Courts

The Supreme Court Will Functionally Decide If You Can Wear Your #MAGA Hat To Vote

Minnesota's attempts to ban electioneering at polling places run into the power of T-shirts.

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If they were intellectually consistent, the people who are constantly crying about “voter fraud” and “voter intimidation” would ALSO be the people most sensitive to electioneering at polling places. Right? If you are worried that there are massive conspiracies to steal American elections, you should want to do everything possible to make sure that when people go to cast their sacred and secret ballot, they are unmolested by outside political forces trying to change or shame their minds.

Of course, the “voter fraud” people are entirely hypocritical racists, so they don’t really have a suite of logical concerns. They’re not concerned with “voter intimidation,” they’re concerned with “black and brown people, voting.” They are all about intimidation if it discourages minority groups from participating in self-government.

It’s this inherent hypocrisy that leads us to Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Manksy. It’s a voting rights case, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments about in February. The case arises from a man who wore one of those “Don’t Tread On Me” shirts — which were the MAGA hat before Trump realized he could get incredibly stupid Americans to pay him for MAGA hats. Election workers informed him that the shirt (and a button which read “Please I.D. Me”) were in violation of Minnesota’s law banning political insignia at polling places.

That guy went on to found the “Minnesota Voters Alliance” in the instant case.

The “Don’t Tread On Me” shirt at issue has fallen out of favor, but the Supreme Court’s ruling will have a direct effect on the ubiquitous MAGA hat. To my mind, the MAGA hat is the brown-shirt-and-swastika kit of our day. But to the white American, that sounds hyperbolic. I mean, I’m sure the 1930s German just thought the swastika was a mark of their political affiliation too, not a symbol of white supremacy.

SCOTUSblog, as is their practice, runs competing views on important cases in the weeks leading up to big arguments. Today, the Heritage Foundation’s defense of swas… I mean, “political insignia” went up.

When was the last time a T-shirt changed the way you voted? Probably never, but the state of Minnesota thinks you’re much more impressionable. It’s so concerned that voters might influence others with their clothing choices that it prohibited wearing items that could be construed as “political” — such as a “Please I.D. Me” button or a “Don’t Tread on Me” T-shirt — from polling places on Election Day. Offenders are subject to civil fines of up to $5,000 and the possibility of criminal charges.

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That’s the very opening of the article and you can see that it is fatally flawed in the first sentence. The ban on T-shirts is not because they “change the way” people vote. Nobody is wearing a T-shirt to change somebody’s mind.

The point of a T-shirt ban is to ban INTIMIDATION of others as they try to cast a ballot. You’re not trying to get people to change their vote, you’re trying to make them think twice about voting at all.

I live on a blue block in a purple county in a blue state. If somebody showed up at my polling booth wearing a MAGA hat, I’d laugh at them. If I lived in a red state, and I had to navigate a phalanx of MAGA-hat-wearing people and polling officials, I might just go home. I want to vote for the Democratic congressional candidate, but I don’t want to get LYNCHED for it.

The Heritage Foundation forgets that people who are now on their side have a history of murdering minorities who try to vote where they are not supposed to. In the historical context of voting rights, we’re not talking about Minnesota trying to protect “impressionable” people, we’re talking about Minnesota trying to protect people who FEAR FOR THEIR SAFETY when showing up to vote. The MAGA people have done everything they can to make minorities know that they are UNSAFE around people who don the garb.

Of course, in our world of false equivalency and white fragility, every argument I just made about the MAGA hat has been and will continue to be made about BlackLivesMatter. People who explicitly think black lives do not matter find the slogan “intimidating” — though when a person wearing a BlackLivesMatters hat rolls their Escalade into a crowd of Nazis and kills one, you let me know.

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Normally, I don’t play their games, but on this point, I will concede my non-violent sartorial rights to curtail your violent sartorial rights. The main legal argument against the Minnesota ban is that it’s overbroad. I don’t think it is. I think that some apparel clearly has political meaning, and we can easily tell which ones do by whether the candidates in the election have adopted the apparel and slogans in their campaigns. Individual states are capable of determining what kind of clothing amounts to a political message in their polling places, and are right to exclude them in a zone around people trying to cast a ballot.

In Boston, an “Eat the Rich” shirt is probably a paean to a local band; in Montpelier, it’s a clear sign in support of Bernie Sanders. And in either case, if you are unwilling to cover up your stupid shirt for five minutes while you vote, it’s a good indication that whatever you’re wearing, you’re doing it to intimidate others at the polling location.

Given the current makeup of the Court, I expect black people who want to vote in Georgia are going to have to push through a sea of MAGA hat wearers brandishing nooses by the time Roberts and Gorsuch are done with the issue. Unless or until he affirms the travel ban, Roberts’s antipathy to black voting rights stands as the darkest mark in his ledger, while Neil Gorsuch was handpicked by the Heritage Foundation to be wrong about exactly this kind of thing.

But, it is what it is. Conservatives can win now only by suppressing the non-white vote, and they’re willing to try to do that in any way they can.

Symposium: Don’t tread on my passive political speech [SCOTUSblog]

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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