In her paper, Peretti first analyzed how SCOTUS handled numerous election law, campaign finance, and voting cases between 1969 and 2016. She noted that this timespan was dominated by GOP appointments, with Presidents Nixon, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush filling 13 of the 17 vacancies.
This conservative judicial bonanza resulted in fewer restrictions on voter suppression and tilted election rules to favor Republicans. Still, SCOTUS more often than not rendered pro-democracy decisions, as shown in the following figure Peretti cited from another 2024 study charting the proportion of court decisions invalidating barriers to voting or upholding campaign-finance regulations, sorted by each chief justice’s tenure.
Brown et al, 2023, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
It’s hard to ignore the steep drop at the end. Under Chief Justice John Roberts, whose term began in 2005, SCOTUS has completely broken with historical precedent in defending democracy. Much of that divergence occurred after President Trump added the latest three conservative justices – Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett – in his first term. Now, the right-wing Roberts Court has retreated from adjudicating election matters, effectively announcing open season on Americans’ right to vote.
So of course GOP politicians have gone hunting.
“From 2013 to 2024, state lawmakers in 31 states enacted 103 laws that created new barriers to voting, and voters in 28 states faced new voter restrictions in the 2024 presidential election that were not present in 2020,” Peretti described. “These varied provisions restrict mail-in voting, shorten voting times, require voter identification at the polls, reduce drop box locations, require proof of citizenship to register, and ban youth preregistration.”
Without SCOTUS’ longstanding shield, American democracy is deeply imperiled. Power-hungry politicians will enact election laws that benefit their respective parties. Democrats and Republicans alike have been guilty of such shenanigans, but Republicans take it to a nefarious level. In his 2022 book, Laboratories against Democracy, University of Washington political scientist Jacob M. Grumbach found that Republican control of state government was the single most powerful explanatory factor for democratic backsliding.
“The blatantly political path of the Roberts court’s Republican justices—permitting their copartisans to rig election rules to stay in power—is iniquitous and fraught with danger, both for democracy and the court itself,” Peretti wrote.
As a result, SCOTUS’ credibility has fallen from its historically lofty pedestal. Its job approval dove from 61 percent in August 2009 to 44 percent in September 2024, according to Gallup.
“The Republican Party is disproportionately culpable in this development,” Peretti concludes. “Its antidemocracy crusade and its devotion to capturing the court at all costs may have, ironically, triggered a legitimacy crisis and jeopardized the institutional prize it so greatly values.”
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