Trump and the Supreme Court are undermining democracy. Here's what voters can do now.

Trump and the Supreme Court are undermining democracy. Here's what voters can do now.

Opinion
Guest Voices

Voters depart a polling place at McDonald Elementary School, Nov. 5, 2024, in Dearborn, Mich. (AP/Charlie Neibergall)

Thomas Reese

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May 6, 2026

President Donald Trump and the U.S. Supreme Court have destroyed decades of progress in American democracy by gutting the Voting Rights Act last week and instituting a gerrymandering war to win more elections in red states.

The Democrats have responded by gerrymandering blue states. The result will be fewer Black candidates elected to office and fewer competitive elections where the voters have a real choice between the parties.

How did this happen?

Trump knows he and his supporters are going to be in trouble in the November midterm election. The party controlling the White House traditionally loses seats during midterm elections. These losses are greater if the president is unpopular, as is Trump currently. But the losses can only occur in districts that are competitive. It's very unlikely districts that are overwhelmingly Republican will go blue.

So now, Trump and other Republicans are trying to protect their majority in the House of Representatives by asking Republican officials in red states like Texas to redraw the House district lines to find him additional safe Republican seats.

The process of redrawing electoral district lines to favor one party is called gerrymandering, after Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry in 1812 backed a redistricting plan favoring his own party, the Democrat-Republicans. One of the districts looked like a salamander, so the press combined the governor's name with salamander to produce the name "gerrymander."

In response to Trump's request for five additional seats in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott pushed the redistricting plan through a special session of the state legislature. But then, voters in California and Virginia adopted redistricting plans that give Democrats additional House seats.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is now trying to get additional House seats for Republicans even though the state constitution forbids partisan gerrymandering. Other Southern states are moving in the same direction.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering is legal under the U.S. Constitution. Whether it is legal under state law depends on a particular state's constitution and laws.

Legal or not, gerrymandering is bad for democracy. It means that in the general election, the voters have no choice in most districts because one party has an overwhelming majority so that the other party does not have a chance.

In addition, even if a state is evenly split across parties, gerrymandering can give a large majority of the seats to the party that controls redistricting. As the League of Women Voters and others have noted, gerrymandering "allows officials to choose their voters rather than voters choosing who represents them."

Historic climate law, signed by Biden, has Catholic fingerprints all over it

Aug 18, 2022
by Brian Roewe
Action

President Joe Biden hands the pen he used to sign the Democrats' landmark climate change and health care bill to Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, Aug. 16. (AP/Susan Walsh)

With the stroke of his pen, President Joe Biden signed into law Aug. 16 the largest-ever federal action in response to climate change, pumping hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade into transitioning the nation to clean energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions that are rapidly heating the planet.

The more than $300 billion in climate provisions included in the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, represent a major milestone after decades of mostly failed efforts by the United States, the world's largest historical source of heat-trapping emissions, to match its response to climate change with the serious threats it poses for the country and the globe.

Faith groups who have worked for years lobbying for significant federal climate legislation celebrated the historic achievement. At the same time, they vowed to take on its shortfalls, specifically continued investments in and potential fast-tracking of new fossil fuel production that have long exposed communities of color to greater levels of pollution.

"Finally! This landmark bill comes none too soon," Susan Gunn, director of the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, said in a statement, referring to the heatwaves, wildfires and flooding this summer across the country and much of the world.

"The cry of the earth, which Pope Francis calls us to heed in his Laudato Si’ encyclical, finally was heard in the halls of Congress. This legislation is a strong start for the United States to do its fair share to care for our common home," she said.

In a statement after the Aug. 12 House vote sent the bill to Biden's desk, Catholic Climate Covenant executive director José Aguto praised the bill as providing "authentic hope for future generations, bringing our nation and world closer to emissions reduction goals, closer to each other, and closer to a better world."

Wind turbines operate at sunrise in the Permian Basin oil and natural gas production area in Big Spring, Texas, Feb. 12, 2019. (CNS/Reuters/Nick Oxford)


Catholic fingerprints were all over the Inflation Reduction Act and its massive climate investments.

It was Biden, the nation's second Catholic president, who signed it into law. After doing so, he gifted the pen to Catholic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. It was Manchin, the focus of intense scrutiny for his ties to the coal industry, who for months wielded his position as a critical swing vote to scale back and hold up the legislation before striking a surprise deal July 27 with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to bring the bill back to life, with an apparent assist from Bill Gates.