Justice Kagan Removes Her Blindfold

The declaration on Tuesday by Justice Elena Kagan that the court on which she sits has “blinded itself to the very deleterious effects of their rulings on how the political system works” strikes us as a backhanded compliment of the first water. Lady Justice has, for some five centuries, sported a blindfold — a boon rather than a burden. The premise of that artistic license is that justices, and Justice, is best when it is impartial. Justice Kagan has amply demonstrated her erudition on art history, so there is little danger that her own allusion to blindness escaped her. Instead, her remarks to students at Catholic University on Tuesday amounted to a cri de coeur against the court’s voting rights and campaign finance jurisprudence. Justice Kagan called the justices’ skepticism toward the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a landmark from another age, “very destructive to our democracy.”Justice Kagan asserts that the effect of the court’s latest decision on the voting rights docket, Louisiana v. Callais, is to midwife “a democracy that doesn’t work as well as it should.” The court’s majority in Callais, though, determined that the use of race in creating a congressional district amounted to “an unconstitutional racial gerrymander” that was at odds with the Constitution, America’s democratic charter.The high court’s decision in June, National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, also drew Justice Kagan’s ire. That ruling nixed a statute limiting the monies political parties can spend in coordination with a candidate for office. The six justice majority reckoned that the First Amendment’s protection of free speech applies with full force to political campaigns, and that the restriction could not survive “closely drawn” scrutiny.Justice Kagan declares that in the wake of that ruling the “people of America look around this political system and think that all this money chasing all these political candidates is a nightmare. And they’re right.” There does not seem to be any evidence to suggest, though, that Americans reckon themselves to be in a lucre-tainted nightmare. Instead, the nation is on the verge of a fiercely contested election that could yet shift the balance of power in the country.Justice Kagan, our A.R. Hoffman reports, also took aim at the heart of constitutional conservatism — the doctrine of originalism. She declared that “the whole project of originalism is kind of misconceived, and it’s not a very good match with the Constitution we have” — meaning one written “for the ages.” The endurance of the national parchment could flow, though, from its rootedness rather than the relentless pressure to make it reflect the moment. These columns have made no secret of our admiration for Justice Kagan, to whom we refer as “Chief Justice Kagan.” The same notion appears to have occurred to no less an eminence than Harvard’s Noah Feldman, who in a video this week on X calls her “insanely skilled” and the “Queen of Compromise.” He speculates that “those powers of consensus-building might have made her a once-in-a-generation (Chief) Justice.”Is that possibility foreclosed forever? Democratic chances for the Senate rise seemingly by the day. It is hardly beyond the realm of possibility that control of the White House flips in 2028. Justice Kagan is just 66 years old, with Chief Justice Roberts having attained 71 years. So Justice Kagan could yet find herself in the van of the high court’s next liberal era. She is, and would be, a force to be reckoned with. Mind the blindfold, though.

Justice Kagan Removes Her Blindfold

Justice Kagan Removes Her Blindfold

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