Our Politics

Category: Cases

  • Supreme Court Upholds Alabama Challenge To Voting Rights Act

    Supreme Court Upholds Alabama Challenge To Voting Rights Act

    The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, allowed a congressional map drawn by Alabama Republicans to remain in place on February 7, freezing a lower court ruling that said the map likely violates the Voting Rights Act by diluting the political power of African American voters. The lower court had ordered a new map to be drawn, which could have led to Democrats gaining another seat in the House in the fall. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the three liberal justices in dissent. The justices also said they would hear arguments over the map, adding another potentially explosive issue, concerning the scope of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, to the court’s docket.

    The court’s order, the first dealing with the 2022 elections, means that the map will be used for the state’s upcoming primary, and likely be in place for the entire election cycle, while the legal challenge plays out.

    The order pauses an opinion by a panel of three judges that held that the Alabama map likely violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because it only includes one district where Black voters have the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for himself and fellow conservative Justice Samuel Alito, said the court acted in order to maintain the status quo while the justices consider the issue. Kavanaugh said the court’s order “does not make or signal any change” to voting rights law.

    Chief Justice Roberts, who again found himself siding with the court’s three liberals, said that while he agreed the court should take up the issue for next term to “resolve the wide-ranging uncertainties” in the case, he would have allowed the district court opinion to stand while the appeals process played out. The Supreme Court will hear the full case next fall.

    “The District Court properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction,” Roberts wrote. 

    Justice Elena Kagan, writing for her liberal colleagues Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, wrote a much more strongly worded dissent. Kagan said the majority had gone “badly wrong” in granting Alabama’s request to freeze the lower court opinion and the court’s decision “forces Black Alabamians to suffer what under the law is clear vote dilution.” She said the decision will undermine a key section of the Voting Rights Act. She also said the court should not issue such an impactful order on its emergency docket (which critics refer to as its “shadow docket”) without full briefing and oral argument. “Today’s decision is one more in a disconcertingly long line of cases in which this Court uses its shadow docket to signal or make changes in the law, without anything approaching full briefing and argument,” Kagan said. She said the court’s action “does a disservice” to Black Alabamians who “have had their electoral power diminished — in violation of a law this court once knew to buttress all of American democracy.”

    Alabama’s congressional redistricting plan was challenged under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a VRA provision that has been a crucial tool for voting rights advocates after the Supreme Court gutted another section of the law that required certain states to get federal approval for its maps.

    The lower court panel, which included two judges appointed by former President Donald Trump, said that Alabama was required to draw a second district where Blacks made up a majority of voters or close to it. Their decision pointed to Supreme Court precedent for how VRA redistricting cases should be handled. Before the Supreme Court’s ruling, US Rep. Mo Brooks complained to Alabama.com that “skin pigmentation” should not factor into the congressional redistricting process. “These liberal activist judges have tried to segregate us based on race, I find that abominable, in order to elect people in certain parts of the state based on race, which I also think is abominable. We’ve got to put the skin pigmentation issue behind us,” the Alabama Republican told the outlet Saturday, remarking later on “the concept that Blacks can only be elected in Black districts, and Whites should have districts of their own in which they get elected. I believe that is racist and I oppose it.”

    Alabama, in seeking the Supreme Court’s intervention, had argued that race had been improperly used in the proceedings to determine whether Alabama was obligated under the law to draw a second minority-majority district. Alabama, in its arguments to the court, is asking the Supreme Court to “cut back significantly on the scope of Section (Two of) the Voting Rights Act in redistricting cases,” Rick Hasen, an election law expert, wrote in an analysis of the case last week. “A cutback could have major negative implications for African-American and other racial minority representation in Congress, in state legislatures, and in local bodies across the country, making it harder to require jurisdictions to draw districts where minority voters can elect representatives of their choice,” Hasen, a law professor at University of California-Irvine, wrote on the election law blog.

  • Supreme Court Clears Way For Release Of Trump Presidential Records To January 6 House Select Committee

    Supreme Court Clears Way For Release Of Trump Presidential Records To January 6 House Select Committee

    The Supreme Court cleared the way on January 26 for the release of presidential records from the Trump White House to a congressional committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. The court’s order means that more than 700 documents will be transferred to Congress that could shed light on the events leading up to the insurrection when hundreds of rioters converged on the Capitol attempting to stop certification of the 2020 presidential election results. Only Justice Clarence Thomas said publicly that he would have granted former President Donald Trump’s request to block the document handover from the National Archives to the House select committee. No other justices made an objection public. The Biden White House supports releasing the records to the committee, after determining the disclosure is in the nation’s best interest and declining to assert executive privilege.

    “The Supreme Court’s action tonight is a victory for the rule of law and American democracy,” Congressman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, and Congresswoman Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, who are chair and vice-chair of the panel, said in a joint statement on January 26. “The Select Committee has already begun to receive records that the former President had hoped to keep hidden and we look forward to additional productions regarding this important information.” 

    The select committee is seeking more than 700 pages of disputed documents as it explores Trump’s role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election. That includes his appearance at a January 6 rally in which he directed followers to go to the US Capitol where lawmakers were set to certify the election results and “fight” for their county. The documents include activity logs, schedules, speech notes and three pages of handwritten notes from then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, paperwork that could reveal goings-on inside the West Wing as Trump supporters gathered in Washington and then overran the Capitol, disrupting the certification of the 2020 vote. Former President Donald Trump is also seeking to keep secret a draft proclamation honoring two police officers who died in the siege and memos and other documents about supposed election fraud and efforts to overturn Trump’s loss of the presidency, the National Archives has said in court documents.

    White House spokesman Mike Gwin said in a statement after the ruling that former President Donald Trump’s “actions represented a unique and existential threat to our democracy, and President Biden has been clear that these events require a full investigation to ensure that what we saw on January 6th can never happen again. Today’s ruling by the Supreme Court is an important step forward in that process, and in ensuring accountability for an unprecedented assault on our democracy and the rule of law.”

    The move effectively moots former President Donald Trump’s pending appeal in the case that centered on keeping the documents secret. Lawyers for Trump say the documents are sensitive and privileged records. “The disagreement between an incumbent President and his predecessor from a rival political party is both novel and highlights the importance of executive privilege and the ability of Presidents and their advisers to reliably make and receive full and frank advice, without concern that communications will be publicly released to meet a political objective,” Trump’s lawyer, Jesse R. Binnall told the justices. On the other hand, the Biden administration argued that withholding the records based on executive privilege is not in the interest of the United States. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said that in light of the “extraordinary events” of January 6, President Joe Biden had decided that that an assertion of executive privilege is “not justified.”

    A federal appeals court ruled against former President Donald Trump, holding that he “has provided no basis for this court to override President Biden’s judgment and the agreement and accommodations worked out between the Political Branches over these documents.” The court noted that the events “marked the most significant assault on the Capitol since the War of 1812,” but agreed to freeze its ruling until the Supreme Court acted. “Under any of the tests advocated by former President Trump, the profound interests in disclosure advanced by President Biden and the January 6th Committee far exceed his generalized concerns for Executive Branch confidentiality,” the panel of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit wrote.

    On January 26, the Supreme Court cited part of that sentence. “Because the Court of Appeals concluded that President Trump’s claims would have failed even if he were the incumbent, his status as a former President necessarily made no difference to the court’s decision,” the Supreme Court said. “Tonight’s ruling is a major setback for former President Trump in his efforts to block the National Archives from turning over documents to the January 6 Committee,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law. “Although the justices did not rule on whether the court of appeals correctly rejected his suit, by not blocking the handing over now, the justices have allowed that ruling to be the final word.

  • Fifth Circut Court Of Appeals Temporarily Blocks Biden Administration COVID Vaccine Mandate

    Fifth Circut Court Of Appeals Temporarily Blocks Biden Administration COVID Vaccine Mandate

    A federal appeals court temporarily blocked President Joe Biden’s Covid vaccine and testing requirements for private businesses on November 6, just a day after they had officially gone into effect. The Republican attorneys general of Texas, South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Utah, as well as several private companies, filed petitions on November 5 challenging the mandate in the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The court on November 6 ordered the vaccine and testing requirements halted pending review “because the petitions give cause to believe there are grave statutory and constitutional issues with the Mandate.” The three judges who issued the order, Stuart Kyle Duncan, Kurt Damian Englehardt, and Edith Hollan Jones, were appointed by former Presidents Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan.  

    The Labor Department’s top lawyer, Seema Nanda, said the Biden Administration is “fully prepared to defend this standard in court.” The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which polices workplace safety for the Labor Department, developed the vaccine and testing requirements under emergency authority that allows the agency to shortcut the process to issue workplace safety standards, which normally take years. “The Occupational Safety and Health Act explicitly gives OSHA the authority to act quickly in an emergency where the agency finds that workers are subjected to a grave danger and a new standard is necessary to protect them,” Nanda said in a statement after the Republican attorneys general and companies filed their challenge.

    Under the mandates, companies with 100 or more employees must ensure their staff has received the shots necessary for full vaccination by January 4. After that date, unvaccinated employees must submit weekly negative COVID-19 tests to enter the workplace. Unvaccinated workers must start wearing masks indoors at their workplaces starting December 5. Seema Nanda said the mandate “preempts any state or local requirements that ban or limit an employer’s authority to require vaccination, face-covering, or testing.” Texas Governor Greg Abbott banned vaccine mandates in his state through an executive order last month.     

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in a statement, called the vaccine mandate “a breathtaking abuse of federal power,” arguing that it is “flatly unconstitutional.” Paxton said the mandate goes beyond the “limited power and specific responsibilities” of OSHA. In their petition to halt the mandates, several companies that operate in Texas challenged OSHA’s authority to issue emergency workplace safety standards, arguing that it is an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority to the executive branch. OSHA’s emergency authority was established by Congress. The companies Burnett Specialists, Choice Staffing, and Staff Force also argued that the requirements put them in the position of either violating federal regulations or Texas state law. They also said the mandates would result in irreparable harm, including fines for possible non-compliance as well as the loss of employees to smaller companies who are not covered by the mandates. 

  • Supreme Court denies election appeal from Pennsylvania Republicans

    Supreme Court denies election appeal from Pennsylvania Republicans

    The US Supreme Court on February 22 brought a formal end to eight lingering disputes pursued by former President Donald Trump and his allies related to the Presidential election including a Republican challenge to the extension of Pennsylvania’s deadline to receive mail-in ballots. The justices turned away appeals by the Republican Party of Pennsylvania and Republican members of the state legislature of a ruling by Pennsylvania’s top court ordering officials to count mail-in ballots that were postmarked by Election Day and received up to three days later. Three of the nine-member court’s six conservative justices, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch, dissented from the decision not to hear the Pennsylvania case.

    Former President Donald Trump lost his re-election bid to former Vice President Joe Biden by a 306-232 margin in the 2020 Presidential election. Now-President Biden defeated Trump by 80,000 votes and the legal case focuses on less than 10,000 mail-in ballots. The Supreme Court, as expected, also rejected two Trump appeals challenging Biden’s victories in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin based on claims that the rules for mail-in ballots in the two election battleground states were invalid. The court also turned away separate cases brought by Trump allies in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona, all states won by Biden. It already was clear that the high court had no intention to intervene in the cases because it did not act before Congress on January 6 certified Biden’s victory. That formal certification was interrupted when a pro-Trump mob stormed the US Capitol. The court also turned down motions to expedite the election cases.

    Former President Donald Trump made false claims that the Presidential election was stolen from him through widespread voting fraud and irregularities. From the day after the Presidential election until the middle of December, Trump’s legal team filed some 40 election-related lawsuits challenging the results in seven states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico). The Supreme Court ruled these disputes as invalid on December 11 in 1 7-2 decision, with even Trump’s own Supreme Court appointees ruling against him.

    The case brought by Pennsylvania Republicans concerned 9,428 ballots out of 6.9 million cast in the state. The Supreme Court previously rejected a Republican request to block the lower court ruling allowing the ballots to be counted. In his dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas said the Supreme Court should resolve whether non-legislators, including elections officials and courts, have any power to set election rules. Thomas said it was fortunate that the state high court’s ruling did not involve enough ballots to affect the election’s outcome.

  • Supreme Court Rules That Federal Civil Rights Law Protects LGBTQ Workers From Discrimination

    Supreme Court Rules That Federal Civil Rights Law Protects LGBTQ Workers From Discrimination

    Federal civil rights law protects gay, lesbian and transgender workers, the Supreme Court ruled on June 14. The landmark ruling will extend protections to millions of workers nationwide and is a defeat for the Trump administration, which argued that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that bars discrimination based on sex did not extend to claims of gender identity and sexual orientation. The 6-3 opinion was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, President Donald Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s four liberal justices. “An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids,” Gorsuch wrote. “There is simply no escaping the role intent plays here: Just as sex is necessarily a but-for cause when an employer discriminates against homosexual or transgender employees, an employer who discriminates on these grounds inescapably intends to rely on sex in its decisionmaking,” the opinion read.

    Speaking at a press conference, President Donald Trump called the decision “very powerful” and acknowledged it was surprising to some. “They’ve ruled and we live with the decision,” Trump said. “We live with the decision of the Supreme Court.” Presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden called the ruling “a momentous step forward for our country.” “The Supreme Court has confirmed the simple but profoundly American idea that every human being should be treated with respect and dignity. That everyone should be able to live openly, proudly, as their true selves without fear,” Biden said. Justice Samuel Alito, one of the court’s conservatives, wrote in his dissent that “even if discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity could be squeezed into some arcane understanding of sex discrimination, the context in which Title VII was enacted would tell us that this is not what the statute’s terms were understood to mean at that time.” Meanwhile, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s second Supreme court appointee, acknowledged the social and political progress achieved by members of the LGBTQ community, but nonetheless dissented. “They have advanced powerful policy arguments and can take pride in today’s result. Under the Constitution’s separation of powers, however, I believe that it was Congress’s role, not this Court’s, to amend Title VII. I therefore must respectfully dissent from the Court’s judgment,” Kavanaugh wrote.

    A number of LGBTQ groups celebrated the court’s ruling, including the Human Rights Campaign, whose president, Alphonso David, said in a tweet that the decision is a “landmark victory for #LGBTQ equality.” Sarah Kate Ellis, the president of the LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD, said in a statement that the decision “is a step towards affirming the dignity of transgender people, and all LGBTQ people.” But the ruling was also sharply criticized by the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, whose president issued a blistering statement about Justice Neil Gorsuch, who replaced the late Justice Antonin Scalia. “Justice Scalia would be disappointed that his successor has bungled textualism so badly today, for the sake of appealing to college campuses and editorial boards,” said Carrie Severino, a former clerk of Justice Clarence Thomas. “This was not judging, this was legislating — a brute force attack on our constitutional system.” Gorsuch grounded his opinion in the plain text of the law. He acknowledged that when the law was passed, Congress may not have been thinking of gay, lesbian and transgender rights. The conservative justice said Congress might not have “anticipated their work would lead to this particular result,” but, he said, the “express terms of the statute give us one answer.” “Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit,” he wrote in the ruling.

    The court’s ruling was on separate cases: one concerning whether the law encompasses claims of sexual orientation brought by Gerald Bostock, and the estate of Donald Zarda, and the other concerning a transgender woman, Aimee Stephens, whose challenge marked the first time the court heard arguments regarding the civil rights of a transgender individual. Stephens, who died in May, mustered the courage back in 2013 to tell her co-workers about something that she had struggled with her entire life: her gender identity. Not long after, she was fired as the director of a funeral home. Stephens’ former boss, Thomas Rost, testified in the lower court that she was fired because she was “no longer going to represent himself as a man.” A lower court ruled in her favor, holding it is “analytically impossible to fire an employee based on that employee’s status as a transgender person without being motivated, at least in part, by the employee’s sex.” Aimee Stephens’ wife, Donna Stephens, also welcomed the court’s ruling, saying in a statement that Aimee was “a leader who fought against discrimination against transgender people.” “I am grateful for this victory to honor the legacy of Aimee, and to ensure people are treated fairly regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity,” Donna Stephens said.