We have a choice. Twelve ordinary Americans showed us one path. Nine elite Justices offer another.

You can help decide whether will be a nation with equality before the law or just another place where the powerful rule.

America has always contained contradictions. We have been at once a nation of laws and a nation where powerful people rule over others. Finally, we stand at the moment of choosing. We cannot forever be both. We will become the world’s first truly interracial, interfaith democracy and a model for how the world can work together, or we will be just another country where power is for those who have it.

Twelve ordinary Americans showed us one future. Nine elite ones are considering the other.

All of us have a stake and a say in the outcome- obligation and agency to shape our destiny.

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Twelve ordinary Americans. That’s who the state of New York asked to interrupt their lives and perform one of democracy’s sacred tasks. Day after day, they heard evidence under oath. They were instructed on the law. They deliberated. They decided. Then they went back to their day jobs among other ordinary Americans.

That twelve ordinary Americans are trusted with this awesome power, and that they used it hold a former President accountable, just as other juries have held other criminals accountable, is a triumph of justice is America.

House Speaker Johnson, convicted ex-Illinois Governor Blagojevich, and Republicans in high places across the country are calling the New York verdict a sham. It is exactly the projection we have come to expect from these guys. They attempt to steal an election, but claim the other guys are plotting to steal the election. They lie about crowd sizes, the path of hurricanes, random facts about their own lives, and big things like the justice system, while assuring everyone that it is the other guys telling lies. Projection and lies are so intrinsic to membership in their cultist party that employment at the Republican Nation Committee requires attesting to the creed that the 2020 election was stolen rather than lost.

They rant that the real verdict will come in November. Nonsense. Donald Trump is a convicted felon. Nothing that happens in November changes that. Politics is politics, but the rule of law is the bedrock, and politics doesn’t change that.

Or at least it never has.

Now nine members of the most elite group of Americans, threaten to undermine it all. They cannot undo the verdict in New York, but they can undermine the very idea of equality before the law. Shielded from accountability themselves, wined and dined by those with interests before them, and openly contemptuous of the other branches of government, the Supreme Court is considering whether former Presidents should be immune from prosecution.

At least two of them are deeply implicated in this partisan and cultish perversion of truth. One is married to prominent advocate for overturning the 2020 election. In the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 loss, Ginny Thomas was in direct communications with the architect of the steal, John Eastman, she emailed Arizona lawmakers urging them to reject the vote in their state, and she implored White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to stop the certification. Another flies insurrectionist flags over his home and his vacation home. Both insist they have no conflicts we should worry about when they sit in judgement about January sixth or about Presidential immunity.

Chief Justice Roberts, not himself implicated in the same way, none the less says it is perfectly fine for his colleagues to sit in judgment on these cases. Never mind that ordinary rules that apply to every other court in America would never allow it. Never mind that no reasonable person can look at these things and not see at least the appearance of bias. Yet not a single Justice has spoken out publicly to call on Thomas of Alito to recuse.

So far Congress and the Executive branch have been unable to turn the Court from its dangerous and self-destructive path. Dangerous because it threatens the very idea of equality before the law. Self-destructive because a Supreme Court most Americans see as illegitimate ceases to have authority.

A jury of ordinary citizens held one of the most powerful Americans to account. It was an amazing and powerful affirmation of the rule of law. Meanwhile, our Supreme Court risks its own legitimacy to consider whether Mr. Trump should be above those law, and whether those who attacked the Capitol to overturn an election for him can ever be prosecuted. The Court has already delayed prosecution on charges of trying to overturn the election. Now it seeks to allow judges who proudly share their partisan leanings to rule on both these questions.

Like I said, we are at a moment of choosing. Are we going to be a nation of laws, a place where we all stand equal before justice or just another place where those with power rule over the rest of us? Are the twelve ordinary Americans pointing to our future or the nine elite ones?

The answer is up to you.