No one is taking away anyone’s right to vote, but then, why would anyone vote? All of American’s elections are rigged. Has anyone actually ever met an actual Democrat? Sure, there are those people talking on cable news, but they may be imaginary. Look around at your friends. But Democrats keep winning elections. Who voted for them? Who voted for Joe Biden? This must be fraud. How could a Republican ever lose an election in America? Americans are Republicans. Those who aren’t Republicans cannot be Americans either. So this has to end. End election fraud. And of course any Democrat winning any election must have rigged the system. His or her win is implicit but definitive proof of that. Biden’s win is implicit but definitive proof that Trump won, by a landslide, invisible now but soon to be revealed.
And all of that is nonsense. That’s just Arizona talking, and Fox News, and now most of the Republican Party. Any Republican loss is a suspicious loss that must be investigated and then changed to a Republican win, because Republican don’t lose. Everyone knows that.
Well, maybe the wrong people voted. That’s possible. But that can be fixed. And the new Supreme Court, Trump’s Supreme Court, just said go for it. The News York Times’ Adam Liptak explains that:
The Supreme Court on Thursday gave states new latitude to impose restrictions on voting, using a ruling in a case from Arizona to signal that any challenges to laws being passed by Republican legislatures that make it harder for minority groups to vote would face a hostile reception from a majority of the justices.
The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s three liberal members in dissent.
Arizona and all sorts of states pass a law that makes it next to impossible for this or that minority to vote. Well, this Supreme Court doesn’t want to hear any whining about that. Did the new law say this or that minority was forbidden from voting, in those exact words, or did it just say in certain areas there would be very few voting machines on Election Day, to stop any possible fraud. Maybe hundreds of thousands of a particular minority live in that area, and now most of them can’t vote, but the law didn’t mention them at all. It mentioned fraud. No one specifically said “those people” couldn’t vote. So shut up. Stop whining.
This changes things:
The decision was among the most consequential in decades on voting rights, and it was the first time the court had considered how a crucial part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 applies to restrictions that have a particular impact on people of color.
The six conservative justices in the majority concluded that the relevant part of the act can be used to strike down voting restrictions only when they impose substantial and disproportionate burdens on minority voters, effectively blocking their ability to cast a ballot – a standard suggesting that the Supreme Court would not be inclined to overturn many of the measures Republicans have pursued or approved around the country.
That’s the new standard. Is the new law really that bad? But maybe that’s the wrong question:
In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the majority had done violence to the Voting Rights Act, a civil rights landmark.
“Wherever it can, the majority gives a cramped reading to broad language,” she wrote. “And then it uses that reading to uphold two election laws from Arizona that discriminate against minority voters.”
Justice Kagan said the court’s action was a devastating blow to the nation’s ideals.
“What is tragic here,” she wrote, “is that the court has (yet again) rewritten – in order to weaken – a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness and protects against its basest impulses. What is tragic is that the court has damaged a statute designed to bring about ‘the end of discrimination in voting.’”
Yeah, well, someone had to put Martin Luther King and John Lewis in their place. This is a way to erase 1965 and the whole Civil Rights movement form the late fifties and the sixties. Many on the right have been seething about those two guys and their crowd since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This is shutting down all that nonsense. It took almost fifty years to spit in Martin Luther King’s face but now it’s been done. Of course it will take more time to erase the sixties entirely, but this is a start. No more hippies!
Who cares? Those happies are all dead now, or soon will be, and there are ways to keep at least some of “the wrong people” voting even now, expect that might not work:
The ruling came at a time when disputes over voting have taken center stage in American politics, and it will draw new attention to congressional efforts to address new state voting restrictions.
An ambitious, sprawling bill being pushed by Democrats, called the For the People Act, is stalled in the evenly divided Senate. Unless moderate Democrats like Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia change their minds and agree to change Senate filibuster rules to allow legislation to pass with a simple majority rather than the 60 votes necessary for most bills, it has little chance of becoming law.
Joe Manchin said he will not vote for any such thing unless at least ten Republican senators do too – or maybe more. And of course they’re laughing at him. He jus gave the Senate Republican veto power over anything and everything. Whatever the clear majority wants will be shot down. Republicans now know they can stop everything. They rule.
And there’s this:
Some congressional Democrats hold out hope for narrower legislation, notably the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which seeks to restore a key provision of the Voting Rights Act struck down by the Supreme Court eight years ago. Still, there is little sign of sufficient Republican support to get that measure through the Senate.
The court’s decision may also complicate the Justice Department’s suit against a new Georgia voting law.
Does the new Georgia voting law specifically mention Black folks? No. So now the Justice Department has nothing. Everything changed;
The larger message of the ruling was that the Voting Rights Act of 1965, hobbled after the Supreme Court in 2013 effectively struck down its central provision, retains only limited power to combat voting restrictions said to disproportionately affect minority voters’ access to the polls.
The 2013 decision, Shelby County v. Holder, concerned the law’s Section 5, which required prior federal approval of changes to voting procedures in parts of the country with a history of racial and other discrimination. But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s majority opinion in that case said the law’s Section 2 would remain in place to protect voting rights by allowing litigation after the fact.
While Section 5 was available, Section 2 was used mostly in redistricting cases, where the question was whether voting maps had unlawfully diluted the voting power of minority groups. Its role in testing restrictions on the denial of the right to vote itself has been subject to much less attention.
And now none of it matters:
President Biden said in a statement that “the court has now done severe damage” to those two important provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
“After all we have been through to deliver the promise of this nation to all Americans, we should be fully enforcing voting rights laws, not weakening them,” he said.
“While this broad assault against voting rights is sadly not unprecedented, it is taking on new forms,” Mr. Biden said. “It is no longer just about a fight over who gets to vote and making it easier for eligible voters to vote. It is about who gets to count the vote and whether your vote counts at all.”
Perhaps so, but that’s just a byproduct of the mess that stole Trump’s reelection from him:
In his majority opinion, Justice Alito wrote that states had a legitimate interest in rooting out fraud.
“Fraud can affect the outcome of a close election, and fraudulent votes dilute the right of citizens to cast ballots that carry appropriate weight,” he wrote. “Fraud can also undermine public confidence in the fairness of elections and the perceived legitimacy of the announced outcome.”
And there were those mysterious Italian military satellites each with its mysterious electron beam that changed millions of Trump votes into Biden votes. Alito didn’t mention that. He didn’t have to. Trump lost. Something nefarious was going on. People were saying that. Arizona thought so. They had the right to shut down as much voting as possible.
Or maybe not:
Justice Kagan wrote that the court’s decision might affect many new laws.
“In recent months, state after state has taken up or enacted legislation erecting new barriers to voting,” she wrote. “Those laws shorten the time polls are open, both on Election Day and before. They impose new prerequisites to voting by mail and shorten the windows to apply for and return mail ballots. They make it harder to register to vote and easier to purge voters from the rolls. Two laws even ban handing out food or water to voters standing in line.”
“Some of those restrictions may be lawful under the Voting Rights Act,” she wrote. “But chances are that some have the kind of impact the act was designed to prevent – that they make the political process less open to minority voters than to others.”
She was in the minority. No, she was in the majority:
By a roughly 2-to-1 margin, Americans prioritize making lawful voting easier rather than making voter fraud more difficult, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released Thursday.
The poll finds 62 percent of adults saying it is more important to pass new laws “making it easier for people to vote lawfully,” while 30 percent say it’s more important to pass new laws “making it harder for people to vote fraudulently.”
The poll was conducted just before the Supreme Court upheld two Arizona voting restrictions that a lower court had said discriminated against minority voters, with experts saying the decision could make it harder to challenge some new voting restrictions being passed following former president Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud.
Everyone knows that. The nation has been split in half:
The Post-ABC poll finds sharp partisan and racial differences on what new voting laws should focus on. A 59 percent majority of Republicans say it’s more important to pass new laws making it harder to vote fraudulently, while 62 percent of independents and 89 percent of Democrats say new laws should make it easier for people to vote lawfully.
An 82 percent majority of Black adults say it’s more important to make it easier for people to vote lawfully, compared with 67 percent of Hispanic adults and 58 percent of White adults.
But this Supreme Court has settled that argument. Less voting!
The New York Times’ Nick Corasaniti and Reid Epstein discuss the implications of that:
Voting rights activists, on the defensive this year in the face of a wave of restrictive new voting laws, grappled on Thursday with new guidance from the Supreme Court signaling that the challenge will be even steeper now for opposing these laws in court.
The 6-to-3 ruling established a series of “guideposts” for what could potentially constitute a violation under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, appearing to limit one of the few paths Democrats and activists have for mounting legal challenges to new measures currently being proposed and passed in Republican-controlled states.
“This decision overly constricts how we view evidence in our Section 2 cases, and that’s going to make it harder – not unwinnable – but harder,” said Allison Riggs, a senior lawyer at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the rights of people of color.
In fact, this gets tricky now:
There are other legal avenues to challenge restrictive voting laws besides the Voting Rights Act, including under the First, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. But the act has been paramount in helping to rein in laws that could disproportionately affect communities of color, and the decision could threaten some of the legal strategies that voting rights groups and election lawyers have been drafting to challenge some of the new laws.
But voting rights experts noted that the court’s decision on Thursday did not invalidate or significantly hollow out Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. “I do think the test will work to stop a lot of discriminatory electoral practices,” said Chad Dunn, the co-founder of the Voting Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a longtime voting rights lawyer. “And that part is good news.”
That will just take more work:
At least three major cases involving Section 2 claims are in the federal court system, according to a database of election litigation maintained by Ohio State University. One of the cases is a lawsuit that the Justice Department filed last week against Georgia, arguing that the state’s new omnibus voting law, S.B. 202, is racially discriminatory in both its intent and its impact.
While the case was brought under Section 2, some election lawyers said that it was unlikely to be derailed by the court’s decision on Thursday.
“There’s two ways to prove a Section 2 case – you can show there’s purposeful discrimination, or you can show that the law at issue had a discriminatory effect,” said Tom Perez, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and a former chief of the civil rights division of the Justice Department.
“The court narrowed the effects test. The purpose claims are unchanged, and the Georgia case is a purpose case. The Georgia cases that were recently filed, they include claims of intentional discrimination and they include constitutional claims.”
In short, don’t argue effect – suppressing the Black vote or whatever. Argue intent. Find the smoking-gun memos and all the rest. Prove that their objective was to suppress If not end the Black or Hispanic or Asian or Gay or whatever vote. The evidence is out there. Find it.
But the guys on the other side feel safe. They’re happy:
Republicans said the court’s ruling would serve as a green light for GOP state legislators to pursue addition restrictions on voting.
“Rhetorically, it will provide them a shield to say, ‘What we’re doing is perfectly legitimate, the Supreme Court lets us do it,’” said Benjamin L. Ginsberg, a veteran Republican election lawyer. “What’s important to look at in that opinion is what the court looks at in the usual burdens of voting. You have to be halfway informed about where your polling precinct is. If a bunch of people can’t figure out where their voting precinct is, that doesn’t mean you have to lessen common-sense protections to help them.”
He didn’t mention changing precinct borders and available polling places over and over in the week before any election. He must have been grinning with a sly wink as he said those words, but shutting down voting is he aim:
The conservative Heritage Foundation, which along with its political arm, Heritage Action, have spent years trying to add numerous restrictions to voting, said that states should follow Arizona’s lead in enacting tougher voting laws.
Garrett Bess, the vice president of Heritage Action, called the Supreme Court’s decision “an enormous win for election integrity and voter confidence.” He added, “State officials across the country should take note and work to enact similar policies in their states.”
And then very few people will be able to vote, only the good people of course. Arizona leads the way:
The two provisions of Arizona law at the core of the Supreme Court decision on Thursday were increasingly common restrictions on voting that have appeared in other states. One law banned third parties from helping voters with dropping off their absentee ballots, a process that Republicans derisively call “ballot harvesting” but that is designed to help older, sick or otherwise disabled voters with handling their ballot. The other law canceled all votes cast in person at the wrong precinct.
At least 22 states have passed or introduced a law restricting ballot collections, according to a database maintained by the Voting Rights Lab, a liberal-leaning voting rights group.
Past Supreme Court rulings on voting laws have often been followed by rushes of legislation crafted in light of the decisions. After the Court upheld an Indiana voter identification law in 2008, numerous other states, including North Carolina, Texas and Pennsylvania, sought to pass similar laws.
In short, this will snowball, or else it’s all nonsense:
Even as some voting rights groups noted that it was not a worst-case scenario ruling, Democrats around the country were quick to deride the decision by the Supreme Court, which broke down along the court’s 6-3 ideological divide, and vowed to redouble their efforts to pass federal voting legislation.
“Today’s Supreme Court decision reinforces what we already know: Voting rights are under assault in America and we must act with the fierce urgency of now to end the era of voter suppression once and for all,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat and the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus.
And that will define the next four years or more. Let us vote! No, you can’t vote! Yes, we can! No, you can’t!
This will not end well
Just Above Sunset 