A Supreme Court justice delivered a blistering assessment of her own court’s record on elections just two weeks before the midterms.
Justice Elena Kagan told an audience at Catholic University’s law school on Tuesday that the conservative majority’s rulings on campaign finance, partisan maps and voting rights have deepened the nation’s divisions, The New York Times reported.
“In all these areas, the court has kind of blinded itself to the very deleterious effects of their rulings on how the political system works,” Kagan said, adding that the result is “a democracy that does not work as well as it should.”
Kagan, one of three liberal justices, spoke alongside J. Joel Alicea, a former clerk for Justice Samuel Alito. While Kagan has penned sharp dissents in election cases before, Tuesday’s remarks took on the majority’s broader record.
She singled out the court’s 2019 decision shutting federal courts out of partisan gerrymandering disputes, a ruling in which she wrote the dissent. Since then, she said, “both political parties have been engaged in a race to the bottom” to draw maps that favor their side, a practice she called “very destructive of our democracy.”
Kagan also argued that the court’s moves to loosen campaign finance limits opened loopholes for a flood of political spending.
“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.”
Kagan took aim at originalism, the conservative legal philosophy holding that the Constitution should be read according to its meaning when it was ratified. “The whole project” of originalism, she said, “is kind of misconceived, and it’s not a very good match with the Constitution we have.”
Still, Kagan pushed back on criticism that the court has bowed to President Donald Trump, calling that charge a “bum rap.” The Times noted that the court handed Trump major victories last term on immigration and executive power but also struck down his tariffs and blocked his attempt to end birthright citizenship.
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