The two Supreme Court cases that could blow up our democracy

When the U.S. Supreme Court reconvenes next week, it’s going to pick up where it left off last term on the extremist majority’s path of destruction. Abortion, gun proliferation, civil rights, criminal rights, separation of church and state, climate change—everything that made life in America more fraught for everyone who is a white conservative man. They’re not even close to done.

That’s because there are still the scraps of democracy—we still have elections, despite their concerted efforts of the last few decades. In most places, those elections are free and fair, and the outcomes accepted. But that could all change with two of the cases the Court is taking up this fall. One would allow an egregious racial gerrymander, picking apart the last bits of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) that are still standing, and one could put radical Republican state legislatures in charge of picking our next president.

Last February, the Court’s extremists used the shadow docket to stay a lower court’s order to make Alabama’s Republican legislature redraw its congressional district map. The lower court ruled that the redistricting plan diluted the votes of Black Alabamans—about a quarter of the state’s population—in violation of Section 2 of the VRA. The legislature had basically put the majority of Black people in one of the state’s districts, diluting the Black vote in violation of Section 2, which prohibits any voting procedure that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race.” That happens, the provision goes on, when, “based on the totality of circumstances,” racial minorities “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” The court ordered the state to draw a second Black district.

RELATED: It’s time to break the glass on the five-alarm fire that is the U.S. Supreme Court