The Supreme Court and voter suppression

[Frank]

About the June 29 Trump v. Slaughter ruling by the Supreme Court

Jermaine Fowler

July 10, 2026 (Friday)

Yesterday, an email left the White House, signed by a deputy director of presidential personnel named Morgan DeWitt Snow. “Your position as Commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service.”

Three sentences. When they landed, the only federal agency devoted to running American elections had no members left and no legal power to act. Four months remain before the midterms.

He told us this was coming. On July 26, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Trump told a summit of Christian voters, “Get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years. It’ll be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.” Three days later, on the friendliest set he has in television, Fox News host Laura Ingraham offered him the exit ramp. Trump kept driving. Everyone heard bluster and moved on.

Every vote you have ever cast went into a machine. A scanner in a school gym, a touchscreen in a church basement, a tabulator humming in a county warehouse. You took the little red, white, and blue sticker, went back to work, and trusted the number that came out the other side, and you trusted it because somewhere, before that machine ever touched a ballot, somebody tested it and swore it counts.

That somebody is this commission. It writes the rules a voting machine has to pass. It vets the laboratories that run the tests, then certifies the machines that survive, and in much of the country a county cannot legally plug in a machine without that certification. Even the form you filled out to register to vote is its work, the national template every state builds on. By law Congress made it independent, and by law split it down the middle, two commissioners from each party, so no president could bend it toward himself.

All four chairs now sit empty.

Nothing in the room will look different. On election morning the scanner will still light up. Still humming, still pulling your ballot in with that small mechanical swallow, still flashing its green check, the machine has no way to tell you that the people who checked it are gone. The body looks the same. Underneath, the immune system has been stripped out.

And when your county’s dying scanners finally fail, and it orders replacements, and the replacements need a federal certification that nobody on earth is left to give, the failure arrives on a Tuesday in November, in a school gym, in a line folding back through the parking lot, at the moment a poll worker drops your ballot into an emergency bin, to be counted later.

If later comes.

It took one court ruling and one writing. The ruling came June 29. Trump v. Slaughter, six to three. If you saw the headline at all, it read like a story about trade regulators, some beige Beltway fight over a commission so obscure that most people who cover politics for a living could not tell you what the letters stood for. It cut far deeper. With one decision the Court handed the president power to fire the leaders of nearly any independent agency at will, a power denied to every president for ninety-one years, and among the agencies it unlocked sits the one that checks the machine that counts your ballot.

That same afternoon, those same justices shielded exactly one agency from him. The Federal Reserve. They protected the money. They released the vote.

Justice Sotomayor said what it meant. The ruling, she wrote in dissent, “reshapes our Government,” shifting tremendous power over broad swaths of American life “into the President’s hands.” Three justices signed her warning. Six signed the other way.

Where did the ninety-one years come from? From 1935, when a unanimous Court told Franklin Roosevelt that a president cannot own the agencies Congress builds to stand apart from him. One justice had seen the fight coming a decade earlier. Dissenting in 1926, in the first case of this long line, Louis Brandeis wrote that the founders divided power “to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power” and to “save the people from autocracy.” He lost that vote. He wrote those words one hundred years ago, and the Court fulfilled them one hundred years later, punctually.

Born from a broken election, this commission exists because of Florida, 2000. Back then the state voted on punch cards. You slid your ballot into a slot and pressed a metal stylus through the hole beside your candidate’s name, punching out a paper dot the size of confetti. The counting machine read the ballot by shining light through the holes. A clean hole meant a vote. But thousands of dots refused to tear away. They hung on by a corner, flapped back over the hole, blocked the light, and the machine counted nothing, even though a human hand had pressed the stylus there on purpose. The dangling dot had a name, a chad, and for thirty-six days the most powerful nation on earth held ballots up to fluorescent light, arguing over whether a hanging flap of confetti was a vote or a blank, while the presidency of the United States swung on 537 of them. Never again, Congress swore, and built this agency at 92 to 2 in the Senate so no American election would break that way twice.

Who won that Florida fight? Young Republican lawyers. John Roberts advised the legal team. Brett Kavanaugh worked the recount. Amy Coney Barrett, twenty-eight years old, flew down to help. All three sit on the Supreme Court today. All three signed the June ruling. The lawyers who won the broken election unmade the repair.

So how does this steal an election with everyone still voting? Machines age out and their replacements sit uncertified, so the breakdowns come on schedule, in the counties where they are wanted. Lines stretch. Bins fill. Then the men who fired the referee point at the wreckage and shout fraud. Trump shouted fraud in 2020, and a bipartisan federal commission stood among the authorities that could answer him. He will shout it again in November, and the office that could answer is empty, because he emptied it. In March he ordered this same commission to rewrite the national registration form to demand proof of citizenship. A commission with members could refuse him. An empty one can only obey. And a contested election goes where contested elections go, up through the courts to nine justices, three of whom have already decided a presidency once.

Project 2025 named the 1935 protection as a target in print, two years before the Court killed it. On Steve Bannon’s show in July 2024, the president of the Heritage Foundation promised “the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Bloodless.

In 1870 the Fifteenth Amendment promised the ballot. Twenty years later Mississippi clawed it back with paperwork, the rest of the South copied the forms, and for three quarters of a century the promise lay in the ground. People died digging it out. For registering voters, Medgar Evers was shot in his own driveway in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963. The next summer, Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered in Neshoba County for the same work and buried in an earthen dam. In March 1965, John Lewis walked at the front of a column across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and Alabama troopers fractured his skull on the far side. Five months later the Voting Rights Act was law, because the country had watched the price being paid on live television.

Sixty-one years separate that bridge from this email. For the last three of them, the plan sat in print while people talked themselves calm. They said the courts would stop him, and to be fair, sometimes the courts did. The next election would fix it, they said. He always talks like that, and everything would be fine.' It'll be fixed. It'll be fine.' Trump spoke those same words in West Palm Beach, to his own believers. In the mouths of the worried, the words promised that nothing much would change. In his, they were a schedule.

They advertise a bloodless revolution. But the blood came first, in a driveway in Jackson, in a dam in Neshoba County, on the pavement on the far side of a bridge in Selma. Most of the people who paid never got to use the thing they bought. They were buying it for whoever came after, trusting those hands to hold it.

We are the ones who came after.

The ballot stays in your hand. A ballot is a message to power, and they are unhooking the wire it travels on.

“You won’t have to vote anymore.”

Was he telling the truth?

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