Kagan says Supreme Court rulings undermine American democracy

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan sharply criticized the court’s conservative majority Tuesday, saying its rulings on redistricting, voting rights and campaign finance have made American democracy work less well.

“The court has blinded itself to the very deleterious effects of their rulings on how the political system works,” Kagan said during a discussion at Catholic University’s law school in Washington, D.C. She said the justices had shown too little concern for the consequences of their decisions and had “created a democracy that doesn’t work as well as it should.”

Kagan, one of the court’s three liberal justices, focused on a 2019 ruling that barred federal courts from intervening to limit extreme partisan gerrymandering. Since then, she said, “both parties have been engaged in a race to the bottom” in drawing districts to favor themselves, depriving voters of “their rights to voting equality.”

She said maps that leave many voters with little chance of electing their preferred candidate also push politics “away from the center, toward the wings, toward the extremes,” because candidates in safe districts chiefly worry about primary challenges. The court’s failure to act, she said, is making an already polarized country “even more so.”

Her remarks came two weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm elections, as states battle over congressional maps. Texas began redrawing its map at President Donald Trump’s urging, followed by other states, including California, NBC News reported. Kagan warned that large states with substantial numbers of voters from both parties were being turned “all red or all blue” in ways she called “very destructive to our democracy.”

Kagan also criticized decisions weakening the 1965 Voting Rights Act, enacted to protect minority voters. The Guardian reported that the court struck down Louisiana’s congressional map earlier this year, effectively gutting a major section of the law. NBC News reported that a ruling this year led Republican-led states to eliminate majority-Black districts. Kagan described voting rights as “foundational” to a healthy political system.

On campaign finance, she objected to rulings that have struck down restrictions on political spending. In June, the court overturned limits on how much political parties may spend on candidates, The Guardian reported. That decision and the Louisiana ruling were both decided 6-3 along ideological lines, according to The Guardian.

“The people of America look around this political system and think that all this money chasing all these political candidates is a nightmare,” Kagan said. “And they’re right.”

During a question-and-answer session with professor Joel Alicea, Kagan also criticized a ruling this year that gave Trump greater control over federal agencies Congress had established to operate independently, NBC News reported. She warned of the “danger of one president being able to ride roughshod over all the other institutions of government and over the people.”

But Kagan rejected the idea that the 6-3 conservative court simply approves Trump’s agenda. She pointed to rulings against him, including one involving his attempt to impose sweeping tariffs. The court is “deeply conservative,” she said, but in some cases has “definitely pushed back on the president.”