Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections

In this disturbing exposé, journalist Daley (Ratf**ked) recounts conservatives’ decades-long plan to undermine the Voting Rights Act and disenfranchise people of color. His nearly 10-year investigation—which included interviews with attorneys general, federal judges, Justice Department officials, conservative funders and litigators, members of Congress, and other elected officials—traces the Right’s campaign to “refashion the nation in their image” through a “takeover of the courts, the creation of new legal theories, and a carefully curated set of right-wing judges.” Emphasizing that the push to restrict voting rights is—unlike how it is sometimes portrayed—far from a recent development (within a month of the Voting Rights Act’s passage in 1965, there was a case before the Supreme Court relitigating whether it was constitutional), Daley highlights in particular the long-running involvement of current Chief Justice John Roberts. Tracing the arc of Roberts’s career, which, after law school, included work in the 1980s Reagan Justice Department opposing voting rights cases, Daley offers a trenchant analysis that paints Roberts, who has generally been depicted as a “model of judicial restraint,” as in fact at the forefront of a radical and intellectually dishonest approach to precedents that has gutted the Voting Rights Act and increased the Supreme Court’s power, transforming it into an antidemocratic institution. It’s a must-read. (Aug.)