Courts & Law

Update on the Referendum (‘citizens veto’) of HB 2305, Voter Suppression Act

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Earlier this week, the Secretary of State's Office completed its review of the petitions for the referendum ("citizens veto") of HB 2305, the Voter Suppression Act. The Arizona Capitol Times (subscription required) reported, Secretary of State knocks 2,300 signatures from HB2305 referendum effort:

2305hb11The coalition fighting the election law approved by the Legislature this year filed 139,161 signatures that passed the first round of verification from the Secretary of State’s Office.

The office tossed 237 petition sheets
containing more than 2,300 signatures for technical reasons. An
unreported number of individual signatures were also thrown out for
technical reasons, said Matt Roberts, a spokesman for Secretary of State
Ken Bennett.

* * *

The remaining signatures must have an
overall validity rate of roughly 62 percent in order to force a
referendum against the law. Referendum backers like Robbie Sherwood,
spokesman for the Protect Your Right to Vote Campaign, are confident enough of the signatures will be validated to make it happen.

“To lose less than 5 percent (on the first review) we thought was
very good, and we were very happy with that. Certainly it’s not over,
and we’re not counting our chickens before they hatch, but we’re
confident we’ll have the signatures,” he said.

The Secretary of State’s Office announced Monday that it is sending a
random 5 percent sample of the 139,161 signatures to each of the
state’s 15 county recorders, who will check the validity of signatures
from their counties.


Within 15 days of receiving the 5 percent
sample, each county must calculate the percentage of valid signatures
from registered voters in the county and return the petition sheets,
along with the total validity rate, back to the Secretary of State’s
Office.

Arizona GOP voter suppression efforts follow the lead of Kris Kobach

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Nativist anti-immigrant lawyer Kris Kobach, the athor of Arizona's Prop. 200 (2004) and SB 1070 (despite disgraced former Sen. Russell Pearce's claims of authorship to the contrary), has a plan to get around the U.S. Supreme Court decision in June striking down the proof of citizenship requirement to register to vote in Arizona's Prop. 200 and a similar law in Kansas, where Kobach unbelievably is now Secretary of State. Kris Kobach's Bold New Plan to Keep People From Voting:

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has become a national figure by advising other states on how to implement anti-immigrant and voter suppression measures,
has come up with a new creative way to make it harder for Kansans to
vote: barring those who register to vote with a federal form from
casting ballots in state elections.

Back in June, the Supreme Court struck down
an Arizona elections law that required those registering to vote to
show proof of citizenship beyond what is required by federal voter
registration forms. In Kansas, Kobach has been struggling to deal with
the implementation of a similar proof-of-citizenship law, which has left
the voting status of at least 12,000 Kansans in limbo.

These voters, many of whom registered with the federal “motor voter”
form at the DMV, were supposed to have their citizenship information
automatically updated, a process that was delayed by a computer glitch. Kobach then suggested that these 12,000 voters be forced to cast provisional ballots – a suggestion that the state elections board rejected.

Now, the Lawrence Journal-World reports, Kobach has a new idea to deal with the problem that he created.
The paper reports that Kobach is considering a plan to circumvent the
Supreme Court’s decision in the Arizona case by creating two classes of
voters. Under this plan, those who register with a federal form would be
allowed to vote only in federal elections until they produced the
state-required citizenship documents. Those who meet the state
registration requirements would then be allowed to vote in state-level
elections.

First Monday in October: SCOTUS preview

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

There are a number of controversial cases already on the U.S. Supreme Court docket for its 2013-2014 term, none more so than "Son of Citizens United," the McCutcheon v. FEC case to be argued tomorrow. Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog.com has a preview:

GavelToday is the first Monday in October, which means that this morning the
Justices will return to the bench for the first time since they issued a
series of historic rulings at the end of June.  In the Los Angeles Times,
David Savage looks ahead at the new Term, which he characterizes as one
that “gives the court’s conservative bloc a clear opportunity to shift
the law to the right on touchstone social issues such as abortion, contraception and religion, as well as the political controversy over campaign funding”; at BuzzFeed, Chris Geidner lists his eleven cases “that could change the U.S. in the coming year.”

The editorial board of The New York Times
weighs in on the new Term as well, emphasizing that, although “[n]o
case yet promises the high-profile splash of rulings on national health
care, voting rights or same-sex marriage, . . . in many of them,
long-established Supreme Court precedents may be at risk.”  And in the ABA Journal,
Erwin Chemerinsky focuses on the Court’s October sitting, concluding
that there is “every reason to believe that October Term 2013 will again
involve decisions that affect not only the law and legal system, but
each of us, often in the most important and intimate aspects of our
lives.”

Tomorrow the Court will hear oral arguments in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, in which it will consider the constitutionality of aggregate limits on campaign contributions.  Lyle previewed the case for us last week, while Carolyn Shapiro has a video preview at ISCOTUSnow.  The case is also the focus of the Room for Debate page of The New York Times, where debaters include Richard Hasen (who also has extensive links to coverage of the case at his Election Law Blog), Ilya Shapiro, Bradley Smith, Ciara Torres-Spellicsy, and Elizabeth Wydra; other coverage comes from Kenneth Jost at Jost on Justice, who observes that the Court in Citizens United “made
clear it has no qualms about setting corporations free to spend freely
on political campaigns,” and contends that “[a]ll signs suggest those
five justices are likely to have no qualms about unleashing McCutcheon
and other well-heeled contributors as well.”  And at the Constitutional
Accountability Center’s Text and History Blog,
Elizabeth Wydra describes McCutcheon as a case that “could make it even
harder for Congress to address one particular issue: the corrupting
influence of money in politics.”  Finally, in anticipation of the oral
argument in McCutcheon, the latest installment in C-SPAN Radio’s series on historic oral arguments looks back at the oral argument in Colorado GOP Federal Campaign Committee v. FEC.

South Carolina and another nullification crisis

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The Washington Post's Colbert King got it exactly right in The rise of the New Confederacy.

Confederale SoldiersSouth Carolina, the state that gave us the Nullification Crisis with the South Carolina Ordinance of Nullification in 1832, until Congress in 1833 passed a Force Bill, authorizing President Andrew Jackson to use military force against South Carolina ended the crisis.

South Carolina, the home of Senator John C. Calhoun, the intellectual force behind states' rights and nullification, under which states could declare null and void federal laws which they viewed as unconstitutional, and who was an inspiration to the secessionists of 1860–61.

South Carolina, the first state to secede from the United States with the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.

South Carolina, whose Confederate militia batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, the first shots of the American Civil War in 1861.

South Carolina, which has refused to accept its defeat in the Civil War or to accept the post-Civil War Amendments, in particular the 14th Amendment, which forever ended any debate over Sen. Calhoun's theories of nullification and secession.

Colbert King: The modern GOP is the New Confederacy

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

In a follow-up to my post, Republicans on the modern GOP: An anti-government, Neo-Confederate insurrectionist party of radicals, the Washington Post's Colbert King details today, The rise of the New Confederacy (excerpt):

Confederale SoldiersFederal government as the enemy.

Today there is a New
Confederacy, an insurgent political force that has captured the
Republican Party and is taking up where the Old Confederacy left off in
its efforts to bring down the federal government.

No shelling of a
Union fort, no bloody battlefield clashes, no Good Friday assassination
of a hated president — none of that nauseating, horrendous stuff. But
the behavior is, nonetheless, malicious and appalling.

The New
Confederacy, as churlish toward President Obama as the Old Confederacy
was to Lincoln, has accomplished what its predecessor could not: It has shut down the federal government, and without even firing a weapon or taking 620,000 lives, as did the Old Confederacy’s instigated Civil War.

Not
stopping there, however, the New Confederacy aims to destroy the full
faith and credit of the United States, setting off economic calamity at
home and abroad — all in the name of “fiscal sanity.”

Its members
are as extreme as their ideological forebears. It matters not to them,
as it didn’t to the Old Confederacy, whether they ultimately go down in
flames. So what? For the moment, they are getting what they want: a
federal government in the ditch, restrained from seeking to create a
more humane society that extends justice for all.

The ghosts of the Old Confederacy have to be envious.