The Voting News Daily: The winner of South Carolina’s primary: Super PACs, Constitutional Showdown over the Voting Rights Act: D.C. Circuit Hears Shelby County v. Holder
It has been two years since the Supreme Court issued its decision in the case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, and we are only now just beginning to see how its overturning of a century of campaign finance law is distorting the electoral process. Rather than acting truly independently of campaigns, as the majority of justices envisioned, these entities exclusively act on behalf of individual candidates — and are typically run by former aides. Rather than encouraging the universal right of free speech, the ruling has had the effect of providing a megaphone for the rich to drown out all other voices. Read More
On January 19, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit debated the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance requirement, one of Act’s most important and successful provisions, which was renewed by a near unanimous Congress in 2006 and signed into law by President George W. Bush. In 2009, in NAMUDNO v. Holder, the Supreme Court came dangerously close to striking down that 2006 renewal, raising a host of constitutional concerns about the requirement that jurisdictions that have a history of engaging in racial discrimination in voting obtain federal permission before altering their voting laws and regulations, but ultimately avoiding the constitutional question. During yesterday’s argument, the panel — Judges David S. Tatel, Thomas B. Griffith and Senior Judge Stephen F. Williams — grappled with the constitutional questions raised by Chief Justice Roberts in NAMUDNO. All three members of the panel were very active during the argument, posing numerous questions to the parties, often in rapid-fire succession. Read More
