A note on liberal democracy and counter-majoritarianism.

☑︎ The main purpose of counter-majoritarian checks, such as veto points, is to preserve the rights of subpopulations: to guard against the 'tyranny of the majority'

☑︎ Those rights extend to having some say in policy outcomes, i.e., if subpopulations have no input into governance because they're in the minority, then they have de facto lost the right of self-determination.

Notice that *neither* of these purposes implies that *disenfranchisement* is a legitimate counter-majoritarian mechanism in liberal democracies (aka democratic republics aka liberal republics). In fact, the opposite is true.

☑︎ The mechanisms here are, in fact, not at all counter-majoritarian.

They involve using electoral majorities to strip rights from subpopulations in order to maintain political dominance.

How do the "we're not a democracy, we're a Republic" crowd pretend otherwise?

They rely on a neat sleight of hand: they deliberately obscure the difference between the *individuals and demographic groups whose rights they want to strip* and the *party coalitions* that those individuals, on average, are more likely to vote for or belong to.

So the narrative of majoritarian tyranny is "Democrats imposing their ideology on Republicans"† but the *check* is to deprive subpopulations of rights, i.e., to engage in practices we associate with majoritarian tyranny.

†It's become fashionable to describe this as "tyranny of the minority" but that can depend on specific electoral outcomes; other times it's at least ambiguous. Instead, we should focus on the instruments, logics, and mechanisms. tl;dr voter suppression is not a "veto point."

☑︎ These kinds of instruments – such as  disenfranchisement and extreme gerrymandering – also subvert the primary purpose of legitimate counter-majoritarian mechanisms in liberal democracies: to protect the rights of citizens.

Obviously, rights come into conflict and political communities inevitably restrict some rights in order to preserve or enhance others.

But here we're talking about removing one of *the* constitutive political right of citizenship on the putative grounds that it's exercise *might* lead to restrictions on the rights of other citizens.

(I write "putative" as the stakes are often quite parochial, e.g. the allocation of rents and transfers.)

So even if disenfranchisement was a "counter-majoritarian" exercise, it would still be self-refuting and illegitimate.

tl;dr even before yesterday, SCOTUS had already stopped serving as check against majoritarian tyranny.

The problem isn't that it is failing to follow the will of the majority – it's not obligated to – nor, per se, that it's entrenching minority policy preferences

The problem is that it's a threat to *liberal* democracy, to the very goods that counter-majoritarian mechanisms are supposed to preserve.

The red line is already in the rearview mirror. There's no trigger worth waiting for. Expand it first, explore structural reform later.