The good news is that over the past week two federal courts struck down multiple provisions of GOP-enacted voter suppression laws in Wisconsin and North Carolina. The cautionary news is that the rejection of 21st century Jim Crow-style disenfranchisement at the polls, and, indeed, the fate of democracy itself, may well now hinge on the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election. … In the first voting rights case to see a ruling come down last Friday, North Carolina NAACP v. McCrory, the good news is that a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeal struck down as unconstitutional a comprehensive GOP voter suppression scheme that the court determined had been deliberately designed to have a retrogressive impact on the right of African-Americans to participate in electoral democracy. The state Republican legislature’s scheme, the court held, was specifically designed to “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”
The bad news, however, is that over the past three years — a period that included the 2014 midterm election and this year’s primary elections — this unconstitutional scheme was the law of the land in North Carolina only because a cabal of five Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices gutted a key provision (Section 5) of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). That section required pre-clearance from either the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) or a three-judge U.S. District Court panel before election restrictions of the type enacted by NC could have implemented. In arriving at their decision, the 4th Circuit judges rejected as “clearly erroneous” the factual findings of a George W. Bush-appointed U.S. District Court Judge who had previously upheld this racially motivated scheme’s constitutionality.
In the second case last week, One Wisconsin Institute v. Thomsen, the good news is that U.S. District Court Judge James D. Peterson, after a full trial on the merits, struck down as unconstitutional eight (8) specific aspects of eight (8) election laws that were enacted after the election of Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Scott Walker and Republican majorities in both houses of its state legislature. The bad news is that a previous decision handed down by Republican appointed “radicals in robes” on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeal — a decision that became final after the Supreme Court declined to hear the case — prevented Judge Peterson from reevaluating the constitutionality of a strict polling place photo ID law in WI even though his honor acknowledged that, in seeking to remedy the phantom menace of in-person voter fraud, Republicans had created “a cure worse than the disease.”
The importance of the next Supreme Court Justice was underscored by Judge Peterson’s suggestion that both the 7th Circuit and the Supreme Court should revisit the issue given that “the evidence in this case casts doubt on the notion that [photo] ID laws foster integrity and confidence” in the electoral process…
Full Article: Fate of Democracy in Hands Of the Electorate Following Recent Election Law Victories | The BRAD BLOG.