Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan suggested Tuesday that some recent decisions by her conservative colleagues have undermined democracy, while admitting at times they had also pushed back against the Trump administration.
Kagan took part in a discussion on recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions while speaking at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law. She specifically took issue with cases like Louisiana v. Callais, which ruled in a 6-3 decision that race-based gerrymandering of congressional districts was unconstitutional.
In her dissent, Kagan called the decision the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act” and she continued to criticize election and campaign finance decisions made by the court.
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“Part of the reason why the court got it wrong was a kind of lack of the appropriate concern or understanding of the consequences of their decisions,” Kagan said, according to NBC News.
She went on to warn that decisions that undermined voters’ ability to choose their candidates were “very destructive of our democracy.”
“I do think in all these areas the court has blinded itself to the very deleterious effects of their rulings on how the political system works and has created a democracy that doesn’t work as well as it should,” Kagan said.
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She also criticized the conservative view of originalism in the Supreme Court, calling it “misconceived” and “not a very good match with the Constitution we have.”
Kagan claimed that these and other decisions have contributed to the country becoming more “polarized,” particularly around campaign finance.
“I think you know the people of America look around this political system and think that all this money, chasing all these political candidates, is a nightmare, and they’re right,” she said.
However, Kagan stopped short of accusing the court of being beholden to President Donald Trump, pointing out several cases where even conservative justices “definitely pushed back” on his agenda. Trump nominated three of the current justices on the court in Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
In a comment to Fox News Digital, Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Fellow of Courts and the Constitution Zack Smith denounced Kagan and what he characterized as far-left politicians’ efforts to delegitimize SCOTUS decisions.
“The job of the Court is not to play politics with its decisions. Instead, its job is to faithfully apply the Constitution and other laws as they are written. Justice Kagan has disagreed with the majority of her colleagues in some of those decisions, but that doesn’t mean they are illegitimate or even wrongly decided,” Smith said.