Kagan says Supreme Court rulings weakened democracy and intensified polarization

Louisiana’s map and party-spending limits were struck down

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan said the conservative majority’s recent decisions on redistricting and campaign finance have undermined U.S. democracy and deepened political polarization. Speaking at Catholic University’s law school in Washington DC on Tuesday, Kagan directed criticism at the court’s 6-3 conservative majority, according to multiple reports relayed by The Guardian.

The comments came two weeks before the midterm elections and amid battles over congressional redistricting. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s congressional map, which The Guardian said effectively gutted 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.

Kagan, one of the court’s three liberal justices and an appointee of Barack Obama, said: “The court has kind of blinded itself to the very deleterious effects of their rulings on how the political system works.” She also said the court “has created a democracy that does not work as well as it should.”

Kagan 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.” Her argument linked the court’s treatment of voting maps to the quality of political competition and to voting equality.

She also criticized the court’s 2019 decision holding that federal courts should not police a practice known as partisan gerrymandering. Kagan said that as a result, “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 the 2019 ruling 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.” She said: “It is making what I think is unfortunately a too polarized country even more so.”

Her comments also focused on partisan mapmaking in large states. Kagan said: “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 returned to 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.”

MSI previously reported that Southern activists mobilized after the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act and that the South Carolina House passed a GOP-leaning congressional map after midnight. Kagan’s remarks now place a liberal justice’s criticism of the court and partisan mapmaking within the same pre-midterm fight.