In a fiery 41-page dissent in a voting rights case, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan slammed her conservative colleagues, accusing them of ignoring the legislative intent of the 1965 Voting Rights Act as well as the high court’s own precedents.
Kagan’s fiery opinion, which was joined by the two other liberal members of the court, Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, accused her conservative colleagues of undermining Section 2 of the landmark Voting Rights Act and tragically weakening what she called “a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness.”
“Never has a statute done more to advance the nation’s highest ideals. And few laws are more vital in the current moment. Yet in the last decade, this court has treated no statute worse,” she wrote, according to The Hill.
Kagan also warned that “efforts to suppress the minority vote continue” yet “no one would know this from reading the majority opinion” and said the court in its 6-3 decision penned by stalwart conservative Justice Samuel Alito gave “a cramped reading” to the “broad language” of the voting law and used that reading to uphold two Arizona voting restrictions “that discriminate against minority voters.”
One is a 2016 Arizona law that prohibits the transporting of another person’s absentee ballot to election officials unless done by a family member or caregiver, a practice which critics call “ballot harvesting” but proponents say is necessary to give voters with limited mobility or in remote areas access to the polls.
The second is a longtime Arizona election rule that requires provisional ballots cast in the wrong precincts to be discarded.
Kagan argued that “in recent months, state after state has taken up or enacted legislation erecting new barriers to voting” and those laws shorten the time polls are open, imposed new prerequisites to voting by mail, make it harder to register to vote and easier to purge voters from the polls.
The court’s majority opinion upheld both policies and overturned an en banc decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that held the restrictions disproportionately impacted minority voters and thus violated the Voting Rights Act.
