Justice Elena Kagan charged that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has blinded itself to the harm its rulings inflict on democracy, a broad attack weeks before the midterms.

NBC News reported that Justice Elena Kagan used a public appearance at Catholic University’s law school in Washington, D.C., to criticize the Court’s 6-3 conservative majority over decisions on partisan map-drawing, the Voting Rights Act, campaign finance limits, and presidential control of federal agencies.

The remarks came on Tuesday, less than two weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm elections, as states including Texas and California redraw congressional maps. Kagan cast those rulings as leaving the political system weaker. She also pushed back on claims that the Court simply rubber-stamps President Donald Trump.

Her argument is familiar from the Court’s liberal wing: when the majority declines to police politics the way progressives prefer, democracy itself is said to suffer. The conservative justices have repeatedly returned power to states, voters, and the elected branches instead.

Kagan says the majority lacks “appropriate concern”

During the session, which included a question-and-answer with professor Joel Alicea, Kagan went after the majority’s approach to consequences.

She told the audience:

"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,"

She went further on the cumulative effect:

"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,"

The Washington Examiner reported the same core critique: Kagan argued the justices failed to account for how their election-related decisions affect the functioning of American democracy.

That framing treats judicial restraint as a civic injury. It also arrives as other liberal justices have drawn attention for public comments of their own, including Justice Jackson’s remarks on impartiality that conservatives flagged as tone-deaf.

Partisan maps, race, and a 2019 line the Court refused to cross

Kagan zeroed in on the 2019 ruling that said federal courts could not step in to limit extreme partisan gerrymandering. In her account, that decision helped set off a “race to the bottom” as both parties chase safer maps.

She said lopsided districts deny people “their rights to voting equality,” drive voters “away from the center, towards the wings, toward the extremes,” and make “a too polarized country even more so.” When states nearly wipe out a group’s chance to elect its preferred candidate, she called it “very destructive of our democracy.”

Texas moved first on new maps at Trump’s urging; California and other states followed heading into the midterms. The practical result is political actors drawing political lines, the arrangement the Constitution leaves to the states and Congress, not lifetime judges.

She also described a series of rulings as an “evisceration” of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, including a decision this year that, in the NBC account, led Republican states to eliminate majority-Black districts. That is her loaded label. The Court has been narrowing race-based districting rules that critics long said sorted voters by skin color.

Court fights over election mechanics are nothing new. Recent orders have produced sharp dissents and public drama, as when the Supreme Court lifted a block on Trump’s mail-ballot order and Justice Jackson issued a lengthy dissent.

Money in politics and the “nightmare” line

Kagan took aim at the majority’s consistent record striking down campaign finance restrictions, the most recent in June. She put the public’s frustration in blunt terms.

She said:

"I think you know the people of America look around this political system and think that all this money, chasing all these political candidates, is a nightmare, and they’re right,"

Conservatives have long answered that spending limits are speech limits. Candidates, parties, and outside groups speaking about elections is core First Amendment activity. Calling it a nightmare does not make judicially invented caps constitutional.

The pattern fits a broader left project of treating the Court’s structure itself as the problem whenever outcomes disappoint. That impulse has shown up in open calls for structural change, including when Harris pushed Supreme Court expansion and Electoral College overhaul.

Agency power, tariffs, and the rubber-stamp charge

Kagan also criticized a ruling this year that gave the president greater control over federal agencies Congress once set up to sit apart from political direction. She warned of a “danger of one president being able to ride roughshod over all the other institutions of government and over the people.”

That is the progressive case for insulated bureaucracies. The competing constitutional view is straightforward: executive power belongs to the elected president, not to permanent managers who face no voters.

She still refused the full partisan caricature of the current Court. Kagan said the Court is “deeply conservative,” yet in certain cases it has “definitely pushed back on the president,” including on an attempt to impose sweeping tariffs.

In other words, even in her telling, the majority is not a blank check. That matters when critics paint every 6-3 result as raw politics. Split decisions and pushback cut both ways, as in other high-profile matters where the Court divided 6-3 and sided with a wounded veteran against contractor immunity claims.

Justices who defend major precedents under pressure have made the same point from the other side of the bench. Alito has described the courage required after Dobbs as threats and harassment hit the Court, a reminder that public campaigns against the institution are not cost-free.

What the speech leaves on the table

Kagan’s appearance put a sitting justice on a law-school stage arguing that her colleagues lack “appropriate concern” for how their work lands in politics. She named gerrymandering, voting rules, campaign money, and agency control as the proof.

She did not present new case holdings. She restated her dissents and her theory of harm. The majority’s through-line in those areas has been limits on federal judicial power, limits on race engineering in maps, protection for political speech, and clearer presidential authority over the executive branch.

Whether those results improve or degrade “democracy” depends on the definition. If democracy means courts rewriting election maps, capping speech, and shielding agencies from the president voters chose, Kagan’s indictment notes itself. If democracy means elections, free debate, and accountable branches, the conservative majority has been restoring the older design.

Liberal justices are free to disagree in dissents and even on campus. Voters still get the last word in November. The Constitution does not require the Supreme Court to manage every hard political fight so one side can call the result healthier democracy.