Elena Kagan Says Supreme Court Is Making American Democracy Worse

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan has a message for her conservative colleagues: The damage their decisions are doing to American democracy is becoming harder to ignore.

Speaking Tuesday at Catholic University’s law school in Washington, D.C., Kagan accused the court’s conservative majority of failing to consider the real-life consequences of its rulings on elections, voting rights, and the influence of money in politics. The result, she argued, is a political system that is becoming less representative and increasingly hostile to voters.

“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,” Kagan said, adding that the decisions have created a democracy that “doesn’t work as well as it should,” NBC News noted.

Her criticism comes as states across the country redraw congressional districts ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections, intensifying the battle over which party will control the House of Representatives. The latest redistricting fight began in Texas, where President Donald Trump urged Republicans to redraw the state’s congressional map to help the GOP retain power. California and other states later joined the fray, redrawing their maps to level the playing field.

Kagan pointed to the Supreme Court’s 2019 decision allowing extreme partisan gerrymandering to continue without federal court intervention as a major contributor to the problem. By declining to police the practice, she argued, the court encouraged both parties to manipulate district boundaries for political advantage.

“Both parties have been engaged in a race to the bottom in terms of doing these partisan gerrymanders,” she said.

The consequences extend beyond election-night calculations. When politicians redraw districts, they virtually guarantee their party’s victory, Kagan argued, and voters lose meaningful choices, and candidates have less incentive to appeal to people outside their party’s ideological base. Instead, they increasingly cater to primary voters and the political extremes.

Kagan also condemned the court’s treatment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the landmark civil rights law designed to protect minority voters from discrimination. Recent rulings limiting the consideration of race in redistricting have helped Republican-led states eliminate majority-Black congressional districts, further intensifying concerns about minority representation.

She also criticized the court’s repeated decisions striking down campaign finance restrictions, including a June ruling. She said the growing influence of money in elections has left many Americans rightly frustrated with a political system in which wealthy interests can wield outsized influence.

“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,” Kagan said.

Her concerns extended beyond elections. During a question-and-answer session with law professor Joel Alicea, Kagan questioned a ruling that expanded presidential control over independent federal agencies Congress established. She warned that giving the president too much authority creates the risk of one leader overwhelming other institutions and disregarding the public interest.

Still, Kagan rejected the argument that the court’s conservative majority simply rubber-stamps Trump’s agenda. She noted that the justices have ruled against the president in several cases, including his sweeping tariff policy.

Kagan noted that a deeply conservative court can still reject individual presidential actions while making broader legal decisions that reshape the balance of political power.

For Kagan, however, the effect of those decisions is troubling: fewer elections in which people’s votes actually matter, weaker protections for minority voters, financial influence over candidates, and a political system increasingly tilted toward party extremes.

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