By Jan Wolfe
WASHINGTON, Oct 20 (Reuters) – US Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan on Tuesday said the court’s conservative majority has undermined democracy and “created a race to the bottom” in how congressional districts are drawn.
Kagan, one of the court’s three liberals, told students at Catholic University’s law school that the conservatives have enabled increased political polarization by not reining in partisan gerrymandering, which involves states redrawing the boundaries of electoral districts based on the partisan leanings of voters to boost a political party’s candidates.
In recent years, Kagan 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.”
Partisan gerrymandering is driving political candidates “toward the extremes, because the only thing anybody has to worry about anymore is being primaried,” Kagan said.
“It is making what I think is unfortunately a too polarized country even more so,” 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.”
The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, in April gutted a pillar of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark 1965 civil rights law that aimed to prevent racial discrimination in voting.
That ruling prompted a frenzied round of redistricting across the South to eliminate US House of Representatives districts where Black voters make up a majority or near-majority, as Republican-led states scrambled to take advantage of the decision. President Donald Trump’s Republican Party is seeking to retain control of Congress in the November midterm elections.
At Trump’s urging, Republican-governed Texas redrew its electoral map last year in an effort to flip Democratic-held US House seats, while Democratic-led California then reconfigured its map to target Republican-held House seats.
Kagan, an appointee of former Democratic President Barack Obama, said the court’s conservatives did not appreciate the real-world impact of their April voting rights decision, or their June decision that struck down a cap on the amount of money parties can spend on campaigns with input from candidates.
“I think part of the reason why the court got it wrong was a lack of the appropriate concern or understanding of the consequences of their decisions,” Kagan said.
“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,” she added.
Kagan added that the June decision on campaign finance regulation has created opportunities for donors to corrupt candidates.
“The one place where the court has allowed campaign finance regulation to operate is to prevent quid pro quo corruption, kind of money for favors, and the court never seems to see the opportunities for doing exactly that,” Kagan said.
“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.
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Andrew Chung and Stephen Coates)
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