From a cursory level, I agree that charities should not have to disclose their donors other than to the IRS for tax purposes, but I don't the implications of this ruling. Hopefully it won't be used like Citizens united was and increase dark money. I'm somewhat liberal, but I think California is a F'ed up kind of liberal.
Or even worse, a stalemate where nominal centrists say "see wasn't that bad" and even more ridiculous voter suppression occurs. Anybody who ever gave John Roberts credit for the insanely low bar of not sustaining patently nonsensical challenges to Obamacare (there are many) should know that him chaining the Reconstruction amendments to his pickup and driving them down the road to fascism is a big reason why we are in this cluster ****
I'm not surprised with the AZ ruling. This was in line with Roberts showing deference to the other branches and the states.
wow, Biden didn't waste much time criticizing the Supreme Court on this one https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing...-in-brnovich-v-democratic-national-committee/ Statement by President Joe Biden on the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Decision in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee JULY 01, 2021•STATEMENTS AND RELEASES I am deeply disappointed in today’s decision by the United States Supreme Court that undercuts the Voting Rights Act, and upholds what Justice Kagan called “a significant race-based disparity in voting opportunities.” In a span of just eight years, the Court has now done severe damage to two of the most important provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – a law that took years of struggle and strife to secure. 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. Yet this decision comes just over a week after Senate Republicans blocked even a debate – even consideration – of the For the People Act that would have protected the right to vote from action by Republican legislators in states across the country. While this broad assault against voting rights is sadly not unprecedented, it is taking on new forms. 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. Our democracy depends on an election system built on integrity and independence. The attack we are seeing today makes clearer than ever that additional laws are needed to safeguard that beating heart of our democracy. We must also shore up our election security to address the threats of election subversion from abroad and at home. Today’s decision also makes it all the more imperative to continue the fight for the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to restore and expand voting protections. The Court’s decision, harmful as it is, does not limit Congress’ ability to repair the damage done today: it puts the burden back on Congress to restore the Voting Rights Act to its intended strength. That means forging a coalition of Americans of every background and political party – from advocates, activists, and business executives – to raise the urgency of the moment and demand that our democracy truly reflects the will of the people and that it delivers for the Nation. That is what Vice President Harris and I will continue to do. This is our life’s work and the work of all of us. Democracy is on the line. We can do this together.
Why should he? Citizens United was a catastrophe. This ruling doesn't have much of an impact, but the trend, in my opinion, is the opposite of what it should be.
"The out-of-control election hyperbole": https://theweek.com/politics/1002193/the-supreme-courts-reasonable-decision-on-voting The out-of-control election hyperbole W. James Antle III The Supreme Court's 6-3 decision upholding a voting law passed by Arizona's Republican-controlled state legislature is a shot across the bow to President Biden's Justice Department, which is challenging another such law in Georgia. It's also likely to pour another gallon of gasoline onto the voting debate in the country. Former President Donald Trump has as recently as yesterday cast doubt on the 2020 presidential election results, citing widespread voter fraud for which there is no evidence. But more sober-minded Republicans are also worried that practices like ballot harvesting (the involvement of third parties in collecting and delivering absentee ballots, which Arizona banned in the law affirmed by the Supreme Court) and too lenient protocols around mail-in voting are lower integrity, pointing to the conclusions of a 2004 bipartisan commission led by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker. In close elections, marginal changes to the law in this area could matter. And in Electoral College terms, the 2020 election was close: Trump lost by about 43,000 in three battleground states. Two of them were Arizona and Georgia. There have always been tradeoffs involved between ballot access and ballot security. Any requirement that makes it easier to verify who a voter is will also make it more difficult for someone who recently moved but did not update their voting records or who isn't carrying proper identification to vote. What has raised the temperature of this debate beyond the normal level, other than Trump's claims about last year's presidential election, is the not wholly unjustified perception that each party is weaponizing election integrity or voting rights for their own partisan gain. Each party's stance, while defensible in purely neutral terms, happens to perfectly line up with what most experts believe would help them win a competitive election. Taking things up a notch further, each side also behaves as if we are experiencing either an old-style urban political machine level of voter fraud or a Jim Crow-level of voter suppression. It may indeed be the case that some GOP election integrity measures have a disparate impact on racial minorities that can't be justified in terms of the voting violations that actually exist, or that the voting practices adopted by many states during the pandemic need to be tightened up. But the reality doesn't match the hyperbole — or demagoguery — of either party.
Point-Counterpoint "The Roberts Court thinks plutocrats should be able to buy the government in secret": https://theweek.com/politics/1002192/roberts-court-americans-for-prosperity "SUPREME COURT FOILS DEMOCRATS’ ATTACK ON CONSERVATIVE NONPROFITS": https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/07/supreme-court-foils-democrats-attack-on-conservative-nonprofits.php
I'm not a fan of anonymous speech. I get the idea that your speech might get curtailed, but it's also cover to do some very evil stuff.
Alito: "The mere fact that there is some disparity in impact does not necessarily mean that a system is not equally open or that it does not give everyone an equal opportunity to vote." So, by this logic, if I designed a system that everyone must drive 100 miles to vote, it's a-ok? LOL.
"The Supreme Court Bolsters Voting Rights": https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-court-bolsters-voting-rights-11625178708?mod=hp_opin_pos_1 The Supreme Court Bolsters Voting Rights A 6-3 majority saves judges from becoming election commissions. By The Editorial Board Updated July 1, 2021 6:33 pm ET The Supreme Court issued its ruling of the year on Thursday in upholding two Arizona voting rules. In a single blow, the Justices shot down efforts to politicize the Voting Rights Act and saved federal courts from becoming super election commissions. Democrats in Brnovich v. DNC challenged Arizona’s ban on ballot harvesting and a requirement that voters cast ballots on Election Day in the precinct of the county where they’re registered. They claim the rules have a disparate adverse impact on minority groups and violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. A district judge found no evidence the rules were discriminatory in intent or effect. But liberal judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overruled the lower court. Progressives have been bombarding courts with challenges to state voting laws under Section 2 since the High Court in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) struck down the Voting Rights Act’s requirement that the Justice Department or federal courts sign off on election-law changes in states with histories of discrimination. The Biden Administration’s lawsuit against Georgia’s new voting law is based on Section 2. Writing for a 6-3 majority, Justice Samuel Alito chronicles the history of Section 2, which Congress amended in 1982 by eliminating an earlier requirement that plaintiffs prove discriminatory intent. Congress, however, directed courts to consider whether election procedures were “equally open” and provided equal “opportunity” to minorities based on “the totality of circumstances.” Arizona allows all voters to vote by mail or in person for nearly a month before Election Day. Its rules are hardly burdensome based on the totality of circumstances, Justice Alito notes. Even the Biden Justice Department didn’t dispute that Arizona’s rules are kosher under Section 2. This should have been a 9-0 decision, yet the three liberal Justices want to relitigate Shelby. In an especially dyspeptic dissent, Justice Elena Kagan drags in the ghost of Dred Scott and extraneous facts about current political debates to echo the progressive narrative that conservatives are neutering the Voting Rights Act. It is her worst opinion as a Justice. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer declared on Thursday, “It is simply unconscionable that the Court’s conservative majority chose to double down on their gutting of the Voting Rights Act, failing to properly respond to a wave of restrictive and discriminatory laws in the wake of Shelby.” This is pure demagoguery. The Justices are strengthening the Voting Rights Act by establishing parameters for lower courts to prevent its political abuse. Justice Alito notes that courts should give consideration to whether election rules and procedures were common in 1982. This could scuttle challenges to restrictions on early and absentee voting. He also explains that “the strength of the state interests—such as the strong and entirely legitimate state interest in preventing election fraud—served by a challenged voting rule is an important factor. Ensuring that every vote is cast freely, without intimidation or undue influence, is also a valid and important state interest.” Liberal Justices disagree. The standard in the Kagan dissent would require states to prove there are no less restrictive means to safeguard elections and strike down any policy with a disparate impact on minorities, no matter how small. Based on the dissent, New York City’s ranked-choice voting system could violate Section 2 because it is biased against low-information voters. Don’t laugh. Progressive groups and City Council members argued this in a lawsuit. As Justice Alito writes, the voting regime that liberal Justices want “would have the effect of invalidating a great many neutral voting regulations with long pedigrees that are reasonable means of pursuing legitimate interests. It would also transfer much of the authority to regulate election procedures from the States to the federal courts.” That has been the goal of progressives since Shelby. The Court majority doesn’t deny that racially discriminatory voting policies may still exist, and it declines to establish a definitive test for establishing Section 2 violations. But it has now blocked liberal groups from using the courts to achieve what they can’t democratically. This is judicial modesty at its finest. Appeared in the July 2, 2021, print edition as 'The Court Bolsters Voting Rights.'
"A Supreme Blow to Intimidation": https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-supreme-blow-to-intimidation-11625177781?mod=hp_opin_pos_3 A Supreme Blow to Intimidation Sheldon Whitehouse is unhappy about Thursday’s ruling. That’s a good sign. By Kimberley A. Stassel July 1, 2021 6:16 pm ET Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is unhappy with Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling that reins in his ability to harass political opponents. Perhaps he and his fellow intimidators should have been less brazen. The justices celebrated the Fourth of July with one of their more important First Amendment rulings in decades. The high court’s decision in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta strikes down an attempt by California politicians to cast what Chief Justice John Roberts called “a dragnet for sensitive donor information from tens of thousands of charities each year.” It also marked the court’s belated if crucial recognition that the 21st century requires a new approach to disclosure. The risks of “bomb threats, protests, stalking, and physical violence,” the chief justice wrote, “seem to grow with each passing year,” giving “anyone with access to a computer” the power to compile information to destroy others. And the opinion’s references to past cases make clear the threat to donors doesn’t come only from hackers or doxxers but from government itself. Mr. Whitehouse didn’t get a mention—the chief justice is a gentleman—but the senator can take a bow. For more than a decade, progressives have been weaponizing disclosure laws, using them to harass and intimidate political opponents. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin forged a popular tactic in 2013, using a letter to attempt to expose and shame donors to the free-market American Legislative Exchange Council—a naked effort to cripple the group. Since then, Mr. Whitehouse has taken on the lead harasser role. He cloaks his intentions in warnings about “dark money” and “front groups.” But his threats have become so obvious that there is no longer any denying his objectives. Whether he’s demanding confidential financial information from free-market nonprofits or insisting on new rules to expose the donors to organizations that submit court briefs, his targets are always on one side—the right—and his clear goal is to punish them. He’s been aided by the Democrats who ginned up the Internal Revenue Service scandal over the targeting of conservative nonprofits and liberal groups that launch boycotts of corporations whose executives and political-action committees contribute to political campaigns. And by the anonymous activists in 2008 who mined disclosure records to compile a database of contributors to California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage—used to target donors’ homes and businesses and get people fired. With today’s routine online doxxings, the Lincoln Project’s proposed blacklist, politicized prosecutors, cancel culture and campus tribunals, the Supreme Court can no longer pretend disclosure is benign sunshine. Critics of AFP are already decrying it as a 6-3 “conservative” ruling, but what stood out was the bipartisan nature of the cause the court supported. Nearly 300 organizations signed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of the two right-leaning petitioners, groups that, as Chief Justice Roberts noted, span “the full range of human endeavors.” It’s not often you see agreement among the Pacific Legal Foundation, the NAACP, the Cato Institute, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the National Association of Manufacturers and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Even groups on the left have come to understand the sauce, the goose and the gander. Conservatives might not practice donor intimidation much, but give them time. The breadth and depth of this coalition highlight the weakness of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent. It seems willfully blind to today’s partisan environment and its threats. It airily insists that there is no burden to nonprofits in complying and no risk that donors will be intimidated. Besides, she says, California is capable of keeping the information secure! She wrote these lines a few weeks after someone leaked the confidential tax data of thousands of Americans to ProPublica. Mr. Whitehouse instantly issued a sky-is-falling statement, warning that we are “now on a clear path to enshrining a constitutional right to anonymous spending in our democracy.” The dissenting opinion fretted that the majority “marks reporting and disclosure requirements with a bull’s-eye.” Expect the decision to rally the left’s demands that the Supreme Court be packed with a liberal majority. Yet as all these critics well know, the issue at hand was the disclosure of donors to nonprofits. The opinion doesn’t touch the current reporting regime for donors to political campaigns. Transparency advocates might argue that this latter disclosure helps expose or guard against corruption or its appearance. But they’ve never had a reasonable argument that government should have the unfettered ability to snoop in Americans’ private associational activities—even more so with today’s high-tech tools and viciously partisan environment. The court reinforced that on Thursday, and not a moment too soon. Americans can head off to their Independence Day festivities a little more confident about their First Amendment rights. Write to kim@wsj.com. Appeared in the July 2, 2021, print edition.
That’s the interpretation he wants you to have but the truth is the court could have left lower court rulings in place if he felt that way. If something hasn’t been tried at the SCOTUS level that still can allow some states to have nuance in their individual laws. Having the Supreme Court rule actually makes things clearer in a negative way, and now every state including liberal states will now have to act in response to a federal high court ruling. If Robert’s wanted to truly protect the sanctity of the high court and allow for state independence, he’d be taking less of these types of cases and allowing lower court rulings to stand. Alitos opinion makes it clear that the high court says states with a party in power can and should make laws in order to pick their voters. Not the other way around. A state like Washington or Oregon reads this opinion and now is forced to start thinking about drafting laws in order to make voting difficult for the rural more conservative voters in those two states. I mean how else are they supposed to react to such a clear definition of the high courts interpretation of federal election law? John Robert’s has always been a tool for corporate big money. Robert’s got his start in DC as an aid in the Reagan counsel tasked with helping Reagan with Reagan’s lasting legacy of flooding our government with dark money to buy elections, and he hasn’t looked back ever since. His legacy won’t be that he stood up to Trump in any way. It’ll be that he led the charge to turn America into an oligarchy which led to the demise of our democratic process.
True every state now can act in response to the high court ruling but that is pretty much how the US system has worked. I'm not going to deny that Roberts isn't a conservative. He came on and has been a judicial conservative and part of that is deference of the Judicial Branch to the other branches, not exactly deference of the USSC to lower courts. How the Robert's court ruled in this case was to be expected. I'm not necessarily saying this is a good thing but that Roberts is a known variable in this regard.
The Roberts ruling this way should've been expected. The Roberts' court has been known to have deference towards the other branches and Roberts is still a Conservative. I'm not sure what is controversial about that take. That doesn't mean there still aren't other ways to address this but I never felt that the current court in this regard was going to do much about states passing voting restrictions.
I'm not sure what you mean by other branches? Do you mean like Congress? But isn't the Robert court dismantling the Voting Right act piece by piece? This is the 2nd time the Court has strike down or weaken provisions of that Voting Right act.
I haven't followed this closely enough but my understanding is that while the USSC has ruled against parts of the Voting Right's Act that the act overall can still be enforced. It also can be strengthened if Congress passes new legislation but so far has been unable too.
The USSC allows the moratorium on evictions to continue even though a majority of Justices agreed that the order was problematic. https://www.vox.com/2021/6/30/22556...t-kavanaugh-eviction-moratorium-housing-covid The Supreme Court’s latest decision could save millions from eviction — but not for long Brett Kavanaugh hands the smallest possible victory to millions of Americans facing eviction. The Supreme Court handed down a narrow 5-4 decision Tuesday night, which will nonetheless come as an enormous relief to millions of Americans who were at risk of losing their homes if the decision had gone the other way. The Court’s order in Alabama Association of Realtors v. HHS concerns a temporary federal moratorium on many evictions, which was implemented in 2020 to prevent tenants who were behind on their rent from being evicted and then moving to friends’ couches, homeless shelters, or other places where they were more likely to interact with other people and potentially spread Covid-19. The moratorium on evictions does not apply to all renters. In order to qualify, renters have to make several declarations under oath, including that they meet certain income requirements, that they cannot pay their rent “due to substantial loss of household income, loss of compensable hours of work or wages, a lay-off, or extraordinary out-of-pocket medical expenses,” and that they have no other housing options. Renters who take advantage of the moratorium still owe their landlords rent, and they can still be evicted for non-payment of that rent once the moratorium expires. Although the moratorium will expire on its own terms on July 31, a group of landlords and realtors asked the Supreme Court to lift the moratorium early, effectively allowing landlords to start evicting many of their tenants right away. In a 5-4 decision, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh crossing over to vote with the three liberal justices, the Court denied this request — leaving the protections in place for another month. Kavanaugh, however, wrote a very brief opinion warning the Biden administration not to extend the moratorium beyond July. The upshot, in other words, is that this is not much of a policy victory for tenants. Indeed, if anything, Kavanaugh’s opinion moves the law somewhat to the right on the question of whether federal agencies can take innovative steps to respond to a crisis. Yet, while the decision in Alabama Association of Realtors is the smallest possible victory for renters, the Court’s decision to stay its hand in this case potentially saves millions from an immediate catastrophe. The moratorium is an imperfect policy — some evictions have proceeded even while it’s been in place — but it has played an important role in keeping people housed during the pandemic. More than 11 million Americans are behind on their rent, according to a May 31 report by CNBC. So, if even a fraction of these Americans qualify for relief under the eviction moratorium, they are now safe from eviction for another month. Cont.
