A few days ago, I wrote a diary about expanding the Supreme Court as one of several key remedies to counter Republicans’ consistent use of anti-majoritarian strategies. Now Adam Serwer over at The Atlantic covers some of the same ground with exponentially greater eloquence:
There is no constitutional amendment, no federal statute, no state law, no half-baked legal philosophy, and no federalist principle that will prevent the conservatives on the Court from upholding Republican efforts to sever Democratic constituencies from the franchise. Whether Trump wins or loses in November, they will pursue this agenda in earnest. And with Barrett on the Court, it is unlikely that even Roberts’s rare defections will be an obstacle to them.
I’ve been criticized for being alarmist about our trajectory, including my panic over the willingness of four Supreme Court justices just this week to disenfranchise Pennsylvania voters by overruling that state’s supreme court on a matter of state elections law. But I cannot stress how important this moment is. If the Supreme Court is allowed to continue down its path of “sever [ing] Democratic constituencies from the franchise,” we may face an electorate in a very short time that does not have enough democratic voters left to give us a majority.
We need to strike while the iron is hot.