John Roberts’ conservative SCOTUS majority 'rigging the docket' against voting rights: analysis

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is selectively accepting cases to the Court's docket in a long-term project to weaken democracy, according to a recent analysis.

In an essay published recently by Slate, legal activist Sarah Lipton-Lubet argued that the Roberts Court is marching down a path that leads to the overall erosion of voting rights in selecting the cases it chooses to hear in a given term. Lipton-Lubet tracked the number of cases the Court has heard concerning "core democracy issues" like gerrymandering, redistricting, voting rights enforcement, and campaign finance since the Roberts Court's 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision that gutted portions of the Voting Rights Act pertaining to racial discrimination.

She found that out of 32 such cases, the Roberts Court agreed to hear 26 in which it had an opportunity to overturn a lower court ruling in favor of democracy, and only six in which it could potentially overturn an anti-democracy ruling (the Supreme Court can decide to hear a case if four of nine justices agree to issue a writ of certiorari).

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"It’s not quite 'Heads I win, tails democracy loses,' but it’s pretty damn close," Lipton-Lubet wrote.

One of those six anti-democracy rulings was Allen v. Milligan, in which the Court ultimately ruled that Congressional redistricting maps that disenfranchised Black voters in Alabama were unconstitutional. Both Roberts and Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed with the Court's three liberal justices that Alabama's legislature needed to redraw at least two of its seven Congressional districts to allow greater representation by Black voters, who make up 26% of the state's voting population.

However, Lipton-Lubet argued this decision was an anomaly amid the Roberts Court's larger pattern of weakening democracy over time. She pointed to both the Court's decision to stay the lower court ruling in Allen while it heard the case, allowing the illegal maps to remain in place for the 2022 midterms, which may have been the deciding factor that helped Republicans retake the House of Representatives with a razor-thin majority last year. She also pointed to the Court's 5-4 ruling in the Rucho v. Common Cause case in 2019, in which the conservative majority agreed that matters of partisan gerrymandering were not in the jurisdiction of federal courts. This paved the way for Republican-controlled legislatures like North Carolina's to aggressively gerrymander maps that would virtually guarantee impenetrable Republican majorities for the foreseeable future.

"Roberts and Kavanaugh are shrewd political operatives who have dedicated decades of their personal and professional lives to electing Republicans," Lipton-Lubet wrote. "They are not afraid to play the long game. Unlike some of their less patient colleagues, they recognize the power of cloaking their anti-democratic project in a veneer of moderation."

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"By rigging the docket, Roberts and Kavanaugh can have their cake and eat it too," she added.

Read Lipton-Lubet's full essay by clicking here.