data centers made it to the desk of that state’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills. Mills also happens to be running for the state’s much-contested U.S. Senate seat at the urging of the same Democratic Party establishment lurking behind the FT article. Sure enough, Mills told reporters she’s undecided on signing the measure, and voiced some serious reservations that it would kill a data-center project in a depressed former mill town.

With Trump’s approval hitting new lows and Democrats flipping seats in early special elections, there’s been much chatter about how a historically inept party could manage to blow this one. Well, one way would be to yet again choose big-money donors over the will of the people, who have been rising up in communities across America to form a grassroots opposition to noise, higher electric bills, and other hassles linked to data centers. The progressive wing of the party — led by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who are pushing for a national data center moratorium — is getting the politics right. Have the party’s elites learned anything? Stay tuned.

OK. This might seem weird, but after hailing the sixth anniversary of this newsletter last week, I’m now taking you back to the second-ever edition, from just a week later in 2020. Why? Because that column also celebrated an anniversary that matters now more than ever, the very first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, which drew an amazing 20 million people to teach-ins and protests. Some 56 years later, our commitment to a greener world is again under assault. In 2020, I wrote that “we also need something else we’ve lost since 1970. The quaint idea that saving Planet Earth isn’t just a Democratic problem or a Republican problem. It’s a human problem — and we’d better get moving. Again." Read the rest: “What’s lost since Philly’s amazing 1970 Earth Week.”

By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirer’s Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10.

Inquirer Opinion Newsletter

Future product

Be the first to hear about a roundup of Inquirer columnists’ perspectives on what’s happening now in our city, our nation, and our world.