The Roberts court’s record for safeguarding voting rights is hardly impressive. Rather than view access to the ballot box as fundamental to a healthy democracy, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority prefers to pretend that blatant attempts to deny the vote to poorer, nonwhite Americans are “political” activities and therefore beyond the purview of what Alexander Hamilton assured Americans would be the people’s branch of government.
Whether in Shelby County v. Holder, where Chief Justice John Roberts blithely disemboweled the 1965 Voting Rights Act, or more recently, when a 5-4 majority (which ironically did not include Roberts) refused to void an Alabama redistricting plan that minimized the influence of Black voters, the court has sided with an aggressive conservative base that aims to keep control of government by limiting the rights of groups that vote against them.
It therefore came as a bit of surprise when the court refused, at least for the moment, to grant emergency motions by Republicans in Pennsylvania and North Carolina to reinstate gerrymandered redistricting maps that had been disallowed by their state’s supreme courts. The Pennsylvania petition was rejected because the case was already being heard in federal court, but no such technicality existed in the North Carolina case.
