Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right's Fifty-Year Plot to Control American Elections
“‘They don’t elect us. If they don’t like what we’re doing, it’s more or less just too bad.’”
“This would become John Roberts’ life work,” says Charles freed, a Harvard Law School professor who served in the Reagan administration as solicitor general, the government's lead voice before the US Supreme Court, undermining voter rights and the Voting Rights Act. “Conservatives had a mission: used the courts to advance political policies that would not be won on the at the ballot box. By the time Reagan took office, they had placed the architect of the original plan directly onto the US Supreme Court, where he promptly delivered resounding rebukes to voting rights.”
Making it more difficult to vote was just one way in which author David Daley claims that a group of super wealthy and ultra conservative men (mostly) and women have been trying to undermine democracy believing that decision-making and leadership should be in the hands of an elite few who are much better able to run the United States as it should be run.
Roberts, now Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who waxed poetically in the Senate Judiciary Committee about the cornfields of his Hoosier upbringing but who really lived in a ritzy all-white beach enclave on Lake Michigan and attended prep schools, is just one of many people Daley cites as hiding from the public their true agenda to get their way. The Voting Rights Act (VRA) was popular, and conservatives knew they would never be able to defeat it legislatively. But they could do so by getting conservative judges who were, in Daley’s words, true believers into positions of power. Voting rights would no longer necessarily be up to the Federal government but instead be a state’s rights issue.
Roberts led the way in gutting the VRA in the decision made in the case of Shelby County vs. Holder, arguing in part that racism no longer existed in America so the law was not needed,
Daley says this led to large disparities in white and non-white voting rates in states where the chief justice removed federal oversight.
Between 2010 and 2022, the turnout gap between white voters and voters of color grew by 5 percentage points, to 18 and the turnout gap doubled compared to the rest of the nation in certain places under GOP control.
This decision, along with the Citizen United ruling which let hordes of dark and corporate money be used in political campaigns along with extreme gerrymandering, changed the course of history in ways. Texas, under Greg Abbott now the governor but then the state attorney general, acted upon it immediately. Up until then, Texas had one of the most stringent voter protection laws. That changed quickly with a disenfranchisement of minorities and the poor. In Texas, you now need to present certain types of ID to vote. Gun licenses made the list of what was approved while college IDs did not.
But Roberts is just one of many people Daley mentions in his book. And it’s an interesting group, consumed by the need to remake this country into, some would argue, an oligarchy or autocracy.
Daley wrote this book before the election, but he argued that much of what was put into place could have dire consequences for Biden’s chance of being re-elected. Of course, Biden dropped out and Kamala Harris, his vice president took his place. But the consequences Daley foresaw happened in the way she feared. Too bad for democracy if this happens, Daley implies. But the true believers think they know what’s best and there’s little that can be done to stop them now.
As Roberts would sum it up in a rare interview on C-SPAN, “They don’t elect us. If they don’t like what we’re doing, it’s more or less just too bad.”