There has been a “deterioration of morale” at the U.S. Supreme Court, Yale Law School professor Justin Driver told Bloomberg News, as he predicted “there will be major fireworks” by the time the high court’s term comes to a close around the end of June.

Other legal scholars share that concern.

“It appears from the outside that there has been an erosion of comity and trust,” William & Mary Law School constitutional and administrative law Professor Jonathan Adler told Bloomberg. “This raises the concern that it could affect how the court operates and inhibit deliberation.”

The court already appears to be operating at an unusual level of enmity.

“Tensions are starting to boil over,” Bloomberg reports. “Back-and-forth sniping between Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Samuel Alito Monday night marked the latest sign of strain at a court that has become a prominent symbol of the polarization besetting the country.”

During last week’s landmark ruling all but gutting what remains of the six-decade-old Voting Rights Act, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accused the court’s conservative majority of taking political sides. Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative, called her claims “insulting” and “utterly irresponsible.”

More high-profile — and possibly highly-contested — decisions are to be handed down over the next eight weeks, and with them, more contentious opinions.

Justices are set to rule on President Donald Trump’s effort to eliminate birthright citizenship, they are to hand down opinions on transgender girls in women’s sports, and on Trump’s attempt to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.

On Monday, as the court cleared the way for Louisiana to eliminate a majority-minority district, Justice Jackson “accused the court of betraying its principles, including its past pronouncements that judges shouldn’t change the voting rules on the eve of an election.”

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“Just like that, those principles give way to power,” Jackson warned.

Jackson’s remarks “drew a fiery response” from Justice Alito, who said that her dissent “levels charges that cannot go unanswered.” Bloomberg reports that “Alito took particular umbrage at Jackson’s claim that the court was engaging in an unprincipled power play,” which he called “a groundless and utterly irresponsible charge.”

At the time, Justice Amy Coney Barrett in an appearance said that “collegiality is a decision you make,” as she shared that she and other justices spend time together at lunches and even dinners at each other’s homes.

“You have to make decisions to spend time with people, and particularly people with whom you might disagree, in order to forge those bonds,” Barrett said.

Pointing to what it calls the “Jackson Factor,” Bloomberg reports that Jackson, the nation’s newest justice, “has been at the center of much of the sparring,” and much of that seems to be with Justice Alito.

During an immigration argument, Jackson “offered up a hypothetical scenario in which an administration systematically restricted green card holders when they tried to re-enter the country.”

Alito called it a “conspiracy theory.”

READ MORE: How the ‘Cutthroat’ Gerrymandering ‘Arms Race’ Is Killing Democracy: Columnist

Image by Josh via Flickr and a Creative Commons License

Southern state Republicans’ quest to eliminate most of their majority-minority congressional districts in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s further destruction of the Voting Rights Act will effectively transform the House of Representatives and turn it into something akin to the Electoral College, writes The Atlantic‘s Marc Novicoff.

According to the Supreme Court’s 6–3 conservative majority opinion in Louisiana v. Callais, states can defend new aggressive gerrymandering maps by arguing their intent is partisan rather than racial.

Already, Louisiana and Alabama will be redrawing their maps, Florida already did, Tennessee might — and other red Southern states are expected to follow at some point.

“And so the gerrymandering wars, already awful, are poised to get even worse,” Novicoff writes. Democrats will respond, Republicans will respond to Democrats, and so on, but “voters will lose in the process.”

“The chamber could become something like the Electoral College,” says Novicoff. “Whoever wins a state gets all of its representatives, and the winners are there just to vote for or against the president.”

For 2028, redistricting could become far more extreme.

READ MORE: GOP’s Taxpayer-Funded Billion-Dollar Gift to Trump’s Ballroom Has a Fatal Flaw

“The removal of the VRA will make the arms race even more cutthroat,” Novicoff says. “Republicans could draw Democrats completely out of the delegations of Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee, and take another district or two in Georgia.”

Blue state Democrats are likely to follow suit.

New York, New Jersey, Colorado, and Washington have nonpartisan redistricting commissions they would have to dismantle. Oregon and Maryland do not, making redistricting even easier.

It’s “mathematically conceivable” that California, which has more GOP voters than any other state, Novicoff says, could send no Republicans to Congress. Illinois, as well, could “theoretically engineer a blue-wash.”

Then, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Kentucky, Ohio and Texas could follow, scrapping all their blue districts.

“Zachary Donnini, the head of data science at VoteHub, was willing to game it out,” tentatively predicting “206 safe Republican seats and 203 safe Democratic seats.”

That would leave the nation with just 26 competitive districts out of a total of 435, Donnini calculated.

Bottom line, Novicoff says, regardless of which party wins the redistricting wars, the loser will be American democracy.

READ MORE: ‘Down He Goes’: CNN Analyst Stunned by Core Trump Group in ‘Absolute Collapse’

Image: Public Domain by Architect of the Capitol via Flickr

President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom started last summer as a $200 million project that he repeatedly promised would be paid by private donations. The project has now grown, as has the price tag — to at least $1 billion — and Republicans are pushing hard to get the taxpayers to foot the bill.

“In case this isn’t obvious,” MS NOW reported on Tuesday, “the White House boasted last summer that the price tag for the ballroom would be $200 million, and every penny would come from private donations. By October, the price tag had grown to $250 million. Soon after, it was $300 million. Late last year, it was up to $400 million — though, again, the official line was that American taxpayers wouldn’t be on the hook for the costs at all, even as the White House went out of its way to hide the identities of donors.”

Then the calculus changed entirely.

Late last month, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was among the first Republicans to float the idea of taxpayers funding the ballroom, announcing legislation to foot the bill — to the tune of $400 million. The status of that bill is unclear, and it may not have been filed yet.

Trump used the alleged assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to insist that presidents need a safe space, and claimed that having a “Militarily Top Secret Ballroom” with “every highest level security feature there is” would have prevented the attack.

On Monday, U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) announced that the ballroom project expenditure would become part of a reconciliation bill — that’s when it appears the overall price tag jumped to at least $1 billion.

The Daily Beast reports that Grassley’s reconciliation package earmarks the $1 billion for “security adjustments and upgrades” linked to the ballroom project, including “above-ground and below-ground security features” of the East Wing Modernization Project.

READ MORE: ‘Down He Goes’: CNN Analyst Stunned by Core Trump Group in ‘Absolute Collapse’

As The Daily Beast suggests, it appears the $1 billion price tag is technically not for the above-ground ballroom itself, but for the security upgrades above and below ground that Trump has publicly touted.

“In Mr. Trump’s telling,” The New York Times reported last month, “the bunker will have bomb shelters and ‘very major medical facilities,’ including a hospital. It will have the latest secure communication methods and defenses against bioweapons.”

Republicans are split on the ballroom being funded by taxpayers, NBC News has reported, but most Democrats are opposed.

Meanwhile, Senator Grassley’s decision to include the $1 billion cost in a reconciliation package brings with it a flaw that could kill the project — or become fodder for political ads Democrats may want to run.

“Just flagging that now everyone gets an up or down vote on the ballroom!” U.S. Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) wrote on Tuesday.

“Under budget reconciliation,” Bloomberg’s Steven Dennis explained, “a motion to strike is always in order. So, yes, Democrats can force a vote striking funding for Trump’s ballroom.”

As of late last year, $350 million in private donations for the ballroom have been raised. The president has not indicated if those funds will be used, held, or returned to their respective donors.

Americans already oppose the ballroom by a two-to-one margin — before they were asked to pay for it. By folding the $1 billion into a reconciliation package, Republicans handed Democrats the right to force a floor vote. Trump’s team promised the ballroom wouldn’t cost taxpayers a dime. Now every senator will have to say whether they agree.

READ MORE: ‘Everybody Is Fighting’: Republicans Fear GOP ‘Dysfunction’ Will Blow the Midterms

Image via Reuters