On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to step in and potentially overturn a lower court ruling that North Carolina’s restrictive voter-identification law is unconstitutional, specifically for how it targets black Americans. While this decision counts as a win for voting rights, it comes on the heels of last week’s announcement that Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach will lead President Trump’s new Advisory Commission on Voter Integrity. Trump, of course, claims that millions of people voted illegally in the last election; Kobach supports that claim.
merica, and the battles to come, I spoke by phone with Wendy Weiser, the director of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School. During the course of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed the specific threats to voting rights going forward, the difficulty of predicting Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s views, and why it’s so hard to get people to care about an extremely important issue.
… Wendy Weiser: I agree with that and think it is absolutely a victory. There is a very strong opinion by the 4th Circuit condemning the North Carolina law, and providing a really strong basis for its finding that it was intentionally discriminatory based on race. And that decision now stands. The giant voter-suppression law coming out of North Carolina is now done.
Full Article: How big of a threat is Trump’s voter fraud commission?.