Jennifer Rubin WaPo column:

It is hard to come to any other conclusion with this Supreme Court, after it destroyed Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and crafted an entirely new set of rules for the VRA’s Section 2, making it even harder to prove voting discrimination. This court is clearly hostile to the Voting Rights Act, which Congress passed to correct historical voting discrimination that has suppressed the electoral power of minority Americans.

The court’s right-wing activists would apparently love to live in a nation in which “colorblindness” is the rule — as they seem prepared to establish in the court’s upcoming affirmative action case. One can argue that such a conceit is wrongheaded and impossible in a society still beset by systematic racism and glaring inequality. But the more serious problem with this mind-set is that it imposes the court’s own partisan preferences on the elected branches of government — and thereby on the people. If the VRA is to be rewritten, it should be up to elected lawmakers and the president.

The court’s order is yet another display of extreme judicial arrogance, the solution to which could include revisiting lifetime tenure of the justices, adjusting the jurisdiction of the court or changing the number of justices. In any case, should the court continue its descent into partisan hackery and judicial tyranny, it should prepare for a ferocious backlash.