The supreme court’s takedown of American democracy is complete |
Writing in 1943, the historian Henry Steele Commager delivered both a stern history lesson and a warning about the United States supreme court. The court, he said, had never been a friend to US democracy, and it never would be. For anyone committed to the advancement of majority rule, he added, judicial review “is wrong in theory and dangerous in practice”.
The danger that Commager noted was on full display on 29 April 2026, when the supreme court eviscerated section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As the Department of Justice explains, section 2 “prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups … or procedure that results in the denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group”.
But the Voting Rights Act decision is only the latest in a string of decisions in which the conservative-dominated supreme court has used its version of constitutional interpretation to wage war on constitutional democracy. Those decisions have opened the floodgates to the corrupting influence of money in politics, removed the federal government from the business of ensuring that states do not draw legislative districts in ways that disadvantage minority voters, and given the green light to partisan gerrymandering.
As we try to come to terms with what the court did to section 2, we need to keep those other decisions in mind. They show what Commager long ago observed: that the only reliable way to preserve and improve US democracy is to act democratically by winning at the ballot box and prevailing in the legislative process.
That lesson should inspire a massive turnout in the November election and a mass movement to pressure Congress to take steps to protect and reinvigorate democratic institutions and........