John Roberts: Bemused Spectator of American Democracy
John Roberts: Bemused Spectator of American Democracy
The chief justice's year-end report dwells heavily on the preservation of our civic life, without noting his hand in its undoing.
By MATT FORD at the New Republic
January 3, 2020
https://newrepublic.com/amp/article/156114/john-roberts-bemused-spectator-american-democracy?__twitter_impression=true
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Political violence is a serious threat to democratic systems, but other perils to self-government can be more subtle than rock-throwing. Over the past decade, Republican-led states enacted a wave of measures aimed at making it harder for Americans to exercise their right to vote. These measures tend to disproportionately burden nonwhite voters, who tend to vote for Democratic candidates. In states with a history of voter suppression, a mechanism in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 known as “preclearance” once required state and local officials to obtain federal assent before changing their election laws. In the 2013 case Shelby Countyv. Holder, however, the court’s conservative majority struck down the formula drafted by Congress to determine which states fell under preclearance.
“Our country has changed,” Roberts asserted. The country quickly proved him wrong.
Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, effectively second-guessed lawmakers’ judgment on the matter. “Our country has changed,” he asserted. The country quickly proved him wrong. Republican-led states—those once under preclearance and those that weren’t—began enacting a host of new barriers: strict voter-ID laws, sweeping voter-roll purges, and the closure of hundreds of polling places nationwide. The ruling may have tipped Georgia’s last gubernatorial election to a Republican secretary of state who championed restrictive measures and may have handed at least one battleground state to Donald Trump in 2016. It was one of the worst decisions handed down by the court in the last decade.
Under Roberts, the Supreme Court also foiled a decade-long effort to rein in partisan gerrymandering. Redrawing electoral maps for political benefits is as old as the republic itself. After the 2010 midterms, however, Republican state lawmakers across the country redrew state and congressional legislative maps in ways that sought to permanently entrench themselves in power, even if the electorate disagreed. Last year, the court’s conservative majority ruled that federal courts had no power to intervene in these cases, ending a decade of litigation that kept partisan gerrymandering in check. Roberts’s writings on the matter have already had an impact beyond these cases. Last year, the state of Mississippi cited his opinion in Gill v. Whitford, an earlier partisan gerrymandering case, to defend its racist electoral-vote rule from a lawsuit brought by voting-rights groups.
Democracy is more than just electoral mechanisms, of course. It’s also built on the public’s trust that elected leaders will work for the common good, and not merely for their own self-interest or the interests of those who can afford it. The Roberts Court has made it harder than ever to justify that trust. A series of rulings on campaign-finance laws, including Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and McCutcheon v. FEC, allowed wealthy Americans to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the nation’s electoral system. In return, they’ve received access, favors, and even ambassadorships. What’s more, the justices unanimously ruled in McDonnell v. United Statesthat elected officials could set up meetings for donors who give them Rolexes and loans without running afoul of federal bribery statutes. The result is a slushy interchange of money and influence that favors the rich and well-connected while freezing out everyone else.
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