Roberts’s captivity is entirely fitting: He is forced to witness, with his own eyes, the mess he and his colleagues on the Supreme Court have made of the U.S. political system. As representatives of all three branches of government attend this unhappy family reunion, the living consequences of the Roberts Court’s decisions, and their corrosive effect on democracy, are plain to see.

Ten years to the day before Trump’s impeachment trial began, the Supreme Court released its Citizens United decision, plunging the country into the era of super PACs and unlimited, unregulated, secret campaign money from billionaires and foreign interests. Citizens United, and the resulting rise of the super PAC, led directly to this impeachment. The two Rudy Giuliani associates engaged in key abuses …gained access to Trump by funneling money from a Ukrainian oligarch to the president’s super PAC.

…The court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County gutted the Voting Rights Act and spurred a new wave of voter suppression. The decision in 2014′s McCutcheon further surrendered campaign finance to the wealthiest. 

…The new dominance of ideologically extreme outside groups and donors led lawmakers on both sides to give their patrons what they wanted: conflict over collaboration and purity at the cost of paralysis. The various decisions also suppress the influence of poorer and non-white Americans.

…Roberts had been warned about this sort of thing.

…Justice Stephen Breyer, in his McCutcheon dissent, warned that the new campaign finance system would be “incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy.”

Now, we are in a crisis of democratic legitimacy: A president who has plainly abused his office and broken the law, a legislature too paralyzed to do anything about it — and a chief justice coming face to face with the system he broke.

John Roberts comes face to face with the mess he made – The Washington Post

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A cache of computer files saved on the hard drives of Thomas Hofeller, a prominent Republican redistricting strategist, is becoming public.

…They have been cited as evidence of gerrymandering that got political maps thrown out in North Carolina, and they have raised questions about Hofeller’s role in the Trump administration’s failed push for a census citizenship question.

…”I originally started sharing them with journalists as a direct response to the assertion by the legislative defendants through counsel that they should be destroyed,” Stephanie tells NPR, which previously received a copy of the files from her.

The files document the wide reach of Thomas Hofeller’s work on political maps across the country — including in Arizona, Florida, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee and Virginia, as well as New York’s Nassau County and Texas’ Galveston and Nueces counties.

In a Microsoft Word document last saved in 2015, Thomas Hofeller warned against changing the Census Bureau’s policy of including prisoners in the population counts of the areas where they’re incarcerated, expressing concern that “the actual effect on reapportionment and redistricting is not clearly known for individual states.”

…Stephanie says her father’s stated goal was to use gerrymandering to “create a system wherein the Republican nominee would win.”

Stephanie Hofeller Shares Redistricting Files From Thomas Hofeller’s Hard Drives : NPR

hmmm