Unfiltered Millennial

Author’s Note: Well this year is off to a resounding success…Not. As you can tell, I have struggled to meet my own schedule. I realized that I was too aggressive in estimating the time needed as I tried to figure out how to make it work. But I am still figuring out how to reassess my free time. I also need to manage the time needed to research the content for you. But in the meantime I give you my first book review of 2025.

Kicking off 2025 with the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States have made many in our social circles feel hopeless about the future. I on the other hand mainly have questions around how we got where we are today. That is where this first book comes in, The Court v. The Voters: The Troubling Story of How the Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights by Joshua A. Douglas. 

Douglas is a law professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law and host of the podcast Democracy Optimist. He is also the author of Vote for US: How to Take Back Our Elections and Change the Future of Voting. His work has appeared in various publications including The New York Times, Huffington Post and USA Today.

The premise of his book is that over decades the U.S. Supreme Court has been dedicated to slowly stripping away the rights of voters and giving more power to state legislatures. The interesting fact about that is that state legislators have inherent self interest in keeping their position. So as they get more power and the U.S. Supreme Court yields more ground to those state legislatures, the loss of voting rights and efforts to make it tougher to engage in voting means that it is easier for incumbents to keep their positions of power while getting to ignore the very people voting them into office.

Douglas takes us through a historic review and gives color behind nine of the most pivotal cases that slowly stripped away voting rights. Some cases, Citizens United and Shelby County, were recent and still wreak havoc on citizens trying to engage in their most basic right. But also provides the color of voting for Donald Duck and the ability of independent candidates even getting access to the ballot.

Douglas’ analysis of these cases tie them altogether in the cohesive plot of the Supreme Court to protect the politicians over the voters. Instead of acting as the non-political arbiter of protecting the rights of the governed, the Supreme Court put their lot in with those that have power and want to keep it.

The particularly interesting examples include how the Supreme Court would take narrow decisions that they themselves wrote to later justify much larger and more impactful decisions. The best example of this was in Douglas’ chapter on Shelby County v. Holder. Douglas illuminated how a little known case to the general public, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder, would set the stage for the total evisceration of the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance provisions in Shelby County.

The Court knew it would be tough and they couldn’t find five votes to create a landmark decision in Northwest Austin so Chief Justice Roberts instead “bailed out” the small utility from the Voting Rights Act requirements while insinuating the Court had “serious misgivings” about the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act. Then when a new case from Shelby County, Alabama came before a different court with a more conservative tilt. Chief Roberts wrote another opinion citing his own precedent that he created to take away Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Douglas proves out his theory that the Supreme Court has chosen one group over another. They decided that they would throw their lot in with the politicians who use their powers to limit our rights to make their reelections easier. It is much easier to keep your job when those tasked with electing their officials are limited in their ability to vote.

To be clear, this is not a Republican nor Democrat issue. This is a societal issue. Both parties at different levels limit the rights of the voters through redistricting, unlimited funding from special interests at the expense of voters and restricting who actually can vote. So the question is where do we go from here?

Douglas argues that we have to fight at the state level and through state courts to expand and sustain voters’ rights. Many state constitutions include a right to the ballot at the state level. As voting and election administration is left to the states, challenges to laws through state constitutions persist at the state level and aren’t addressed by federal courts typically unless there is a U.S. Constitution issue. This strategy makes a lot of sense and Douglas makes a strong argument for an active fight at the state level. 

While I applaud and in part agree with Douglas’ prescription, I believe that some of these issues have to be addressed at the federal level. While we can’t depend on the Supreme Court, we can work on electing members of Congress dedicated to confirming the rights of U.S. citizens to vote. Is that an easy prescription? No. But it is the only way we get to a place where we don’t have a patchwork of rights dependent on what state you live in.

Overall, Douglas work provides an excellent review of how conservatives on the Supreme Court have slowly but surely chipped away at our rights to join in our democracy. The only way to fight back is by starting to take step by step to start to rebuild the strong foundation that voting rights can offer for a legitimate and vibrant democracy.