Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan argued recent conservative-majority rulings are destabilizing democracy and creating a system that does not work as well as it should.
Fox News reported that Justice Elena Kagan made the case in a closed discussion at Catholic University’s law school in Washington, D.C., just weeks after the Court opened its new term and less than two weeks before the midterm elections.
She spoke with law professor Joel Alicea, a former clerk to Justice Samuel Alito, before faculty and students. Kagan, appointed by President Barack Obama in 2010, zeroed in on rulings covering partisan maps, campaign money, and Voting Rights Act districts.
Her message was blunt: the conservative majority, she said, has not grasped how those decisions land on the political system itself.
The Washington Examiner reported that Kagan criticized the high court’s recent election-related rulings and argued the justices failed to account for how their decisions affect the functioning of American democracy.
Kagan tied her critique to the 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause. That ruling barred federal courts from throwing out maps solely because they unfairly favor one political party. She had dissented.
In her view, the effects of Rucho stripped “masses of citizens” of their “rights to voting equality.” She also said the decision fed a “race to the bottom” as states redraw lines for partisan gain.
President Trump and Republican state lawmakers have pushed new congressional maps drawn to favor Republicans and House control. Democratic-led states have redrawn their own maps. Lawsuits and court fights continue.
Kagan went further on the broader climate those fights create.
"Making what I think is, unfortunately, a too polarized country even more so,"
she said, adding that the rulings are “driving people away from the center toward the wings, toward the extremes.”
She did not stop at maps. Last term the Court struck down federal limits on how much state and national parties can spend in coordination with their candidates. Kagan has described that approach as letting a party become an “alternative checking account” for a candidate.
"The people of America look around this political system and think that all this money chasing all these political candidates is a nightmare,"
Kagan said. “And they’re right.”
She also faulted a ruling that made it harder to draw majority-minority congressional districts under the Voting Rights Act. Across these areas, she argued, the majority missed the real-world stakes.
"Part of the reason why the court got it wrong was a kind of lack of the appropriate concern or understanding of the consequences of their decisions,"
Kagan said.
"I do think in all these areas the court has blinded itself to the very deleterious effects of their rulings on how the political system works and has created a democracy that doesn’t work as well as it should."
Kagan cast the current bench against an earlier era she preferred. In that period, she said, the Court sat in a “better place” because it was more balanced and no one could count on it to push through a full agenda.
"There was a period of time where the court was in a better place, and the country was in a better place because the court was more balanced, and it was unclear whether the court could push through anybody’s program."
“Nobody in America thought that the court was in the pocket of any one group or any one party,” she continued. “And the court had a kind of legitimacy. When the court has a legitimacy of that kind, it helps to create a stable country.”
That nostalgia lands as open pressure on colleagues who now hold the majority. It also sits beside a long-running progressive campaign to change the Court’s size when outcomes disappoint, including when Kamala Harris calls for packing the Supreme Court while eyeing another run.
Congress has seen proposals to alter the Court’s current size. Americans interviewed near Capitol Hill split over expansion, with some urging lawmakers to leave the Court alone and others demanding it be packed now.
Even as she attacked the majority’s election-law path, Kagan pushed back on claims that the Court simply stamps out a Trump agenda. She noted the Court has rejected birthright citizenship restrictions, tariffs, and limits on mail-in voting tied to the president.
“It’s why the president sometimes really has not very nice things to say about the court’s decisions and some of my colleagues,” Kagan said.
That point undercuts the loudest version of the capture narrative. It also fits a pattern in which the same justices who draw fire from the left have blocked or limited executive moves, much as when the Supreme Court kept a block on Trump limits to gender treatments for federal inmates.
Kagan has separately stressed institutional distance from the executive branch, a theme that surfaced when Justice Kagan defended the Supreme Court's independence in earlier remarks about the Trump administration.
The redistricting wars Kagan described are not abstract. Republican-led states and Democratic-led states are both redrawing lines. Courts are hearing the challenges. Control of the House hangs in the background.
Her complaint about party coordinated spending returns to an old progressive demand for tighter federal caps on political money. The majority saw those caps as colliding with free speech. Kagan sees a public that is sick of the cash chase.
The Voting Rights Act dispute follows the same divide. One side reads the statute as still authorizing race-conscious district lines. The other reads recent precedent as narrowing that tool. Kagan says the narrowing harms democratic participation.
None of this stays sealed inside the last term. The new term is expected to bring major cases on the scope of gun rights and state election integrity laws. Liberal justices have looked for procedural exits in other high-stakes fights, including when experts say liberal justices seek a jurisdictional off-ramp in a climate case out of Boulder.
Alicea’s role as discussion partner adds another layer. He once clerked for Alito, who has faced his own recent scrutiny over when to sit out a case, including when Alito stepped aside from a climate case against oil companies days before arguments.
Kagan’s appearance was closed to the wider public, yet her words moved quickly into political coverage. She framed the conservative majority as insufficiently worried about consequences. She said the country is more polarized because of the Court’s path. She said democracy works less well than it should.
She also described an older Court she liked better, one that could not be counted on to deliver any side’s full program and therefore enjoyed broader public trust.
Voters and lawmakers are already arguing over whether the answer is to leave the nine-justice bench alone or expand it. Kagan did not announce a packing plan. She did deliver a public brief against the majority’s recent work on the rules of politics itself.
When a sitting justice says her own Court has blinded itself and left democracy worse off, the dispute is no longer only about one map or one statute. It is about whether the left will accept losses at the high court, or keep treating unfavorable rulings as proof the institution must yield.