SCOTUS v. voters: What's the solution?

Joshua Douglas is an optimistic guy. He's a law professor at the University of Kentucky, where he teaches election law and voting rights. While the country as whole has been wracked by a wave of anti-voting rights legislation in the wake of the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 insurrection, Kentucky managed to pass a new bipartisan law that both expanded voting rights and addressed Republicans' supposed security concerns. So Douglas, who is acutely aware of how recent Supreme Court decisions have eroded voting rights and democracy itself, wanted to write a book about reversing that erosion, proposing a “grand election compromise” that would both strengthen democracy and reform the court in ways both Democrats and Republicans could support.  

“That's great, I love it. That's your conclusion,” Douglas says his agent told him. He and others who follow the courts closely already know that the Supreme Court has been terrible on voting rights, but the general public still wants to imagine the high court as a defender of rights. So Douglas needed to explain the problem, his agent said, before providing the solution. So was born “The Court v. The Voters: The Troubling Story of How the Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights.” 

Each chapter focuses on a case in which the Supreme Court has eroded voter rights in some way. Where two or more cases have eroded rights in similar ways, those are presented in order, offering a grand overview of how the court has undermined democracy. Some are well known and infamous decisions, like Citizens United and Bush v. Gore, and others are well known to voting-rights activists, such as Shelby County v. Holder. Others are more obscure, but they all played a role in bringing us where we are today, with individual voting rights dramatically diminished from a high point under Chief Justice Earl Warren's court during the 1960s. Yet Douglas' book is anything but a dry, analytical legal brief. The stories of individuals involved in these cases feature prominently in each chapter, bringing the issues vividly alive. I recently spoke with Douglas via Zoom. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.