The Supreme Court dealt a severe blow to equality in political representation with its decision in Callais v. Louisiana, effectively overturning the Voting Rights Act and dismantling protections against racial discrimination in voting.
The decision prompted a significant number of calls to reform the Court, with changes including term limits and a binding ethics code. Below are some select and illustrative examples of responses.
Current and former government officials
Congressional Black Caucus (CBC):
“We are demanding a vote on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act without delay. Our nation’s highest court has been compromised. The CBC will make it our mission to aggressively advance Supreme Court reform. We will work to establish term limits for justices to help restore independence, neutrality, and legitimacy to the Court.”
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ):
“I lead one of these pieces of legislation with Senator Whitehouse and others to give term limits to Supreme Court members. That could go a long way in curing this. The Supreme Court desperately needs reform.”
Eric Holder, former U.S. attorney general:
“Congress should impose Supreme Court term limits of 18 years, a binding code of ethics that applies to the justices and a provision that requires a new justice to be appointed in the first and third years of each presidential term.”
Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA), ranking member of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet:
“It’s an abominable ruling up there with Plessy v. Ferguson and Dred Scott, as far as I’m concerned. . . . What do we do? One thing we can do is pass term limits [for Supreme Court justices]. I’m going to be pushing that bill to the highest degree. And we also need to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.”
Advocates
Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law President and Executive Director Damon Hewitt:
“We must also pursue reform of the Supreme Court, which has become both logically and morally bankrupt. Our democracy depends on it.”
Legal Defense Fund President and Director-Counsel Janai Nelson:
“When the Court writes one month ago in Louisiana v. Callais that proof of intentional discrimination is still a basis for liability under the Voting Rights Act and then ignores voluminous evidence of the same, we should be outraged about the rank violation of principle and procedure. When the Supreme Court ceases even to pretend to be a forum of objectivity, we must call for its immediate reform. And we must have a Congress that will do the job.”
Academics
Nikolas Bowie, Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law and Daphna Renan, Peter B. Munroe and Mary J. Munroe Professor of Law, Harvard Law School:
“As the founding generation of Republicans understood, the Constitution explicitly empowers Congress to regulate the court. By contrast, the document says nothing about the court’s claimed authority to regulate Congress. Instead, the court’s alleged authority to defy and second-guess acts of Congress has been sustained only because the American public so far has been willing to tolerate this judicial rule — a choice that can be unmade.”
Joey Fishkin, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law:
“It is important for all of us to let Americans know that. It will be one of the foundations for an important argument to come, about the necessity of using political power in the elected branches to do two essential things: change the way we draw congressional districts across the United States, and reform the Supreme Court.”
Richard L. Hasen, Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law and Director, Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law:
“[Congress] will also have to consider reform of the Supreme Court itself, a conclusion I had been resisting until the Court made this unavoidable. . . . As I wrote in Slate last summer, ‘Any decision to strike down what’s left of the Voting Rights Act could kick off the start of a new civil rights movement and more serious talk of Supreme Court reform in the midst of crucially important midterm elections. Justices fundamentally hostile to the rights of voters place the court increasingly at odds with democracy itself.’”
Sherrilyn Ifill, Howard Law School Vernon Jordan Distinguished Professor of Civil Rights:
“We need a Supreme Court that is prepared to uphold a structure of laws that protect democracy in our country, and that has the integrity and vision to do what is needed to hold democracy in 21st century America. That reformed Court will need to be expanded in size, constrained in power, adherent to ethics, and populated with justices who have the legal, intellectual, moral, and experiential skills, combined with the integrity, courage and sophistication to fairly adjudicate the complex array questions and controversies that emerge from a multiracial democracy of three hundred and forty million people in the 21st century.”
