Blogs: Voting rights cases: Made simple | SCOTUSblog
Nearly a half-century ago, Congress decided that the government could not end racial discrimination in voting simply by suing one state, county, or city at a time, because officials who were determined to keep minorities away from the polls were quickly shifting to new tactics. The only way to keep ahead of those tactics, Congress decided, was to bar the worst offenders among state and local governments from adopting any new election laws until they had first proved they would not discriminate. That was a massive shift in policy, and it worked: the law that Congress passed in 1965, the Voting Rights Act, is now widely credited as the most effective civil rights law in American history; even the Supreme Court has said so. But the Supreme Court has grown to be one of the skeptics about the constitutionality of the law, partly because of the very fact that the law has been so successful. ”Things have changed in the South,” the Court commented three years ago. And, at that time, it pondered striking down the key part of the 1965 law — Section 5 — on the theory that “the evil that Section 5 is meant to address may no longer be concentrated” in the states, counties, and cities that must obey that section. There are nine of those states, plus local governments in seven other states, that must get permission in Washington before they may change any law dealing with voting — no matter how trivial the change. The Court chose in 2009 to leave the law as is, but hinted that Congress should update it. Read More
Editorials: The Supreme Court’s next corporate campaign finance quandary | Thomsen Reuters
If you hate the current state of campaign finance, in which corporations and non-profits exert influence through trade associations, political action committees and so-called “Super PACs,” you can’t lay all of the blame at the doorstep of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which held that corporations and labor unions have the same First Amendment rights to free speech as individuals. Nor can you say that the root of the problem was the court’s 2007 ruling in Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right to Life that corporations and labor unions are permitted to spend money on election ads as long those ads do not contain “express advocacy” for or against a candidate. Instead, you have to look back to 1976, when the Supreme Court decided in Buckley v. Valeo that the constitution permits limits on direct campaign contributions to candidates by corporations. Such restrictions, the Buckley court held, do not violate the First Amendment. That bar on direct contributions to candidates, reaffirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 in FEC v. Beaumont, has remained in place despite repeated assaults in recent years. As Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law wrote Wednesday at his Election Law Blog, the current justices may well overturn Beaumont’s holding on direct corporate contributions to candidates if they decide to take up the issue, but so far they haven’t.
