Overview: The recent Supreme Court session featured several controversial rulings that critics argue align with the executive branch’s agenda. Key decisions included gutting parts of the Voting Rights Act, removing campaign finance protections, and prohibiting transgender athletes from women’s sports. These actions, alongside new authority for the president to fire federal regulators, are seen by some as efforts to consolidate power and target marginalized communities.
S.E. Williams
Some have described a scapegoat as a person who is blamed for the wrongdoings, mistakes, or faults of others, “especially for reasons of expediency.” This session, a Republican-majority U.S. Supreme Court was obvious in its expediency and appeasement of the nation’s president even as the Republican justices sought to disguise it.
They attempted to present an image of being fair and balanced by offering a thin veil of objectivity via select, anti-Trump rulings, on issues like birth-right citizenship and tariffs. Though these constructive decisions were welcomed by many Americans—they did nothing at all to offset the damage the Court did in other rulings this session.
Consider the gutting of the Voting Rights Act whose initial passage was paid for across centuries with the blood of martyrs—primarily Black but also white; or, the destruction of 50 years of election campaign finance protections when the high court chose to remove one of the last barriers to wealthy donors’ ability to make unlimited contributions in support of federal political candidates. The court ruled just in time to for those with abundant wealth to attempt to sway voters in the November election.
This year’s rulings made it abundantly clear that in Trump’s America, the Supreme Court’s Republican led majority is ruling in locked-step with the president and his right-wing extremist supporters. The nation’s high court is tailor making, customizing decisions to ensure lasting power and control of the federal government by Trump and his loyalists. It is working to accomplish this by suppressing the ability of those who oppose him to leverage the ballot in opposition, while also denying the public protections against corporate greed and legitimizing discrimination against members of the LGBTQ+ community.
There is so much being eroded all at once that many are feeling overwhelmed and have tuned out. But now is not the time to tune out. It’s time to pay closer attention.
The recent Supreme Court session saw Republican justices deliver one gift after another to the president fulfilling the long awaited goals of the politically powerful, the wealthy, the racists and the ultra-right religious.
Trump hardly had time to celebrate the many gifts as they occurred this session because they just kept coming. . . one victory after another—in near rapid fire succession. This session, the Court offered questionable rulings in alignment with the president’s political wants and in alignment with demand of the religious right with very few exceptions like those mentioned above.
Among the many gifts the Court provided Trump this year was the authority to fire independent federal regulators with no cause. These are the same regulators who oversee federal agencies responsible for investigating corporate fraud, fighting against monopolies and providing consumer protections. In other words, agencies charged with keeping American consumers from being ripped off or damaged in some other way. The president is now able to appoint “roosters to guard the hen houses,” so to speak and/or fire whomever refuses to do his bidding.
Scapegoate, a “goat upon whose head are symbolically placed the sins of the people after which he is sent into the wilderness in the biblical ceremony for Yom Kippur; one that bears the blame for others; one that is the object of irrational hostility.”
merriam-webster.com
Also, in the documented tradition of dictators like Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe and Nicolás Maduro, among others—all who targeted members of the LGBTQ+ community—the nation’s high court has enabled the Trump administration to continue following in those footsteps.
The Court threw transgender members of the LGBTQ+ community under the bus—making trans community an open and official sacrifice to the dictates of authoritarianism. It did so by stepping into a politically-charged, religious zealots’ led debate over the rights of transgender athletes. The Court ruled these individuals must be prohibited from competing in women’s sports.
In doing so, experts say the Court acquiesced to the demands of the religious right by delivering the outcome they desired. In doing so, I believe the Court set the stage for future unfavorable rulings against members of the LGBTQ+ community as the ruling narrows how sex discrimination is defined under federal law and thus may affect how transgender people are treated in other legal contexts.
There are others who agree. In late June, Suzanne B. Goldberg, Professor of Law and Director of the Sexuality & Gender Law Clinic at Columbia Law School since 2006, published an op ed in Ms. Magazine where she discussed the broader legal restrictions related to the LGBTQ+ community that can evolve from this ruling. She stressed the Court’s transgender ruling should be viewed “within the context of a growing number of state laws affecting transgender individuals…”
Goldberg further noted and I concur, that bans on transgender athletes must be viewed as just one part of a larger legislative movement happening nationwide.
This movement began in earnest more than 50 years ago. As noted by experts, since the 1970’s, there’s been a coalition of folks working diligently against “reproductive/abortion rights, gender-affirming health care, sex education—and most concerning to myself and others—legal protections against gender and sexually based discrimination and violence. This coalition consists of religious extremists and far-right political groups among others. Not surprisingly since 2004, according to the American Civil Liberties Union no less than 400 bills have been introduced in state legislatures nationwide that specifically target the trans community.
According to the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), far right extremists are “attacking longstanding federal protections against sex discrimination, to control and punish anyone who accesses abortion, IVF, birth control or other reproductive health care; who has sex outside of marriage, who is queer, trans, or nonbinary, or who departs from their regressive view of gender roles and gender hierarchies.”
Their priorities are evidenced in Project 2025. NWLC says, “will eviscerate sex-discrimination protections from federal regulations, radically restructure federal agencies to diminish their ability to enforce civil rights protections, and weaponize the federal government—including the courts—to enforce discriminatory policies.”
In my estimation, the coalition’s success in this regard is apparent. The question is…what lies ahead?
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court weighed in on an issue that—according to testimony before Congress in 2024—less than 10 students among the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s 510,000 student-athletes were transgender according to the organization’s president.
Yet, the movement to incite and inspire discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community by targeting trans people continues to succeed. Since 2024, more than 400 bills discriminating against the LGBTQ+ community were considered by state houses across the nation. These bills target trans people specifically on a variety of fronts that range from restricting their access to hormone replacement therapy to denying minors the right to change their name or decide which pronoun they prefer to use in school, etc.
The overblown attention and money given to incite discrimination against members of the trans community has taken away from longstanding issues of significance that impact women, members of the BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities.
Goldberg describe the strategy playing out against members of the trans community as “legal scapegoating,” a term that can be equally applied to attacks on immigrants; restricting the rights of women; displacement of Blacks—especially Black women (the nation’s most educated demographic—who went from jobs in the federal government that enabled them to get a foothold on the middle-class or at the very least, the upper-tiers of the working class—to the unemployment lines by the hundreds of thousands.
All are being used as scapegoats.
The scapegoating, however, does not end there. In addition to the above, the right wing’s biggest fear is the power of the vote in the hands of the nation’s conscious—Black Americans. Those in power are apoplectic about keeping access to the vote away from Black people, from the youth, the immigrant, anyone who believes in equity, equality and the oneness of humanity.
What the general public is beginning to realize is that all the voting laws being passed to restrict the Black vote, to some extent, in many ways restricts the the vote of everyone. All of the roadblocks being established for Blacks will also impact poor whites… anyone without the means to secure birth certificate proof of citizenship; pay for picture identification; pay to prepare or knows how to prepare an affidavit, let alone pay for notarization of the affidavit, if required will be impacted by voter restrictions via the SAVE Act and/or other legislation.
Costs will especially impact women, as the SAVE act requires those who have changed their names—even through marriage–to submit an affidavit attesting to the name change.
Threatening the Black vote especially in Southern states where Blacks represent such large majorities and yet the states remain the stronghold of the confederacy—tells the full story. A story this nation must not forget. That true story is: When Blacks were enslaved or freed but could not vote, for part of that period neither could working class whites who did not own property; neither could women—in truth, women had no rights whatsoever, zero; gay and lesbian people lived in closets; and other minorities in the nation, including Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and others had no voice.
Throughout this nation’s 250 year history, when national times got tough, one or another, any combination of people—all of the groups listed above were/are trotted out by the powerful as the latest scapegoat(s).
It is important to understand what is happening so that we do not get caught up in the disinformation and/or unjust laws, rules and regulations and begin to scapegoat each other.
Of course this is just my opinion. I’m keeping it real.