Election Law, SCOTUS, Supreme Court

Why Do Conservative Justices Hate Voters?

Restricting voting rights is the wrong side of history

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Every law talkin’ guy is weighing in on the Supreme Court’s decision to restrict early voting in Ohio. The decision broke down 5-4, along predictable party lines. The same five justices who gave corporations a blank check to buy elections, the same five justices who decided to declare racism over in the South, decided to stay the restriction on Ohio preventing the state from scaling back early voting from five weeks to four weeks. No opinion was given, but it’s likely that the conservative justices applied a narrow reading to voting rights protections under the Equal Protection clause and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, according to Professor Rick Hasen. Shocker.

I get it, politically. It’s obvious that Democrats feel like their electoral chances are enhanced by allowing everybody to vote as easily as possible. It’s also obvious that Republicans feel like their chances at the polls are better if fewer people vote and richer people have more influence. That’s politics. Census 2020, bring your pitchforks.

But Supreme Court justices are supposed to be above petty politics. And even though we know that they are not, what is the ideological advantage of being against voters? Their jobs are unassailable. They are unaccountable to the people. Why then make it harder for “the people” to elect who they want?

Writing at Slate, Hasen puts it like this:

For the most part, it has been Democratic and more liberal judges who have issued opinions reading voting rights protection broadly, and it has been Republican and more conservative judges who have issued opinions reading the protections narrowly.

Why? Why is that so? If you want to call balls and strikes, why do you also have to decide who gets to play? America already has one of the poorest voter participation rates in the world. In the world, man. How is that what the Founders intended? How is that acceptable in the so-called greatest democracy on Earth?

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We already know that the conservative justices don’t care about the democratic quality of our elections. You can’t read Citizens United as anything other than a “f**k you” to the sanctity of the electoral process. And we already know that the justices don’t care about what the voters, through their elected representatives, choose anyway. The Court is going to do what it wants, when it wants, regardless. Why make it harder for an individual person to just show up and throw their meaningless vote away? Why make them stand in long lines? Why make it scary for undocumented citizens? It’s not like anything can happen in this country unless four white men and their black friend agree anyway.

Politically, these decisions are not going to work for conservatives, not in the long term anyway. Taking people’s votes away just makes them more thirsty for the opportunity to cast their ballot. The white, male, landowning hegemony that the Supreme Court is attempting to prop up is never coming back. America is getting non-whiter. Whites will be a racial minority in this country in 30 years. And we have a word for a system where a racial minority is allowed to rule while the votes of the racial majority are restricted. It’s called apartheid.

Is that what we’re going for here? I give a s**t about what the local Republican alderman thinks will help him retain control of the city council. The Supreme Court is supposed to be able to step back and see the whole board. What freaking board are they looking at? Conservatives need to spend less time trying to stop people from voting, and spend more time convincing voters to support them.

Failing that, let everybody vote, then restrict the impact of winning elections. That’s the smart move. That’s what Tessio would do.

The Voting Wars Heat Up [Slate]

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