New York Times: “As the justices have traveled the country this month for public appearances, a traditional part of the court’s schedule after finishing oral arguments for the term, they have seemed intensely aware of a public debate about their relationships with each other and the court’s own legitimacy.”

Rick Hasen: “Over his two decades on the Supreme Court, United States Chief Justice John Roberts had consistently played the long game when it comes to the court’s weakening of voting rights. That was until the past few weeks. With a series of major upheavals in the past month alone, Roberts has signaled that he is shifting to a two-minute offense.”

“This change of velocity, heralded by rulings relating to Louisiana’s and Alabama’s redistricting, threatens to continually upend American elections and create incentives for maximum partisan warfare at exactly the wrong time. The question is why Roberts is suddenly playing like a man running out of time.”

G. Elliott Morris: “The six Republican-appointed justices on the United States Supreme Court have found a magical solution to political polarization. All you have to do is take a partisan election result and subtract out the effects of party loyalty on the result…”

“The problem is that in modern America, party isn’t a variable that operates independently of race. Rather, political party is largely downstream of one’s race. If you subtract the effects of political party from the analysis of polarization, you are subtracting away the very evidence of polarization you are trying to study!”

John Oliver explains the “shadow docket” — which has become a shortcut for rapidly advancing the Trump administration’s agenda through the nation’s highest court.

“President Trump sounded off about Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett over their joining the majority in the court’s opinion on his tariff policy, a ruling that said the president could not use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose broad tariffs,” ABC News reports.

Said Trump: “They were appointed by me, and yet have hurt our Country so badly! I do not believe they meant to do so, but their decision on Tariffs cost the United States 159 Billion Dollars that we have to pay back to enemies, and people, companies, and Countries, that have been ripping us off for years. It’s hardly believable!”

Steve Vladeck: “My own view is that a big part of what’s wrong with the current Court is that it has become completely un-accountable—both because Congress has stopped pulling those levers and because the internal pressure on the Court to moderate created by justices like Stewart, Powell, O’Connor, and Kennedy is no longer there.”

“It’s only in the absence of both forces that Justice Alito can say, as he did in 2023, that ‘no provision of the Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate the Supreme Court—period.’ Alito’s statement was and is literally incorrect, but it captures what has increasingly become the zeitgeist, and underscores why my own view is that restoring a culture of accountability is the best way to split the difference between preserving the Court’s independence and making it more worthy of the diffuse, public support that gives that independence real-world force.”

Jonathan Bernstein: “The first and probably best option is to ‘pack’ it. In other words: Add more Justices. The Constitution doesn’t specify how large the Supreme Court should be, so it’s been set by legislation, and it took a long time for Congress to settle on nine. All it would take to add another one or two or ten Justices would be Congress passing something and the president signing it. Then nominate and confirm the new Justices, and the GOP majority on the Court is gone.”

“The advantage of this is how easy it is. Yes, it would require a nuke of sorts in the Senate – as it is now, the bill could be defeated by a filibuster unless Democrats could find 60 votes, and there’s not going to be any Republican help on it. However, that’s true of most of the Democrats’ democracy agenda, from restoring the Voting Rights Act to statutory DC statehood. My guess is that as long as there are, say, at least 53 Democrats in the Senate they’ll have the simple majority needed to carve out a new exception to the filibuster.”

“The downside of court-packing is that it creates an obvious arms race: Republicans would retaliate as soon as they had the chance by doing the exact same thing.”

“The criminal indictment of former FBI director James B. Comey for allegedly threatening President Donald Trump appears to fall short of a standard articulated by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. in a 2015 opinion, when the Supreme Court pointedly distinguished a genuine threat from mere speech,” the Washington Post reports.

“Roberts, along with a majority of the court, ruled in the 2015 case Elonis v. United States that prosecutors seeking to convict someone of sending a dangerous message must prove the person intended to make a violent threat — or at least knew there was a substantial chance it would be viewed as threatening.”

Adam Liptak: “Wednesday’s bombshell voting rights decision from the Supreme Court is a testament to Chief Justice John Roberts’s patience and penchant for the long game.”

“As far back as 1982, when he was a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, he worked to oppose the expansion of a part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had initially covered only intentional discrimination, to address practices that had discriminatory results. Back then, his efforts failed.”

“In the new Congress, we’re going to have to do something about this Supreme Court, and let me be very clear: everything is on the table.”

— House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), on the MeidasTouch podcast.

Rick Hasen: “Wednesday’s 6-3 party line decision in Louisiana v. Callais will go down in history as one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the last century.”

“All six Republican-appointed justices on the court signed onto Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion gutting what remained of the Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters, while pretending they were merely making technical tweaks to the Act.”

“This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils, by ending the protections of Section 2 of the Act, which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation. It’s the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy, and a brazen willingness to reject Congress’s judgment that fair representation for minority voters sometimes requires race-conscious legislation.”

“It gives the green light to further partisan gerrymandering. It protects Alito’s core constituency: aggrieved white Republican voters. It’s a disaster for American democracy.”