'Race to the bottom': Justice Kagan unleashes on Supreme Court conservatives

NBC News reports Justice Elena Kagan on Tuesday sharply criticized the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, saying it had undermined democracy with a series of rulings, including several that have prompted a new wave of legislative map-drawing that has increasingly eliminated competitive districts.

“Kagan, who has dissented in those cases, also took aim at the majority for striking down campaign finance restrictions and, as she put it, the ‘evisceration’ of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act that was enacted to protect minority voters,” reports NBC News.

“Part of the reason why the court got it wrong was a kind of lack of the appropriate concern or understanding of the consequences of their decisions,” Kagan told the Catholic University’s law school in Washington D.C. “I do think in all these areas the court has blinded itself to the very deleterious effects of their rulings on how the political system works and has created a democracy that doesn’t work as well as it should.”

Kagan cited the 2019 SCOTUS ruling claiming federal courts could not intervene to limit extreme undemocratic gerrymandering. And she also referenced a series of rulings that gutted the Voting Rights Act, including one this year that led to Republican states eliminating majority Black districts.

At President Donald Trump’s behest, conservative states redrew their congressional maps to maximize the number of seats the majority party can win in that state, often at the expense of majority Black districts. Texas kicked off the mid-decade redistricting, which forced blue states like California to try to mitigate the dame. This in turn, prompted still more red states to enter the fray in what Kagan called “a race to the bottom.”

The lopsided maps deny people “their rights to voting equality,” she said, and they have the effect of “driving people away from the center, towards the wings, toward the extremes” because candidates only have to worry about winning the primary. She added that the failure of the court to take action on the issue is “making what I think is unfortunately a too polarized country even more so.”

In addition, the conservative court majority consistently struck down campaign finance restrictions, which allows parties to flood campaigns with cash.

“I think you know the people of America look around this political system and think that all this money, chasing all these political candidates, is a nightmare, and they’re right,” she said during a question-and-answer session with professor Joel Alicea.