JUSTICE KENNEDY: '9 Unelected People' Shouldn't Have So Much Power
It appears "swing voter" Justice Anthony Kennedy also thinks the court has too much influence over Americans' lives.
Kennedy told reporters in Sacramento, Calif. he thought the high court is deciding hot-button political issues Congress should be weighing in on instead, the AP reported Thursday night.
"I think it's a serious problem. A democracy should not be dependent for its major decisions on what nine unelected people from a narrow legal background have to say," said Kennedy, a Reagan appointee with a notoriously mercurial voting record.
The Supreme Court's conservative justices drew Greenhouse's ire because they made it pretty clear they're on the verge of ditching a key part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
That law is designed to make sure minorities get to the polls, particularly in the South, and conservative justices have suggested it's stuck in the Jim Crow era.
Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act in 2006, and Justice Antonin Scalia kept suggesting during oral arguments that this support was "somehow illegitimate," Greenhouse wrote.
"The problem was, he said, that members of Congress 'are going to lose votes if they do not re-enact the Voting Rights Act,'" Greenhouse wrote.
"Justice Scalia, that’s called democracy," she added. "Or it was."