Drastic Supreme Court changes 'unavoidable' after revealing itself as the 'enemy': scholar
A prominent legal scholar warned on Wednesday that the Supreme Court just made reforming the institution an "unavoidable" part of future political administrations.
Richard Hasen, a law professor at UCLA, argued in a new op-ed for Slate that the Supreme Court's 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais "will go down in history as one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the last century." The case gutted "what remained" of the Voting Rights Act's protections for voters of color. Hasen said the decision will not only increase racial gerrymandering, but also strip millions of voters of "rudimentary fair representation" at all levels of government.
"It’s the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy, and a brazen willingness to reject Congress’s judgment that fair representation for minority voters sometimes requires race-conscious legislation," Hasen wrote. "It gives the green light to further partisan gerrymandering. It protects Alito’s core constituency: aggrieved white Republican voters. It’s a disaster for American democracy."
"So what’s to be done? The Supreme Court itself has shown itself to be the enemy of democracy," he added. "If and when Democrats retake control of the political branches, it will be incumbent on them not only to write new voting legislation protecting minority voters and all voters in the ability to participate fairly in elections that reflect the will of all the people. They will also have to consider reform of the Supreme Court itself, a conclusion I had been resisting until the Court made this unavoidable."
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