Election law maven Rick Hasen suggests that two 6-3 rulings by the Supreme Court (vigorously opposed by the justices in the minority) reveal the conservative majority as "hostile to American democracy."
"In one case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the court has weakened the last remaining legal tool for protecting minority voters in federal courts from a new wave of legislation seeking to suppress the vote that is emanating from Republican-controlled states. In the other, Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta, the court has laid the groundwork for lower courts to strike down campaign finance disclosure laws and laws that limit campaign contributions to federal, state and local candidates.
Rick Hasen, "The Supreme Court Is Putting Democracy At Risk"
The court is putting our democratic form of government at risk not only in these two decisions but in its overall course over the past few decades."
Chief Justice John Roberts, throughout a career stretching from the Reagan White House in the early 1980s to Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 (outlawing pre-clearance) to the Brnovich decision (even more devastating to the law), has waged a war against the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (as others noted today).
Today's decision was written by Samuel Alioto, who one court watcher deemed (circa 2014) "the most reliable Republican partisan" on the court. The majority opinion is an apt expression of the majority's longstanding hostility to the 1965 law, as Justice Elena Kagan suggested in her dissent:
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is an extraordinary law. Rarely has a statute required so much sacrifice to ensure its passage. Never has a statute done more to advance the Nation’s highest ideals. And few laws are more vital in the current moment. Yet in the last decade, this Court has treated no statute worse.
In the second decision the majority begins to retract what was an apparent silver lining in its notorious Citizens United v. FEC decision (which overturned restrictions on corporate campaign contributions): Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion (which insisted that "independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption") suggested that, while corporations could spend unlimited amounts, public disclosure of those contributions permitted voters to make informed choices:
The First Amendment protects political speech; and disclosure permits citizens and shareholders to react to the speech of corporate entities in a proper way. This transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages.
Today's Americans for Prosperity decision threatens to take that away, as Justice Sonia Sotomayer suggested in dissent; in Ian Millhiser words: "The upshot is that wealthy donors now have far more ability to shape American politics in secret — and that ability is only likely to grow as judges rely on the decision in Americans for Prosperity to strike down other donor disclosure laws."
Altogether, not a good day for democratic governance, voting rights, or the principle that citizens have a right to know which rich folks and corporations are giving money, and how much, to political campaigns.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion (based on decisions going back a decade or more) that in recent years the justices appointed by Republican presidents (that is, the justices that have formed the majority in most of the court's closest decisions) are collectively doing the bidding of the contemporary Republican Party, and that (as with today's cases) many of these decisions are fundamentally anti-democratic.
I intend to elaborate on and defend this view in future posts.