Liberal justice says recent decisions on redistricting and campaign finance have undermined democracy and polarized US even more
Elena Kagan criticized rulings made by the US supreme court’s conservative majority this week, arguing that its recent decisions on redistricting and campaign finance had undermined America’s democracy.
“The court has kind of blinded itself to the very deleterious effects of their rulings on how the political system works,” said Kagan, one of the court’s three liberal justices, during a discussion at Catholic University’s law school in Washington DC on Tuesday, according to multiple reports.
She emphasized that the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, “has created a democracy that does not work as well as it should”.
Kagan’s remarks come just two weeks before the midterm elections and amid battles over congressional redistricting . Earlier this year, the supreme court struck down Louisiana’s congressional map, effectively gutting a major section of the Voting Rights Act. In June, the court also struck down campaign finance restrictions limiting how much political parties may spend on candidates. Both decisions were split 6-3 along ideological lines.
During Tuesday’s discussion, Kagan, who was appointed by Barack Obama, described voting rights as “foundational” and said: “If you basically get democracy down, if you get a well-functioning, healthy political system then you can count on that political system for a wide range of outcomes.”
Kagan also took aim at the court’s 2019 decision that held that federal courts should not police a practice known as partisan gerrymandering.
As a result, she said, “both political parties have been engaged in a race to the bottom in terms of doing these partisan gerrymanders, effectively depriving masses of citizens of their rights to voting equality”.
Kagan said that decision was pushing political candidates “away from the center, toward the wings, toward the extremes, because the only thing anybody has to worry about any more is being primaried”.
“It is making what I think is unfortunately a too polarized country even more so,” she continued. “In this election, and the next election, we are seeing large states with substantial numbers of people who vote for Republicans and who vote for Democrats, and the states are going to be tried to turn all red or all blue in a way that I think is very destructive to our democracy.”
Kagan also criticized the court’s decisions on campaign finance rules, and the increasing amounts of money in politics.
“The people of America look around this political system and think that all this money chasing all these political candidates is a nightmare,” she said. “And they’re right.”