I knew we’d be focusing on elections on today’s BradCast, with critical midterm primaries being held in six states on Tuesday. Little did I know, however, that the corrupted rightwing U.S. Supreme Court would bigfoot our planned coverage of results with perhaps their worst, most corrupt, most partisan ruling to date. And that’s really saying something when it comes to this corrupted Roberts Court! [Audio to full show follows this summary.]
Even before polls closed in several states on Tuesday evening, the partisan, activist, 6 to 3 Republican supermajority on the High Court dropped its latest anti-Constitutional bombshell ruling, with little comment, on its emergency “shadow docket”.
Despite tens of thousands of voters having already cast their vote; despite a lower federal court twice finding that Republican lawmakers in Alabama had intentionally discriminated against Black voters in violation of both the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution with a U.S. House map that would erase one of two majority-minority Districts in the state that is more than one-quarter Black; despite repeatedly invoking the so-called Purcell Principle over the years to block previous “last minute” changes to elections laws “on the eve of an election”, supposedly to avoid chaos and confusion for voters, even if those changes would have protected the voting rights of thousands, and even if there were still months and months before the election, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday gave Alabama the go-ahead to use that intentionally discriminatory map in this year’s elections.
But we are not just “on the eve” of the election to be affected by Alabama’s SCOTUS-sanctioned return to Jim Crow. The former Confederate state already held its primary election on May 19th! On Tuesday, despite the lower court’s finding just last week that the state’s proposed map was still poisoned by intentional and impermissible racial discrimination, the corrupted Republican Supremes gave a thumbs up to new elections in the four affected Districts in early August.
So much for their concern about “chaos and confusion” at the polls. Never mind the testimony from state election officials in the lower court warning that some 600,000 voting records would have to be modified by hand, one by one, in a process that would take months. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor explained at the end of her dissent [PDF] on behalf of the courts three remaining legitimate jurists:
“Weeks ago, I warned that vacating the District Court’s injunction in these cases would ‘unleash chaos and . . . confuse voters.’ … Nevertheless, the Court forged ahead. Now the Court is squarely faced with a record of the turmoil it has caused and the harm it has wrought. Yet just as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the Court today doubles down on chaos. Because I choose to defend the rule of law and the right of all Alabamians to participate equally in democracy, I respectfully dissent.”
Her respect is misplaced.
As TPM’s Kate Riga observed in her coverage, headlined “SCOTUS Cobbles Together Excuse to Let Alabama Discriminate Against Black Voters,” “Adding insult to injury, this Court had previously ruled that it was too close to Alabama’s elections to impose a new map (one that remedied the state’s discrimination) a whole three months before the primary.”
As veteran legal journalist Mark Joseph Stern railed on social media as this “heinous” and “worst-case-scenario” ruling was released: “The Purcell principle now officially just means ‘Republicans win.’ SCOTUS’s eleventh hour intervention for Alabama Republicans is indefensible. It’s going to unleash massive chaos on the ground for both voters and election administrators. What a disaster.”
“We do not have voting rights in this country anymore. We just don’t,” Stern lamented. “We did for a while because Congress codified them pursuant to a constitutional amendment enacted by the people in a great repudiation of the original sin of slavery. But the Supreme Court has nullified that law and that amendment.”
Wrote UCLA Law Professor Rick Hasen at the Election Law Blog: “As Justice Sotomayor shows, the Supreme Court erred in so many ways. It did not review the district court’s factual findings for clear error. It did not recognize that the lower court applied the presumption of good faith but had ample evidence that Alabama acted in bad faith by flouting the ruling of the district court in the hopes (fulfilled here) that the Supreme Court would see things differently. It allows changes at the last minute after Alabama had represented to the Court earlier in the litigation that it would need months to make the kinds of changes that election administrators will have to make in days.”
“More and more,” writes the usually staid Hasen, “this Court shows itself to be little more than a partisan tool engaged in results-oriented jurisprudence, despite protestations to the contrary.”
Despite it all, we will not give up, we will not give in. We soldier on to fight for voting rights and democracy wherever we still can, as these corrupted elections are still our best — and, until the pitchforks, torches and guillotines come out, only — hope of restoring the nation and reforming the unspeakably corrupted Court.
I’ve got more to say on today’s show about all of that, including how any Democratic plan for a post-Trump reconstruction that fails to include serious and expansive SCOTUS reform, is just not a serious proposal.
And while, in one sense, it seems almost anti-climactic, there is still a LOT to report on today regarding Tuesday’s midterm primary elections in California, Iowa, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota.
For full coverage of that, however, you’ll have to tune in…
