Yesterday, focusing on the 5-4 decision reinstating Alabama's racial gerrymander, I posted critical comments regarding the partisan majority that dominates the Supreme Court. In this morning's Los Angeles Times, Dean Edwin Chemerinsky, of Berkeley Law, offers an op-ed titled, "Conservative justices are helping elect Republicans". While Chemerinsky does not use Linda Greenhouse's raw power play language, he goes further than her in suggesting that their decision can hardly be understood as "anything other than an effort by the conservative justices to help Republicans in the midterms," concluding:
Now it appears that the conservatives are ready to limit the use of the Voting Rights Act to prohibit discrimination in redistricting. It is surely not coincidental that all of these rulings by Republican-appointed justices help Republicans in elections and hurt Democrats.
As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, this ruling allows to stand a “violation of a law this Court once knew to buttress all of American democracy.” Time and again, the court’s conservatives have shown that they are perfectly willing to ignore this principle.
Linda Greenhouse, writing in the New York Times ("The Supreme Court Has Crossed the Rubicon"), never acknowledges the agenda of the Republican Party, but does excoriate the majority for trampling on established precedents, principles, and processes:
What happened Monday night was a raw power play by a runaway majority that seems to recognize no stopping point. It bears emphasizing that the majority’s agenda of cutting back on the scope of the Voting Rights Act is Chief Justice Roberts’s agenda too. He made that abundantly clear in the past and suggested it in a kind of code on Monday with his bland observation that the court’s Voting Rights Act precedents “have engendered considerable disagreement and uncertainty regarding the nature and contours of a vote dilution claim.” But in his view, that was an argument to be conducted in the next Supreme Court term while permitting the district court’s decision to take effect now.
Further, she writes: "It’s impossible not to conclude that what we see at work is not some neutral principle guiding the Supreme Court’s intervention but simply whether a majority likes or doesn’t like what a lower court has done."