Justice Elena Kagan sharply criticized the Supreme Court's conservative majority on Tuesday, arguing that a series of its rulings has undermined American — including several decisions that have prompted a new wave of legislative map-drawing increasingly eliminating competitive congressional districts, according to NBC News.

Kagan, an appointee of President Barack Obama who has dissented in many of those cases, also faulted the majority for striking down campaign finance restrictions and, as she put it, the "evisceration" of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was enacted to protect minority voters and has been reauthorized by Congress multiple times on a bipartisan basis.

"Part of the reason why the court got it wrong was a kind of lack of the appropriate concern or understanding of the consequences of their decisions," Kagan said at the Catholic University's law school in Washington, D.C. "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."

The justice pointed to the Supreme Court's 2019 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause holding that federal courts could not intervene to limit extreme, undemocratic gerrymandering — a decision that left the policing of partisan maps largely to state courts and legislatures. She also cited a string of decisions that gutted the Voting Rights Act, including one this year that led Republican-led states to eliminate majority-Black districts.

At President Donald Trump's behest, conservative states redrew their congressional maps to maximize the number of seats the majority party could win, often at the expense of majority-Black districts. Texas kicked off the mid-decade redistricting push, which forced blue states such as California to try to counter the damage. That, in turn, prompted still more red states to enter the fray in what Kagan described as "a race to the bottom." Because the 2019 ruling bars federal courts from policing partisan map-drawing, the new congressional lines are set to remain in place for the rest of the decade and will first be used in the 2026 midterm elections.

The lopsided maps deny people "their rights to voting equality," Kagan said, and they have the effect of "driving people away from the center, towards the wings, toward the extremes," because candidates need only worry about winning their party's primary. The court's failure to take action on the issue, she added, is "making what I think is unfortunately a too polarized country even more so."

Kagan additionally criticized the conservative majority's consistent strikes against campaign finance restrictions, which have allowed parties to flood campaigns with cash — a line of rulings that includes the Court's landmark 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision removing limits on independent political spending. "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," she said during a question-and-answer session with professor Joel Alicea.