THE Supreme Court is not comprised of “nine junior varsity politicians”, Justice Stephen Breyer insists. For Chief Justice John Roberts, America’s top jurists are umpires with no skin in the game. With a 5-4 ruling on June 11th in Husted v Philip Randolph Institute, a significant voting-rights case, these paeans to dispassionate nonpartisanship ring a bit hollow. All five justices appointed by Republican presidents voted to uphold an Ohio law disproportionately erasing Democrats from the voter rolls; all four Democratic appointees voted to strike it down.
Politics loom large in the background, but the main opinions in Husted turned on a thorny question of statutory interpretation. When Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002, a follow-up to the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), what did it mean when it told states not to remove people from registered voter lists...Continue reading
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