“Before, if I understand well, the Supreme Court was better playing the role of protecting voting rights and it’s got a bit worse in the latest years. That’s right. Now, before the 1960s, the court was pretty bad. So it was really the 1960s was the high mark of the court protecting voting rights. Previous to that, there were a bunch of cases in which the court did not protect the voting rights. A good example is a case called Miner v. Happerstadt, which was about women’s suffrage before the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enfranchised women. This case held that the Constitution did not protect the rights of women to vote. So the court was, I think, pretty bad until about the 1960s. And then we had the court do what I think it should be doing all along, which is actually protect voters in a series of cases. And then we started the backsliding again. But what’s interesting about the past 40 or 50 years is that the court has not been explicit in what it’s doing. It chips a little way here, a little way there. And now you look back 50 years later and you say, oh, now we can see this is what’s happened. But the court was at this high water mark in the 1960s and then slowly and incrementally started to get worse. And now we see the problems that it’s created.
” #democracy #voting #learning