“Don’t Let Them Silence You: Vote, Dammit”: The Way We All Become Equal On Election Day Is That We Cast That Ballot
Our country’s oldest and longest struggle has been to enlarge democracy by making it possible for more and more people to be treated equally at the polls. The right to participate in choosing our representatives – to vote — is the very right that inflamed the American colonies and marched us toward revolution and independence.
So it’s unbelievable and frankly outrageous that in the last four years, close to half the states in this country have passed laws to make it harder for people to vote. But it’s true.
But don’t stop there. Engage, and start the conversation of democracy where you live — in your apartment complex, on your block, in your neighborhood. There is always at least one kindred spirit within reach to launch the conversation. Build on it.
As this country began, only white men of property could vote, but over time and with agitation and conflict, the franchise spread regardless of income, color or gender. In the seventies, we managed to lower the voting age to 18. Yet a new nationwide effort to suppress the vote, nurtured by fear and fierce resistance to inevitable demographic change, has hammered the United States.
And this must be said, because it’s true: While it once was Democrats who used the poll tax, literacy tests and outright intimidation to keep Black people from voting, today, in state after state, it is the Republican Party working the levers of suppression. It’s as if their DNA demands it. Here’s what Paul Weyrich, one of the founding fathers of the conservative movement, said back in 1980: “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
So the right has become relentless, trying every trick to keep certain people from voting. And conservative control of the Supreme Court gives them a leg up. Last year’s decision – Shelby County v. Holder – revoked an essential provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and that has only upped the ante, encouraging many Republican state legislators to impose restrictive voter ID laws, as well as work further to gerrymander Congressional districts and limit voting hours and registration. In the past few weeks, the Supreme Court has dealt with voting rights cases in Texas, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Ohio and upheld suppression in three of them, denying the vote to hundreds of thousands of Americans. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in opposition, “The greatest threat to public confidence… is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminating law.”
The right’s rationale is that people — those people — are manipulating the system to cheat and throw elections. But rarely – meaning almost never — can they offer any proof of anyone, anywhere, showing up at the polling place and trying illegally to cast a ballot. Their argument was knocked further on its head just recently when one of the most respected conservative judges on the bench, Richard Posner of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, wrote a blistering dissent on the legality of a Wisconsin voter ID law. “As there is no evidence that voter-impersonation fraud is a problem,” Posner declared, “how can the fact that a legislature says it’s a problem turn it into one? If the Wisconsin legislature says witches are a problem, shall Wisconsin courts be permitted to conduct witch trials?”
The real reason for the laws is to lower turnout, to hold onto power by keeping those who are in opposition from exercising their solemn right — to make it hard for minorities, poor folks, and students, among others, to participate in democracy’s most cherished act.
And you wonder why so many feel disconnected and disaffected? Forces in this country don’t want people to vote at the precise moment when turnout already is at a low, when what we really should be doing is making certain that young people are handed their voter registration card the moment they get a driver’s license, graduate from high school, arrive at college or register at Selective Service.
In a conversation for this week’s edition of Moyers & Company, The Nation magazine’s Ari Berman put it this way: “This is an example of trying to give the most powerful people in the country, the wealthiest, the most connected people, more power. Because the more people that vote, the less power the special interests have. If you can restrict the number of people who participate, it’s a lot easier to rig the political system.” And Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, noted, “For people who don’t have the power to engage in terms of money in the political process, the way we all become equal on Election Day is that we cast that ballot… [So] it’s not just about corporate interests. It is about power. And it is about trying to suppress the voice of those who are the most marginalized.”
So vote, dammit. It is, as President Lyndon Johnson said when he signed the Voting Rights Act, “the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice.” But don’t stop there. Engage, and start the conversation of democracy where you live — in your apartment complex, on your block, in your neighborhood. There is always at least one kindred spirit within reach to launch the conversation. Build on it. Like the founders, launch a Committee of Correspondence and keep it active. Show up when your elected officials hold town meetings. Make a noise and don’t stop howling. Robert LaFollette said democracy is a life, and involves constant struggle. So be it.
By; Bill Moyers and Michael Winship; Moyers and Company, Bill Moyers Blog, October 24, 2014
“Confused Voter Or Disenfranchised Voter?”: In Texas, You Can Vote With A Concealed Handgun License—But Not A Student ID
Texans casting a ballot on Monday, when early voting begins, will need to show one of seven forms of photo ID. A concealed handgun license is okay, but a student ID isn’t. The Supreme Court on Saturday allowed Texas to go forward with this controversial voter ID law. A federal judge had previously struck down the law, arguing that it could disenfranchise 600,000 voters or a full 4.5 percent of registered voters, many of them black and Latino.
Critics say voter ID laws, especially the one in Texas, amount to voter suppression, because it can be both difficult and costly to get the required identification. In a powerfully worded dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagen, wrote, “The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters.”
Saturday’s decision marks the third time this season that the Supreme Court has allowed a controversial voter law to take effect. The other two were about measures in Ohio and North Carolina. This may not seem surprising, given that the Roberts Court has struck down a key section of the Voting Rights Act, but the rationale for this (and the other decisions) may have been more about timing than substance—in particular, observing the precedent of Purcell v. Gonzalez, in which the Court has blocked last-minute changes in voting laws in order to avoid confusion. Still, what’s worse? A confused voter or a disenfranchised one? The latter, Ian Millhiser argued at ThinkProgress: “If a confused voter brings an ID to the polls that they do not need to have, they will still get to cast a ballot. But if the same voter mistakenly forgets their ID (or fails to obtain one) because they were confused and believed that their state’s voter ID law was not in effect, then they will be disenfranchised.”
Actual voter fraud, which is the problem that Republican legislation supposedly addresses, is difficult to find. Ginsburg noted that there were “only two in-person voter fraud cases prosecuted to conviction” in Texas in almost a decade. The consequences of voter ID laws, on the other hand, are much easier to track. According to the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, existing ID requirements reduced turnout in some states during the last presidential election, particularly among young and black voters. Now, imagine the impact is even larger, because it is spread over the 33 states that now require some form of photo ID to vote. The same report found that the costs of acquiring the needed ID ranged between $14.50 to $58.50 for 17 of the states.
By: Rebecca Leber, The New Republic, October 20, 2014
“Another Long And Ignoble Tradition”: Why The Supreme Court Is Allowing Texas To Hold An Unconstitutional Election
This weekend, the Supreme Court allowed Texas to apply new, stringent voting restrictions to the upcoming midterm elections, which could potentially disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters lacking proper identification. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg explained in a short but brilliant dissent, this is a disaster for the citizens of Texas: the upcoming elections will be conducted under a statute that is unconstitutional on multiple levels.
How could this happen?
There is, admittedly, a quasi-defensible reason for the court’s latest move. The Supreme Court is usually reluctant to issue opinions that would change election rules when a vote is imminent. For example, the court recently acted to prevent Wisconsin from using its new voter ID law in the upcoming midterms, coming to the opposite result from the Texas case. That is the principle at work here, and on a superficial level it makes sense.
But as Ginsburg — joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — points out, the general reluctance to change election rules at the last minute is not absolute. In Wisconsin, using the new law would have created chaos. For example, absentee ballots would not have indicated that identification was necessary for a vote to count, so many Wisconsin voters would have unknowingly sent in illegal ballots.
In the Texas case, conversely, there is little reason to believe that restoring the rules that prevailed before the legislature’s Senate Bill 14 would have been disruptive. “In all likelihood,” the dissent observes, “Texas’ poll workers are at least as familiar with Texas’ pre-Senate Bill 14 procedures as they are with the new law’s requirements.”
And more importantly, some risk of disruption is a price worth paying to prevent an election from being conducted under unconstitutional rules. The Texas statute, which is extreme even by the standards of contemporary Republican vote-suppression efforts, is not remotely constitutional.
The Texas law has all the defects of every law that requires photo ID to vote. You don’t have to take my word for it — you can read the recent tour de force opinion of the idiosyncratic, immensely influential Judge Richard Posner of the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago. Posner initially wrote an important opinion upholding an Indiana voter ID law, which was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court. But last week, he concluded based on new evidence that the laws are “a mere fig leaf for efforts to disenfranchise voters likely to vote for the political party that does not control the state government.”
The fundamental problem with the ID requirements is that they are a bad solution to a non-existent problem. Not only is voter impersonation exceedingly rare, even in theory it would be impossible to steal an election by having large numbers of people pretend they are other voters. Election thefts are accomplished by manipulating vote counts or manufacturing fake votes after the fact, not by having an army of impostors cast votes!
The costs in vote suppression, however, are real, and since voter ID laws don’t accomplish anything, even miniscule costs cannot be worth it.
But the Texas law is much worse than typical voter ID laws. As the Ginsburg dissent explains, “[I]t was enacted with a racially discriminatory purpose and would yield a prohibited discriminatory result,” and hence violates the Voting Rights Act (and, presumably, the Fourteenth Amendment). All voter ID laws are discriminatory in effect, but Texas public officials made little effort to hide the extent to which the laws were intended to suppress the minority vote to protect Republican incumbents from demographic change. Indeed, the only reason the law was able to go into effect in the first place was the Supreme Court’s notoriously shoddy 2013 opinion gutting the Voting Rights Act.
In and of itself, this should be enough to prevent the law from going into effect. But the legal deficiencies of Texas’ election law do not end there. None of the forms of ID required by the statute are available for free. As the dissenters note, the costs are not necessarily trivial: “A voter whose birth certificate lists her maiden name or misstates her date of birth,” Ginsburg explains, “may be charged $37 for the amended certificate she needs to obtain a qualifying ID.”
Texas is simply not constitutionally permitted to do this. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment forbids poll taxes, and the Supreme Court held in 1966 that “a State violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment whenever it makes the affluence of the voter or payment of any fee an electoral standard.”
The fact that Texas’ law is unconstitutional twice over — both by being racially discriminatory and imposing a direct cost on voting — is not a coincidence. Even after racial discrimination in voting was made illegal by the Fifteenth Amendment, for nearly a century states were able to use formally race-neutral measures like poll taxes and literacy tests to disenfranchise minority voters. The Texas law is very much part of this long and ignoble tradition.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s decisions in 2013 and 2014 allowing the Texas law to go into effect are part of another long and ignoble tradition: the Supreme Court collaborating with state governments to suppress the vote rather than protecting minorities against discrimination. As long as Republican nominees control the Supreme Court, this problem is likely to get worse before it gets better.
By: Scott Lemieux, Professor of Political Science at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, N.Y; The Week, October 20, 2014
Justice Ginsburg Was Right”: Hobby Lobby Decision; Already Wreaking Havoc
One of the hallmarks of the ongoing conservative legal revolution is that judicial decisions with enormous consequences are often downplayed by their engineers as just another day at the office (Citizens United, Carhart v. Gonzales), or as having no significance as precedent (Bush v. Gore). As Jeff Toobin explains at the New Yorker, the same phenomenon is occurring with respect to Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.
Justice Samuel Alito insisted, in his opinion for the Court, that his decision would be very limited in its effect. Responding to the dissenting opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who called it “a decision of startling breadth,” Alito wrote, “Our holding is very specific. We do not hold, as the principal dissent alleges, that for-profit corporations and other commercial enterprises can ‘opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs….’ ”
A sampling of court actions since Hobby Lobby suggests that Ginsburg has the better of the argument. She was right: the decision is opening the door for the religiously observant to claim privileges that are not available to anyone else.
One such matter is Perez v. Paragon Contractors, a case that arose out of a Department of Labor investigation into the use of child labor by members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (The F.L.D.S. church is an exiled offshoot of the Mormon Church.) In the case, Vernon Steed, a leader of the F.L.D.S. church, refused to answer questions by federal investigators, asserting that he made a religious vow not to discuss church matters. Applying Hobby Lobby, David Sam, a district-court judge in Utah, agreed with Steed, holding that his testimony would amount to a “substantial burden” on his religious beliefs—a standard used in Hobby Lobby—and excused him from testifying. The judge, also echoing Hobby Lobby, said that he needed only to determine that Steed’s views were “sincere” in order to uphold his claim. Judge Sam further noted that the government had failed to prove that demanding Steed’s testimony was not, in the words of the R.F.R.A., “the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.” That burden seems increasingly difficult for the government to meet.
The Supreme Court itself has suggested that the implications of Hobby Lobby were broader than Alito originally let on. Just days after the decision, the Court’s majority allowed Wheaton College, which is religiously oriented, to refuse to fill out a form asking for an exemption from the birth-control mandate—while retaining the exemption. There is another case, Little Sisters of the Poor v. Burwell, which is also pending, where a religious order asserts that the filling out of a form (which, if granted, would exempt them from the law’s requirements) violates their rights.
If just filling out a form can count as a “substantial burden,” it’s hard to imagine any obligation that would not.
It looks like the Court will soon have abundant opportunities to prove Ginsberg was absolutely right.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Editor, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 1, 2014
“A Revival Of 20th Century Lochner”: The Roberts Court Thinks Corporations Have More Rights Than You Do
The Supreme Court of the mid-twentieth century led a First Amendment revolution, turning a rarely enforced constitutional provision into the crown jewel of our Bill of Rights. While these rulings protected the speech of all Americans, they most frequently came in cases involving disfavored or even despised litigants, from Jehovah’s Witnesses to Nazi sympathizers. The Roberts Court is leading a free speech revolution of its own, but this time for the benefit of corporations and the wealthy.
This revolution is unfolding across a wide range of First Amendment provisions and doctrines, from Citizens United v. FEC, which protects political speech by corporations to Sorrell v. IMS, which makes it easier for corporations to challenge laws that regulate commercial speech. Today’s bitterly divided rulings in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby and Harris v. Quinn continue this trend by turning the First Amendment’s protection for the free exercise of religion and freedom of association into a sword to free corporations and other powerful interests from government regulation. More than the Court’s earlier First Amendment revolution, this series of deeply divided rulings resembles the aggressive, divisive, and now overturned rulings of the Lochner era, named after the infamous 1905 case Lochner v. New York, one of a number of cases in which the Supreme Court of the early twentieth century that struck down laws designed to prevent the exploitation of workers. During this era, the Supreme Court repeatedly expanded the constitutional rights of corporations and other businesses while dismissively treating the government’s interest in economic regulation. Today, we are seeing a revival of Lochner in the name of protecting free speech and free exercise of religion.
This story, of course, begins in earnest with the 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, the case that, perhaps more than any other, defines the Roberts Court. There the Court’s five conservatives united to hold that the Constitution gives corporations the right to spend unlimited sums of money on elections. Corporations cannot vote in elections, run for office, or serve as elected officials, but the Court nevertheless ruled that they can overwhelm the political process by using money generated by special privileges that corporations alone possess. In 2011, the Court continued this corporate-friendly trend in Sorrell v. IMS, holding that forms of market research, such as data mining, are “speech” protected by the First Amendment.
This term, Chief Justice Roberts has opened new fronts in his First Amendment revolution. Prior to 2014, the Supreme Court had never held that a secular, for-profit corporation is entitled to protections for the free exercise of religion and had never struck down a federal law limiting campaign contributions. This year, the conservative Justices did both. In both cases, the Court’s conservative majority built off of Citizens United. In Hobby Lobby, in an opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, the Court held that closely-held, secular, for-profit corporations were entitled to the guarantee of the free exercise of religion, treating corporations simply as the artificial embodiment of its owner or shareholders. Dismissing the fact that corporations cannot pray and have never, in more than two centuries, been conferred with rights of conscience and human dignity, the Court’s conservative bloc concluded that secular for-profit corporations are entitled to a religious exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that employer-sponsored health insurance plans cover the full range of FDA-approved contraceptives. The Court’s opinion—the first in history to require a religious exemption from generally-applicable regulation be given to a commercial enterprise—exalts the rights of corporations over those of individuals, giving corporations the right to impose their owners’ religious beliefs and extinguish the rights of their employees. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg detailed in a powerful dissenting opinion, the majority abandoned constitutional principles and precedent and empowered commercial enterprises to “deny legions of women who do not hold their employees’ beliefs access to contraceptive coverage.”
While framed as a narrow minimalist ruling, Justice Alito’s opinion in Hobby Lobby is anything but. First, its central holding strongly suggests that all corporations—not merely those like Hobby Lobby that are closely-held—are entitled to demand religious exemptions from generally-applicable business regulation. Second, its reasoning invites an avalanche of new claims by corporations and others for religious exemptions, making it very difficult for the government to defeat claims for religious exemptions, even when those exemptions extinguish the rights of employees. The Court’s opinion, as Justice Ginsburg explained, opens the floodgates for a number of “me too” religious objections by other companies on matters ranging from anti-discrimination law to other medical procedures such as blood transfusions or vaccinations.
Earlier this term, in McCutcheon v. FEC, the Court’s conservatives continued their assault on the nation’s campaign finance laws, striking down the federal aggregate limit that permitted individuals to contribute up to $123,000 to candidates per election cycle and opening the floodgates to the wealthiest Americans to contribute millions of dollars at a time to elect candidates to do their bidding. As in Citizens United, the conservative majority turned a blind eye both to constitutional principle and reality, treating the $123,000 contribution limit as an especially severe burden on freedom of speech and artificially limiting the government interest in ensuring electoral integrity to cases of bribery. To the Founders, preventing corruption of the government was at the core of the Constitution, necessary to ensure, as Madison put it, that government was “dependent on the people alone” and that our system of representative democracy remained “not [for] the rich more than the poor.” Rather than grappling with the government’s authority to ensure electoral integrity—an interest deeply rooted in the Constitution’s text and history—Chief Justice Roberts caricatured it. While campaign contribution limits still remain, it seems only a matter of time before those too are invalidated by the Roberts’ conservative majority.
Harris, too, represented a fundamental reinterpretation of the First Amendment, striking down an Illinois law that allowed public-sector unions for home health care workers to collect fees from non-union workers to cover the costs of a union’s bargaining activities. In doing so, Justice Alito dismissed a long line of precedents going back nearly 40 years that had upheld precisely these kinds of arrangements, dealing a serious blow to organized labor. In past cases, the Roberts Court has upheld government regulation of employee speech, giving the government broad leeway in choosing how to run a workplace. But, in a stark about face, Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion ratcheted up the First Amendment rights of anti-union employees, powerfully illustrating Adam Liptak’s observation that in the Roberts Court, “[f]ree speech often means speech I agree with.” In a blistering dissent, Justice Elena Kagan argued that the Court’s conservative majority was perverting established First Amendment law, effectively creating a special set of First Amendment principles only for union fee cases.
Justice Alito’s opinion in Harris invites anti-union activists to file a host of new lawsuits aimed at state laws that allow public-sector unions to collect the costs of collective bargaining from union and non-union member alike. Indeed, much of the Harris opinion is devoted to showing why the past precedent in this area is wrong and ought to be overruled. These precedents survive, if at all, by a thread.
Chief Justice John Roberts is known for playing the long game, issuing decisions that, quietly but decisively, move the law to the right. His greatest successes in this area have come in campaign finance cases, where in just a decade, the Court’s opinions have decimated campaign finance law. Today’s decisions in Hobby Lobby and Harris open new avenues for corporate interests looking to attack regulation, and in years to come we are certain to see a host of new challenges to business regulation, all in the name of free speech or free exercise. In the Roberts Court, the First Amendment is a powerful weapon, not for the street corner speaker, but for corporations and wealthy seeking to squelch regulation.
By: David H. Gans, Director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights, and Citizenship Program at Constitutional Accountability Center; The New Republic, July 1, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 