Books

Orville Vernon Burton & Armand Derfner: Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court.

Erwin Chemerinsky:

• The Case Against the Supreme Court.
• Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights.

Adam Cohen: Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America.

Robert A. Dahl:

• How Democratic is the American Constitution?
• On Democracy.

Richard L. Hasen: Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections.

Adam Jentleson: Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy.

David A. Kaplan: The Most Dangerous Branch: Inside the Supreme Court in the Age of Trump.

Alexander Keyssar: Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?

Jesse Wegman: Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College.

ARTICLES

The Senate

Philip Bump: In about 20 years, half the population will live in eight states.

Alvin Chang & Tom McCarthy: ‘The Senate is broken’: system empowers white conservatives, threatening US democracy.

David Leonhardt: The Senate: Affirmative Action for White People: And why it’s time to make Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., the 51st and 52nd states.

The Supreme Court

Jamelle Bouie: The Supreme Court Needs to Be Cut Down to Size.

Randall Kennedy: More Foe Than Friend: The Supreme Court and the pursuit of racial equality.

Adam Serwer: The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century: The justices again appear poised to pursue a purely theoretical liberty at the expense of the lives of people of color.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: The Case for Ending the Supreme Court as We Know It.

Kenji Yoshino: A Supreme Court for the Rich.

The Electoral College

Jamelle Bouie: 2020 Shows Why the Electoral College Is Stupid and Immoral: It doesn’t just distort presidential elections. It infects the entire political process.

Alexander Keyssar: How Has the Electoral College Survived for This Long? Resistance to eliminating it has long been connected to the idea of white supremacy.

Kevin Kruse: Will the Trump-Biden election disaster finally convince us to scrap the Electoral College?

Pema Levy: Another Monument to White Supremacy That Should Come Down? The Electoral College.

Christopher F. Petrella: Slavery, Democracy, and the Racialized Roots of the Electoral College.

Throughline podcast: The Electoral College.

Jesse Wegman:

• The Electoral College Will Destroy America: And no, New York and California would not dominate a popular vote.
• Can We Please Pick the President by Popular Vote Now? The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in the “faithless electors” case is another reminder of how antiquated and undemocratic the Electoral College is.
• Abolish the Electoral College and Everyone Wins.
• The Electoral College Is a Confusing Mess: Even the Supreme Court justices are perplexed.
• Much more from Jesse Wegman here.

The Filibuster

Jamelle Bouie: Once Again, I’m Telling You That the Filibuster Doesn’t Actually Work.

Kevin Kruse: Twitter thread on the history of the filibuster to suppress civil rights legislation.

National Constitution Center: The filibuster that almost killed the Civil Rights Act.

Norman Ornstein: Five myths about the filibuster.

Greg Sargent: What would James Madison have thought of the filibuster?

Jesse Wegman: The Filibuster That Saved the Electoral College: Like other Senate blockades of the civil rights era, it was about preserving white supremacy.

For more resources on systemic racism, visit the systemic racism section of the website.