Former Attorney General Eric Holder Warns of the Outsized Influence of Conservative Politicians
Former Attorney General Eric Holder warned of the U.S. backsliding into a shameful past. Calling the modern American political landscape a "political apartheid system" Holder pointed out that conservatives have greater influence than their numbers would suggest.
During an interview with Washington Post Live, Holder cautioned, "a minority of the people in this country will have disproportionate amounts of power and be able to put in place things that are not supported by the majority."
Pointing in particular to abortion rights being rolled back, the former attorney general said, "The minority [of voters] will be represented by the majority that was put on the Supreme Court by two presidents who did not win the majority of the vote because of our Electoral College."
Holder used gun control as another example. Explaining to host Jonathan Capehart that more than 80% of Americans favor some controls on who may have access to guns, he said, “at least one party, the Republican Party, has welded itself to the gun industry, the gun lobby, and that has to be broken,” Holder continued that gerrymandering allows the intention of elections to be subverted because, “politicians get to pick their voters. And this is a really graphic example of the harm, the country harm of gerrymandering, where a politician can do something inconsistent with the desires of his or her constituents and not suffer any political consequence because they are in these gerrymandered, safe districts.
It's one of the structural changes that we need to make so that we have a government that is responsive to the needs and the desires of the people, he explained. "[Conservative justices] will have the ability to foist on the nation a policy with regards to reproductive rights that is not supported by the people of this country."
The apartheid policy of South Africa was imposed such that the country's white minority held economic, political and social power over its Black majority. The policy was denounced by countries around the world and was eventually eliminated by the middle 1990s.
