Hakeem Jeffries: Restoring voting rights, reforming Supreme Court top priorities for Democrats

If Democrats take back control of Congress and the White House, undoing the damage the U.S. Supreme Court has done to voting rights — and preventing them from doing it again — will be a top priority, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D) said during a speech Thursday.

His comments, delivered at a National Association of Black Journalists conference in Atlanta, offer one of the clearest indicators of the Democratic Party’s current thinking about voting rights as they fight to win back control over the House — and maybe even the Senate — in the November midterms. 

“Our focus right now is making sure that we win as many seats as we can in November, flip as many red seats blue, and take the gavels back so we can actually function like a check and balance on an out of control administration,” Jeffries said, “as opposed to what Republicans have been doing, which is a reckless rubber stamp for Donald Trump’s extreme agenda, entirely inconsistent with the vision of the House of Representatives.” 

“We can cut his presidency legislatively in half by winning the midterm elections, and that’s incredibly important,” he added.

But Jeffries recognized that Trump would be unlikely to sign any reform bills Democrats might try to send his way, particularly around rebuilding the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) — it was Trump, after all, who instigated the Republican mid-decade redistricting push last year. 

That wave of gerrymanders — supercharged by the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais this April, which eviscerated the VRA — led to the most significant erosion of Black Americans’ voting rights since the Civil Rights era. 

“We’re operating under the premise that the Trump administration and that Republicans have adopted voter suppression as an electoral strategy, and are going to do everything they can to try to rig the election in their favor,” Jeffries said. “We’ve already seen that through the gerrymandering efforts, and then the Supreme Court aided and abetted the MAGA extremists by unleashing Jim Crow-like tactics in the South, and you know we’ve seen that now in Tennessee, and in Louisiana, and in Alabama.”

Jeffries added that Democrats were coordinating with “civil society, the faith community, civil rights groups, organized labor, as well as civil liberties groups and good government groups,” on protecting the vote from federal interference this November. 

While Jeffries said Democrats will want to work on issues voters care most about — like lowering costs, reforming healthcare, and ending the war with Iran — he emphasized that they simultaneously needed to fix the foundations of American democracy, including judicial reform.

“There’s been a series of Supreme Court decisions that have eroded democracy in America,” Jeffries said, citing Citizens United, which unleashed Super PAC spending on elections; Shelby County v. Holder, which decimated the VRA’s preclearance provisions that prevented some states from enacting vote suppressing policies; and Rucho v. Common Cause, which effectively legalized partisan gerrymandering. 

“And then you had the final devastating two decisions,” Jeffries added. “The Supreme Court completely gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in the most recent Callais decision, and then the decision that, I think, has unleashed this unprecedented corruption on the country — the Trump v. United States case, where they gave the president basically complete immunity, as if he was a king.” 

Jeffries said he wants to repeal Citizens United by “either a constitutional amendment or a change in the Supreme Court,” adding that Democrats were “open to aggressively pursuing both.”

Pressed later for details on what that would look like, Jeffries demurred, saying he would leave it to Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee. But he added that it has to be done, citing the Court’s recent decision in Allen v. Milligan, which reversed a lower court panel’s ruling that Alabama had racially gerrymandered its electoral maps.

“If a three-judge federal panel appointed by Republican judges — two of whom were appointed by the current president — could conclude that that was a racially motivated map attacking Black voters, and the Supreme Court steps in and overturns that decision,” Jeffries said. “It tells me that they don’t have the credibility for us to move forward, acting like everything is okay and the status quo is acceptable. It’s not, and we’re going to push for dramatic reform of the Supreme Court.” 

During the Biden administration, House Democrats twice passed a bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, that would have repaired the damage the Supreme Court has dealt to the VRA. But both times the bill stalled in the Senate when moderate Democrats refused to kill the filibuster to enact it with just their slim majority (Republicans were unanimously opposed).

“That was a mistake,” Jeffries said. “What we’ve seen from the other side is that when they have power, they use it. And so I think one of the lessons has to be when we have the ability to move forward and get meaningful things done.”