Congressman Jim McGovern speaks often about Donald Trump’s lies and claims of mass voter fraud. As the last elected official to exit the Capitol floor ahead of the January 6th rioters, McGovern remains deeply concerned Trump will do all he can to subvert fair elections in November. Given burgeoning AI, deep fakes, crypto, and billionaires gaming social media, Trump thuggery and threats to fact-based news, civil discourse and voter suppression remain clear, present dangers.
On Feb. 27 the Greenfield Public Library hosted nationally recognized law expert Rory Little. Yale-educated, Little is a constitutional scholar who teaches at San Francisco’s UC Law School while spending half his time in Greenfield with his partner. He’s a go-to Supreme Court expert and contributor to SCOTUSBLOG, a resource for lawyers, journalists and citizens to understanding complex decisions made at the highest levels of US jurisprudence.
Little’s presentation focused on the make-up of the current Supreme Court. He offered analysis of recent decisions and took questions, including my own: Hadn’t the court shot itself in the foot when it ruled a sitting president is immune from prosecution for all actions taken while in office? Didn’t that threaten co-equal, counter-balancing branches of governance? He offered some possible reasoning for that outcome.
Score keeping isn’t my strong suit, but a clearly unguarded Donald Trump has been pouring in points from a far right corner since day one. In unprecedented subversions of constitutional norms, he rolls up the daily score as Democrats fumble along like they’re playing grade school hockey. Since January 2025 they’ve found the net but once — the day Senator Corey Booker stole Trump’s bullhorn and held court beneath the Capitol dome in a 25-hour filibuster.
The day-to-day scoring is a blowout. Democrats/Independents: one; Trump MAGA/Republicans/Independents: four hundred fifty-something and counting.
The day he retook office Trump showboated an executive order banning the name of the age-old international Gulf of Mexico from all future use in millions of government maps and documents. The Associated Press refused compliance on First Amendment grounds and found itself banned from the White House press room and Trump’s plane. The following day, with 1,459 more remaining in his term, Trump pardoned over 1,500 January 6th rioters, absolving the assaults, trespassing, breaches of peace and destruction he’d watched on TV as over 100 defending police were being injured.
He was ex-president Trump in July 2024 when his self-sought legal challenge on limits to presidential power was decided by the Supreme Court. He was surely cheered by this wording from Chief Justice Roberts, “The Court thus concludes that the President is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for conduct within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority.” Six months later Trump was back in office
Scoring that power-play: Trump: one; balancing co-equal, branches of a constitutional democracy: zero.
Barely constrained, he now fattens his fortunes as prices spike, while loosing unprecedented federal policing and ICE on states that didn’t favor his MAGA camp. He’s further exercised power in unleashing a techno-tsunami of international, AI-propelled bombing “excursions,” flaunting norms of international law and steering a planet and innocent populations toward a cycle of chilling, unrestrained, strike-first war.
But public outcries have grown. Facing his new unitary displays of unbridled power, that opposition recently held a third in a series of “No Kings” rallies. Held across all states, the large crowds garner solid coverage, but unlike Trump’s grandstanding, they score briefly as national headlines; then disappear. Meanwhile Trump’s stranglehold on the news media remains. He mocks the opposition marches while waging actual and theoretical war from Washington — testing courts, the Constitution and the rule of law.
I left Rory Little’s presentation grateful. He stayed on to answer a few remaining questioners. I was a block away when it dawned on me — how rare the chance to solicit someone who’s interacted with members of the nation’s highest court. I ran back to find Little, his partner and one last questioner. I waited, then asked, “Do you think this court is actually afraid of Donald Trump?” He considered that; then offered it was a question he didn’t feel comfortably equipped to answer, one way or the other.
Grateful for his candor, I offered my own thoughts that a democratic society retains a unique, counter-balancing power all its own: the court of public opinion. Noting Trump’s clear intent to spread unfounded election fear as we move toward mid-terms in the darkening days of November, that power remains with the public, latent, but self-evident as in the Declaration’s “We the People.”
A citizenry marching as an undivided nation in a First Amendment-protected Washington visit, voting with their feet to protect the integrity, the civil rights, fair elections and rule of law enshrined in the Constitution, is the public’s voice with a power to silence Trump’s attempt to inject doubt and chaos into our historically fair elections. Again Mr. Little didn’t offer disagreement, and in turn responded that a well-attended Greenfield No Kings rally last fall appeared to signal renewed public engagement. I thanked him, taking my leave.
Donald Trump recently made more of his excoriating, personal and denigrating attacks on court decisions and justices whose rulings he disagrees with. Without mentioning names, on March 17 Chief Justice Roberts offered this defensive statement about the threats such outbursts pose to justices, and the justice system, “Personally directed hostility is dangerous and it’s got to stop.”
Fifteen days later President Trump strode into the Supreme Court and sat directly in front of justices hearing arguments on his challenge to the 14th Amendment’s 160-year-old precedent of birthright citizenship. He later walked out, mid-session — a power move you’ll have to score for yourself.
Karl Meyer writes about the Connecticut River, and sometimes about the Constitution. He is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists.