Justice Elena Kagan told students and professors that recent Supreme Court decisions on voting and elections have left the country more polarized and less functional as a democracy, taking direct aim at rulings from the Court’s conservative majority.
The talk came Tuesday at Catholic University’s law school in Washington, D.C., roughly two weeks before the midterm elections that will decide control of Congress. The Associated Press published its account of the remarks on October 20, 2026.
Associated Press reporting carried by ABC News described Kagan, a liberal-leaning justice, sharply criticizing how majority rulings have shaped the political system. She focused on the Voting Rights Act, campaign finance rules, and partisan map drawing, and she noted that she dissented from the decisions she attacked.
Kagan argued the majority has ignored practical damage to how elections work. She framed the problem as one of institutional self-restraint gone wrong, not abstract theory.
“The court has kind of blinded itself to the very deleterious effect of their rulings on how the political system works and has created a democracy that does not work as well as it should,”
That line set the tone for a broader critique of how federal judges handle political maps, campaign money, and voting protections. She tied the Court’s posture to a political climate she called already too divided.
On redistricting, she said both parties have pushed partisan maps hard in recent years. She did not spare Democrats or Republicans in that assessment.
“Over the last couple of years especially, both political parties have been engaged in a race to the bottom in terms of doing these partisan gerrymanders,... making what I think is unfortunately a too polarized country even more so,”
AP material also linked a surge in map fights to President Donald Trump’s effort to keep Republicans’ slim House majorities in the November election. Kagan’s own words put the “race to the bottom” on both parties, not on one side alone.
The wire account walked through three lines of precedent that drew her fire. In a 2019 decision, the majority treated drawing voting districts for maximum partisan advantage as a political dispute that federal courts cannot police. Conservatives have also held that key campaign finance regulations violate freedom of speech. This year, the Court further narrowed Voting Rights Act protections that had helped increase minority representation.
Those holdings sit at the center of live fights over maps and ballots heading into the midterms. Readers tracking map wars have already seen how a Supreme Court voting rights decision upended Georgia’s redistricting battle and scrambled state-level assumptions about federal oversight.
Kagan cast the campaign finance side in blunt terms. She said ordinary Americans see large sums chasing candidates as corrosive, and she endorsed that reaction.
“The people of America look around and think that all this money chasing all these political candidates is a nightmare, and they're right.”
She dissented from the decisions she condemned. The AP report did not reprint full opinion text or docket numbers, so the public record in this account rests on the justice’s speech and the wire’s paraphrase of the majority’s direction.
Kagan rejected the claim that the conservative majority simply backs the president. She pointed to cases in which the Court has resisted Trump on tariffs, birthright citizenship, and mail ballots. That point matters for anyone who treats every high court loss or win as pure team sports.
She has made a similar institutional point before, including when Kagan declared the Supreme Court will not serve as a rubber stamp for any president. In Tuesday’s remarks, she again separated legal disagreement from the idea of automatic loyalty to the executive branch.
Mail ballot fights remain especially raw this cycle. Separate coverage has followed a Court fight over a Trump mail ballot order and a pointed dissent, along with later trial-court moves that cleared the way for midterm rules after injunctions fell.
Trade and citizenship cases sit in the same basket of friction. Trump has argued that adverse rulings on tariffs and birthright citizenship carry massive economic weight, a dispute that continues outside the voting docket Kagan emphasized Tuesday.
AP placed the speech two weeks before the midterms, with House control on the line and Republicans defending slim majorities. Catholic University’s law school hosted an audience of students and professors in the capital. Lindsay Whitehurst wrote the wire story under a Washington dateline.
The Washington Examiner also covered Kagan’s warning that recent decisions have hurt democracy, underscoring how quickly her critique moved through national political media.
Federal courts still face a thicket of election administration disputes before November. One track involves executive action on mail-in voting after a federal judge lifted the last injunction on a Trump mail-in voting order, a procedural shift with direct midterm consequences. Another track runs through map litigation shaped by the same Voting Rights Act narrowing Kagan denounced.
Investigators of public debate will not find, in this record, numeric House seat counts, full case captions, or empirical studies proving polarization metrics. What the public has is a sitting justice’s open charge that majority doctrine has worsened democratic performance, plus her concurrent admission that the Court has blocked the president in several high-profile areas.
Kagan’s targets are classic structural questions. Who draws legislative lines, and may federal judges second-guess partisan advantage? How far may Congress regulate money in campaigns before the First Amendment stops the effort? What remains of Voting Rights Act tools after successive narrowing decisions?
The 2019 map ruling, as paraphrased, put partisan gerrymandering outside federal judicial policing and labeled it a political dispute. Campaign finance holdings elevated speech claims over regulatory designs the majority rejected. This year’s Voting Rights Act move, as reported, cut back protections tied to minority representation gains.
Those are legal holdings with political fallout. Kagan wants the fallout treated as a reason to rethink the doctrine. The majority has treated the same questions as limits on judicial power and as constitutional commands. Tuesday’s speech did not announce a new case or a stay. It aired a sustained dissent in public, on a campus stage, with ballots looming.
Trump-related examples she cited on tariffs, birthright citizenship, and mail ballots undercut any simple story that the justices only move in one political direction. Related coverage has tracked how Trump says Supreme Court rulings on tariffs and birthright citizenship will cost the country “trillions”, showing the same friction from the executive side.
Authorities have not released a full official transcript in the materials summarized here. Specific docket numbers for the Voting Rights Act, finance, and gerrymandering decisions were not included in the wire account. No public results in this package quantify “polarization” beyond Kagan’s description and the headline framing built around her words.
Election officials and litigants still have to apply the narrowed Voting Rights Act standards to real maps and real candidate lists. State actors on both sides continue to draw districts under the 2019 rule that federal courts will not referee pure partisan advantage claims. Campaigns will raise and spend money under the speech-protective finance precedents Kagan called a nightmare.
Voters will decide House control in November under whatever rules survive last-minute orders and stays. Kagan’s speech adds a public broadside from the bench’s left flank, not a new injunction. Her insistence that the majority does not reflexively back Trump remains part of the same record as her attack on the election docket.
Conservative readers watching the Court care about clear rules, durable precedent, and honest limits on judicial power. They also care when a justice goes public two weeks before a national election and ties doctrinal losses to a failing democracy. Both the critique and the concessions belong in full view.
Constitutional order depends on courts applying written law, not on justices campaigning against their own colleagues’ opinions when maps and mail rules are still moving. Accountability cuts both ways: majorities must justify doctrine, and critics must admit when the same Court checks the president they say it favors.
