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The Supreme Court’s new term could be even more consequential than its last one

Vox – The Republican justices who overruled Roe v. Wade are only getting started. “The headline of this piece is likely to turn a few heads. The Supreme Court’s last term, after all, was an orgy of conservative excess unlike any since the Court’s Great Depression-era attacks on the New Deal. And it culminated in the demise of Roe v. Wade, arguably the most closely watched Supreme Court decision since the justices declared school segregation unconstitutional in 1954. But this term, a potentially even more consequential issue than the right to an abortion is on the Court’s docket: democracy itself. A single case, Moore v. Harper, threatens to fundamentally rewrite the rules governing federal elections, potentially giving state legislatures (some of which are highly gerrymandered themselves) nearly limitless power to skew those elections. A second case in the Court’s new term — which officially opens on Monday, October 3 — also places free and fair elections in the United States in grave peril. That case, Merrill v. Milligan, could usher in a new era of racial gerrymandering where states have more freedom to undercut Black and brown political power than they’ve had since President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 — a law that the Roberts Court has spent the last decade dismantling piece by piece. If both these cases go badly, it’s not that America will stop having elections. But the power to decide how elections are conducted — which ballots are counted, where district lines are drawn, and potentially even who is certified as the winner of an election — could rest with increasingly partisan officials, including the justices themselves. And even if the Court were not hearing what could be two of the most significant election cases of the modern era, this would still be a term with enormous policy stakes…”

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