Months before the 2020 election, as tens of millions of people prepared to vote by mail in the midst of a deadly pandemic, President Donald Trump was already laying the groundwork for challenging the result if it did not go his way. Mail ballots, he said in April, are “very dangerous” and “fraudulent in many cases.” In July, he warned that 2020 would be “the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.” In August, he told his followers that the “only way” he could possibly lose the election is if Democrats “rigged” it against him.

After the election, which Trump indeed lost in decisive fashion, his warnings only got more shrill, more dire, and more vaguely messianic. In December, he delivered a speech railing against the scourge of “corrupt forces … stuffing ballot boxes,” and blamed Biden’s victory on “fraud and abuse…on a scale never seen before.” His efforts to contest the outcome, Trump said, were “about ensuring that Americans can have faith in this election and in all future elections”—a task that he said might prove to be his “single greatest achievement.”

Unfortunately for Trump, neither his initial legal challenges nor his subsequent efforts to incite a violent coup were sufficient to get him what he wanted. But as I predicted at the time, in Republican circles, Trump did manage to mainstream the belief that states that allow mail-in voting are at least facilitating cheating, if not outright encouraging it. Today, adherence to Trump’s stolen-election conspiracy theories remains table stakes for anyone who aspires to be relevant in the Republican Party and/or the conservative legal movement.

Watson v. Republican National Committee, which the Supreme Court decided on Monday, reveals just how deeply election denialism is now embedded in the conservative consciousness. In Watson, a five-justice majority of the Court rejected the GOP’s challenge to a Mississippi law that allows officials to count absentee ballots received up to five days after Election Day, as long as the ballots are postmarked by Election Day. But Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh dissented, and in his opinion for the foursome, Alito warned of Watson’s “lamentable consequences”: Counting post-Election Day ballots, he said, is not only “blatantly contrary” to what federal law requires, but will also “further undermine Americans’ faith in the integrity of this country’s elections.”

Given that the 2026 midterms are about four months away, it is of course good that the Court declined to issue a decision that could disenfranchise tens of millions of mail voters, who tend to cast ballots for Democratic candidates. But it is deeply unnerving to learn that four of the Court’s nine members are willing to upend the electoral processes in more than half of states in service of their demented party leader’s most demented lie. As it turns out, the line between the Court preserving the status quo and the Court plunging the country into a chaotic, anti-democracy nightmare is a single vote.

On a sunny weekday afternoon in September 2020, four members of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Gun Recovery Unit climbed out of their unmarked cars and approached a group of ten Black men on a sidewalk in northwest Washington, D.C. One of the officers asked 25-year-old Donte Carter if he had a gun on him. Carter, who was leaning against a parked car, said no, and lifted his shirt—twice—to show his empty waistband.

The police, however, had follow-up questions: The same officer asked Carter to hike up his pants, and when Carter did so, another officer noticed an L-shaped “bulge” in his shorts. Based on that observation, the cops frisked Carter and found a handgun. He was charged with an array of gun-related crimes, convicted, and sentenced to 14 months in prison.

Before his trial, Carter filed a motion to suppress the gun as evidence. His argument was that police had “seized” him within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, at the moment the officer told him to hike up his pants, since, as a young Black man, ignoring armed cops from a unit infamous for racial profiling wasn’t a viable option for Carter. And because the police had no reason to suspect him of anything at that time—again, he was just standing on the sidewalk, and had already shown that his waistband was empty—Carter argued that the officers had no grounds to search him.

The trial court rejected his argument, finding that Carter was not seized until after he hiked up his pants, and that the bulge the officer (allegedly) saw provided the reasonable suspicion necessary to frisk him. But in August 2025, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals threw out his conviction. As the court explained, the test for whether a defendant is “seized” is whether an “objective and reasonable person in the defendant’s shoes” would have felt free to end the conversation with police—an analysis that requires the court to consider, among many other factors, the “objective reality that people of color face during interactions with law enforcement.”

On a sunny weekday afternoon in September 2020, four members of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Gun Recovery Unit climbed out of their unmarked cars and approached a group of ten Black men on a sidewalk in northwest Washington, D.C. One of the officers asked 25-year-old Donte Carter if he had a gun on him. Carter, who was leaning against a parked car, said no, and lifted his shirt—twice—to show his empty waistband.

The police, however, had follow-up questions: The same officer asked Carter to hike up his pants, and when Carter did so, another officer noticed an L-shaped “bulge” in his shorts. Based on that observation, the cops frisked Carter and found a handgun. He was charged with an array of gun-related crimes, convicted, and sentenced to 14 months in prison.

Before his trial, Carter filed a motion to suppress the gun as evidence. His argument was that police had “seized” him within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, at the moment the officer told him to hike up his pants, since, as a young Black man, ignoring armed cops from a unit infamous for racial profiling wasn’t a viable option for Carter. And because the police had no reason to suspect him of anything at that time—again, he was just standing on the sidewalk, and had already shown that his waistband was empty—Carter argued that the officers had no grounds to search him.

The trial court rejected his argument, finding that Carter was not seized until after he hiked up his pants, and that the bulge the officer (allegedly) saw provided the reasonable suspicion necessary to frisk him. But in August 2025, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals threw out his conviction. As the court explained, the test for whether a defendant is “seized” is whether an “objective and reasonable person in the defendant’s shoes” would have felt free to end the conversation with police—an analysis that requires the court to consider, among many other factors, the “objective reality that people of color face during interactions with law enforcement.”

The six Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have made one thing clear: People may have rights, but in many cases they have no way to enforce them. Four decisions released this week have that paradox at their core.

Two of them, both issued Tuesday, held that the plaintiffs lacked “causes of action”—the legal authorization to sue to vindicate their federal rights. In Cisco v. Doe, practitioners of the Falun Gong religion claimed that they were persecuted by the Chinese government and that Cisco’s surveillance technology helped China identify and torture them. The six Republican appointees said the victims could not sue Cisco under the Alien Tort Statute, a law enacted in 1789 that allows “any civil action by an alien for a tort” that is “committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.” In another case, Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections, a Rastafarian prisoner had attempted to sue the correctional officers who had forcibly held him down and shaved his dreadlocks—in violation of his religious practices—after he had handed them a judicial decision telling them they could not do so. Here the six Republican appointees said that the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act does not allow people to bring claims for money damages against the individual correctional officers who are subject to the act’s obligations.

In both of these cases, the majority ruled expansively, issuing sweeping legal proclamations that will have serious consequences for people whose rights are violated. In Cisco, the justices didn’t just say that Falun Gong practitioners couldn’t sue a corporation for enabling their torture. They said that courts could not recognize any causes of action under the Alien Tort Statute for violations of the law of nations that did not exist when the statute was enacted in 1789. It is up to Congress to authorize causes of action for newly recognized features of the law of nations, even though Congress had already created a cause of action for violations of the law of nations—the Alien Tort Statute itself. The Court’s decision will bar suits by victims of any human-rights abuses, because human-rights protections became part of international law in the 20th century.

Landor did to another set of legal protections—spending-clause statutes—what Cisco did to international law. Spending-clause statutes are the set of laws in which Congress has offered states money, provided that the states adhere to various conditions. In Landor, the condition was that states would agree to respect the religious-freedom rights of incarcerated people. The majority in Landor said that the conditions in those spending programs generally couldn’t be enforced against the state officers who are supposedly bound by those conditions. The Court said Congress didn’t have the power to impose liability on the individual government employees who didn’t personally agree to comply with the conditions that are part of the spending programs—and that state and local governments agree to when they accept federal funds.