A new study published on Thursday and led by my colleague Chelsey Davidson found that since the 2012–13 term, more than 80 percent of election-related cases on the Supreme Court’s hand-picked docket could move the law only in a direction that degraded fair elections.
In that time, the Supreme Court accepted 32 cases involving core democracy issues such as redistricting, ballot access, campaign finance, and VRA enforcement. In 26 of them, the lower court had issued a pro-democracy ruling. This means that the best-case scenario at the court was affirmation of the status quo, while a reversal of the lower court would restrict voter participation. By contrast, the justices picked just six cases where they might reverse anti-democracy rulings.
Reread the first comment I replied to, again:
Your comment implied that I was talking about something the Democrats could do at the moment, but wouldn’t, for the reasons I mentioned. At least, that is how you worded it.
The comment I was replying to was imagining a near term future scenario where Kavanaugh and Thomas were still on the court, but that Democrats held all necessary levers of power in Congress and Executive, which is what I was responding to when I said the party would be structurally incapable/unwilling to act.
And, as I pointed out, they don’t need the executive. They need 2/3s of the Senate. That’s just a scenario that’s not going to happen.
The best we could hope is packing the court, but that won’t remove the conservatives on the court, just lessen their power.
We came pretty close to doing just that, but sinama and manchin blew it up.