This article from Slate contains a clear cry of alarm regarding a recent Supreme Court decision. This is what a court captured by "conservatives" looks like in today's struggle to maintain a working democracy. Read it, or don't, but please listen to the audio clip.
Just Wow.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/elena-kagan-audio-partisan-gerrymandering-dissent.html
Again, I find myself sinking into hopelessness about the future. Had our government been captured in 2016 by actual conservatives rather than spineless lickspittles to Trumpism I would be merely unhappy. But the current crop of Republicans (formerly known as a conservative party) is almost entirely devoted to maintaining an unfair electoral edge via too many avenues to keep track of. One black example is the aborted, yet likely still very effective attempt to add a citizenship question to our census. Of course that was primarily intended to depress the count of likely Democratic voters by depressing non citizen (and even just non citizen adjacent) participation.
Ditto making it impossible to maintain polling places on college campuses, ditto voting shenanigans such as closing polling sites and cutting polling hours in districts with "undesirable voters". And don't forget the expiration of the requirement that states under censure for prior racial disenfranchisement no longer need court permission before enacting changes (surgical in precision due to sophisticated data analysis newly available) guaranteed to do what would not have passed the judicial smell test. This ensures that it will take years for any judicial challenge to work through the courts as local efforts increase roadblocks to fair representation. And now it is clear that we have a captured Supreme Court to cement these anti-democratic affronts for generations*.
Too grim? Unlikely? Rather not look?
WAKE UP. (Not you, dear readers, who are surely horrifically awake)
*Unless there is widespread conscience recovery, soul searching, humility acquisition, or a strangely targeted fatal virus.