<p>WASHINGTON — US Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan on Tuesday said the court's conservative majority has undermined democracy and "created a race to the bottom" in how congressional districts are drawn, Reuters reported. Kagan, one of the court's three liberal justices, was speaking to students at Catholic University's law school.</p><p>Kagan said the conservatives have enabled increased political polarisation by not reining in partisan gerrymandering — states redrawing electoral district boundaries based on voters' partisan leanings to boost a party's candidates. "Both political parties have been engaged in a race to the bottom in terms of doing these partisan gerrymanders, effectively depriving masses of citizens of their rights to voting equality," she said. Partisan gerrymandering is driving candidates "toward the extremes, because the only thing anybody has to worry about anymore is being primaried," Kagan said.</p><p>"It is making what I think is unfortunately a too polarized country even more so," Kagan said. "In this election, and the next election, we are seeing large states with substantial numbers of people who vote for Republicans and who vote for Democrats, and the states are going to be tried to turn all red or all blue in a way that I think is very destructive to our democracy."</p><p>The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, in April gutted a pillar of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 civil rights law aimed at preventing racial discrimination in voting, Reuters reported. That ruling prompted a round of redistricting across the South to eliminate US House districts where Black voters make up a majority or near-majority, as Republican-led states moved to take advantage of the decision ahead of the November midterm elections, in which President Donald Trump's Republican Party is seeking to retain control of Congress. At Trump's urging, Republican-governed Texas redrew its electoral map last year to flip Democratic-held House seats, while Democratic-led California then reconfigured its map to target Republican-held seats.</p><p>Kagan, an appointee of former Democratic President Barack Obama, said the court's conservatives did not appreciate the real-world impact of their April voting-rights decision, or their June decision that struck down a cap on the amount of money parties can spend on campaigns with input from candidates. "I do think in all these areas the court has blinded itself to the very deleterious effects of their rulings on how the political system works and has created a democracy that doesn't work as well as it should," she said. She added that the June campaign-finance decision has created opportunities for donors to corrupt candidates: "I think you know the people of America look around this political system and think that all this money, chasing all these political candidates, is a nightmare, and they're right." Sources: Reuters (Jan Wolfe), reported Oct. 20.</p>