Brett Kavanaugh went to dinner at Morton’s, a famous steakhouse, on Wednesday (6), but had to go out the back. Upon receiving information that one of the conservative Supreme Court justices was there, a group of pro-abortion rights activists went to the door of the venue, four blocks from the White House, to protest.
Kavanaugh would not have heard the protesters, but he left before dessert. Morton’s issued a bitter note against the protest. “Politics must not destroy the freedom to dine. There is a time and a time for everything. Disrupting our customers’ meals was an act of selfishness, an emptiness of decency.”
As the period of controversial Supreme Court rulings seems far from over, other dinners must be disturbed. After concluding a legal year in which he suspended the constitutional right to abortion, expanded the right to bear arms in public and reduced the federal power to curb pollutant emissions, the judges announced that they will address another important issue when they return from vacation in October: the elections.
The court will analyze at least two cases related to the topic. In Moore vs. Harper, state legislators from North Carolina question a state Supreme Court decision that suspended a redesign of constituencies that favored Republicans as biased.
If the Federal Supreme Court wins the case for the deputies, it could set a precedent for the country’s courts to not be able to question actions taken by local governments, which would open space for heterodox changes in electoral rules and, in the extreme, invalidation of the results of the elections. ballots.
In the process, deputies defend a theory called ISL (Independent State Legislature), according to which only states can decide questions about the electoral process. The basis of the ISL is Article 1 of the Constitution, which says that “the time, place, and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by their own legislature.” Thus, in a literal interpretation, state decisions could not be questioned.
If the ISL is found to be valid by the Supreme Court, the ruling could also pave the way for state governments to have even more power in presidential elections. In them, each state records votes on its own and only submits the totals for Congressional certification. In 2020, Donald Trump tried to force local officials to change results to give him victory. He couldn’t, but he tried until the last moment. This effort culminated in the invasion of Congress on January 6, 2021, when supporters of the Republican tried to forcefully prevent the confirmation of Biden’s victory.
The other election-related case the Supreme Court will consider is Merrill v. Milligan, in which Alabama officials were sued for designing districts that did not represent the state’s racial proportion, which effectively reduced the power of black voters to elect their representatives.
The Voting Rights Act (VRA), 1965, determines that there should be no barriers to prevent a certain group from accessing the vote. However, the norm has been weakened by Supreme Court decisions over the past decade. In July 2021, for example, the court upheld a number of Arizona restrictions, finding that they did not significantly violate the VRA.
In late June of this year, the magistrates sent another signal that the court may be poised to weaken the VRA. Judges authorized Louisiana to use, in the November legislative elections, a map challenged in court for reducing the voting power of black voters. Louisiana has a third of African Americans in its population, but they are a majority in just one of the six boroughs.
Redrawing electoral maps to favor one party, “gerrymandering”, is an old tactic in American politics that has been improved with the use of new software and the vast amount of data on voters’ preferences. In the US, each district elects only one congressman, who campaigns only in that area, instead of vying for votes in the entire state, as in Brazil. Districts are divided according to population data from the Census. Every ten years, when a new census is taken, the maps can be redone. And then comes the opportunity for gerrymandering.
“Instead of voters choosing their representatives, ‘gerrymandering’ empowers politicians to choose their voters,” says Julia Kirschenbaum of the Brennan Center in an article. “This tends to happen when map design is controlled by one party, which has become more common.”
Thus, the strategy can cause a party to obtain parliamentary majorities even if it does not have a majority of a state’s votes. The Brennan Center estimates that the redesign by Republicans after the 2010 Census gave them up to 17 seats in the House of Representatives over the next decade.
The electoral maps were redone this year, based on data from the 2020 Census. An analysis by the website FiveThirtyEight, which specializes in statistics, points out that Democrats now have six more districts where they are favorites to obtain seats in the House compared to the previous map. On the other hand, republican states started to have more solid majority districts. Thus, the tendency is that there are fewer places of intense disputes between the parties, and the polarization is reinforced in the country.
Although the redesign process was completed in June, at least 15 states could still undergo changes because the maps have been challenged in court, adding to the weight of Supreme Court decisions on the future of American policy. The court now has a conservative majority, 6 to 3, with three of them nominated by Trump, the likely presidential candidate in 2024.
According to the Gallup Institute, the Supreme Court’s approval in June reached the lowest level since the beginning of the historical series, in the 1970s: only 25% trust the institution. Judges have a lifetime term so they don’t have to worry about it, but protests against them have been increasingly frequent.
In Washington, activists have organized demonstrations in locations close to the judges’ homes. Even at home, they can end up losing the desire to taste dessert.
