Taking Back the Supreme Court: Major changes are warranted to save a broken institution.

• Author: Blum, Bill

The U.S. Supreme Court is not a democratic institution. It consists of nine unelected elite lawyers armed with the tools and techniques of judicial review. They, not "the People," often get the last word on vital questions of social, economic, and even political policy.

Whether this is a smart way to run a democracy has largely been a moot point since the court declared in Marbury v. Madison (1803) that it had the authority to find acts of Congress unconstitutional. The big question today, as always, is whether the court can operate in a politically neutral manner and stay above the partisan fray while discharging its awesome power.

Throughout much of the courts 2020 term, which commenced last October, it may have been plausible to believe that the high tribunal was charting a moderate course, even with six conservative Republican appointees at the helm. In the mainstream press, a middle-of-the-road consensus had emerged that the court was only incrementally moving to the right, and was by no means the threat that some observers had feared when Donald Trump hastily named Amy Coney Barrett to replace the late liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

CNN legal analyst Joan Biskupic expressed the consensus well in a column posted online in mid-June, suggesting that rather than cleaving along partisan lines, the court was displaying more of a 3-3-3 alignment, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh to establish a dominant center-right bloc.

The center-right alliance, Biskupic argued, was proving effective in checking the more extreme impulses of the tribunal's most doctrinaire members, Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch.

No more.

Whatever validity the consensus may have had was obliterated on July 1, just before the court broke for summer recess, with the release of a stunning 6-3 majority opinion written by Alito in the case of Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. The ruling tore another gaping hole in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and signaled that the panel's rightwing ideologues were fully in control.

At issue in Brnovich was an Arizona statute that criminalizes the collection of mail-in ballots by third parties other than family members and caregivers (a practice called "ballot harvesting"), and a state regulatory policy that requires all in-person ballots, even provisional ones, to be invalidated if they are cast by voters outside of their registered precincts. Democrats contested both measures under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which permits challenges to election practices that discriminate on the basis of race.

Dividing along starkly political lines, Alito and his Republican colleagues handed the state a complete victory. Channeling GOP post-election talking points about nonexistent voter fraud almost word for word, Alito wrote that Arizona was justified in imposing the measures because of its "strong and entirely legitimate ... interest in preventing election fraud," which, he asserted, "can affect the outcome of a close election" and "undermine public confidence in the fairness of elections."

"The Brnovich opinion," says Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, "will greatly weaken the Voting Rights Act."

The opinion is especially bad when considered in context. "Eight years ago, in Shelby County v. Holder" Chemerinsky explains, "the court nullified provisions of the act [found in Sections 4 and 5] that required...