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Judge writes blistering dissent as kids’ climate lawsuit gets tossed

by mackenziepsv Posted on January 17, 2020

Nowadays, it’s not unusual to see young folks publicly protesting climate change. But back in 2015, long before Greta Thunberg set up shop on the steps of the Swedish Parliament and inspired millions to take to the streets, 21 kids sued the United States to try to force the government to do something about climate change. They argued that the government’s inaction was putting their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness at risk. That case, Juliana v. United States, paved the way for more climate-themed lawsuits to be filed against governments and oil companies around the world.

On Friday, after five long years of wins, setbacks, and procedural delay, the kids finally got their answer: No.

The 9th Circuit dismissed the case on the grounds that the courts don’t have the power to order the kind of emissions reduction plan sought by the plaintiffs, who were demanding that the government limit atmospheric warming to 1 degree C — a whole half-degree cooler than the target called for by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Any plan to reduce emissions, the panel of three judges wrote in a 32-page opinion, would require the executive and legislative branches to come up with a range of complicated policies and vote on them. As such, the decision reads, “the panel reluctantly concluded that the plaintiff’s case must be made to the political branches or to the electorate at large.” The issue here, of course, is that the leadership of one of the United States’ two major political parties denies the existence of climate change, and Congress’ most recent climate bill — the first one in a decade — just hit the dust in the Senate. Regardless, the case will not go to trial.

One judge wasn’t happy about that. In a searing dissent, District Judge Josephine Staton lacerated the U.S. government and said that the young people do have standing.

In these proceedings, the government accepts as fact that the United States has reached a tipping point crying out for a concerted response — yet presses ahead toward calamity. It is as if an asteroid were barreling toward the Earth and the government decided to shut down our only defenses. Seeking to quash this suit, the government bluntly insists that it has the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the Nation.

The decision is a blow to the youth plaintiffs, many of whom have put their lives on hold for years in order to be available for depositions and testimonies. But winning the case wasn’t their only priority. When Grist interviewed one plaintiff, Aji Piper, in 2018, he said his reasons for suing the government are chiefly moral.

“It’s not about the winning,” he said. “It’s doing it because it’s the right thing to do.” At least the kids know they tried their best to protect Earth from the asteroid. And their legal counsel isn’t giving up yet. “We will be asking the full Ninth Circuit to review the determination that federal courts can do nothing to address an admitted constitutional violation,” Andrea Rodgers, the plaintiffs’ co-counsel, said in a statement.

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Judge writes blistering dissent as kids’ climate lawsuit gets tossed

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These Four Cases Will Quickly Show Who Gorsuch Really Is

by Zelma92959686205 Posted on April 7, 2017

Mother Jones

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When newly minted Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch takes the bench later this month, he will likely have an immediate impact on a court that has been somewhat paralyzed since the unexpected death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February last year. The court, evenly divided with eight members, has waited to tackle a number of potentially thorny cases, either because they were unable to agree on whether to hear them or they were reluctant to adjudicate them. Gorsuch has been confirmed just in time to change all that.

He will also shape the future when, on April 13, he participates in his first court conference, where the justices decide which new cases to hear in the new term and which they’re rejecting. Decisions from that meeting may demonstrate quickly whether fears Senate Democrats have raised about his views on everything from religious freedom to gay rights to corporate power were on target.

Here are a few of the pending cases where Gorsuch will have an opportunity to make an early mark:

Masterpiece Cake Shop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission: In 2012, a Colorado baker named Jack Phillips refused to make a custom wedding cake for two men getting married in Massachusetts, one of the few states where same-sex marriage was legal at the time. The couple was planning a reception in Colorado, where they lived and wanted to celebrate. Phillips claimed making the cake would violate his religious beliefs. The couple sued and has prevailed at every level in Colorado courts, which found that baking a gay wedding cake would not violate Phillips’ free speech or religious freedom rights, but refusing to make one would constitute illegal discrimination based on sexual orientation.The case has been stuck in conference purgatory, relisted multiple times for consideration, but probably not for long.

The gay-cake case seems custom-made for Gorsuch, who was one of the lower court judges who ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby, the craft store that claimed providing health insurance to its employees that covered contraception violated its corporate religious freedom rights. The Supreme Court later upheld the ruling in a 5-4 decision, and critics have warned it will be used to justify the kind of anti-gay discrimination at issue in the cake case. The presence of Gorsuch on the high court, instead of Merrick Garland, President Obama’s court nominee who was denied the seat by Senate Republicans, is likely to be decisive. It probably doesn’t bode well for the LGBT community, despite Gorsuch’s claims to have gay friends.

Salazar-Limon v Houston: Even though police shootings have been in the news and the source of intense protest over the past couple of years, the eight-member Supreme Court seems to have been reluctant to wade into the fray. This case is another one that’s been languishing at the court for many months, waiting for a decision on whether it will be heard. It involves what might be called the “reaching for the waistband” defense frequently deployed by cops who shoot unarmed people of color.

In 2010, 25-year-old Mexican immigrant Ricardo Salazar-Limon had a wife, children, and a construction job. One night after a long day of work, he was out with friends and driving to see another friend when a Houston cop pulled him over for speeding. He had no criminal record, no outstanding warrants, a valid drivers’ license, and insurance on his truck. He was in the country legally and was unarmed. But the cop told Salazar he was going to jail and tried to put him in handcuffs. Salazar jerked back and walked towards his vehicle, annoyed because the officer refused to even tell him why he might be going to jail. As he was walking the officer told him to stop and then shot him in the back, leaving Salazar paralyzed from the waist down.

Salazar sued the police department alleging excessive force. In his defense, the officer claimed that he feared for his life when he shot Salazar because he had moved his hands towards his waistband while walking away. It’s the same argument that’s been employed by cops in at least two other shootings of unarmed citizens in Houston, and it works. The District Court dismissed Salazar’s case, and the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision. The Supreme Court is now being asked to decide whether a court can dismiss a case against an officer in a suit for excessive force “by concluding that it is an ‘undisputed fact’ that the person reached for his waistband just because the officer said he did.”

The facts in this case are infuriating, yet it’s clear that the court has been unable to get the requisite four votes needed to hear it. Whether Gorsuch will provide that additional vote is anyone’s guess, but criminal justice reformers shouldn’t hold out hope that he’ll change the outcome. He’s ruled in a similar case before. In 2013, he wrote the majority opinion in a 10th Circuit ruling dismissing a lawsuit brought by the parents of a man who was tased in head by a cop and died. The cops in that case also used a “reached for his waistband” defense.

Alaska Oil and Gas Association v. Zinke: One of the biggest concerns raised by those opposing Gorsuch’s confirmation was that his record suggested he would be hostile to environmental regulations and the agencies that create them. That theory will be tested soon after Gorsuch’s swearing in, with a case involving the fate of polar bears.

In 2008, the Bush administration’s Fish and Wildlife Service officially declared the polar bear a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Two years later, the agency designated 187,000 square miles around the Bering Sea, the Arctic Ocean and the Alaskan North Slope as critical habitat for the bears, which created new restrictions on oil drilling in the region. The Alaskan oil industry sued and alleged that the Fish and Wildlife Service had overreached and made an arbitrary decision in selecting the boundaries for the critical habitat. The trial court partially agreed, but the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision and sided with the wildlife agency. The appeal of that decision is pending before the Supreme Court, which will decide in the next few months whether to hear the case.

Federal agency overreach is something Gorsuch has a clear record on. He wrote a lengthy concurrence to one of his own opinions on the 10th Circuit, calling on the Supreme Court to limit the requirement that judges defer to federal agencies such as Fish and Wildlife when considering the implementation of laws made by Congress. This may be a sign that, despite his love of skiing, Gorsuch probably is not going to side with the polar bears.

Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer: The court agreed to hear this case last year, shortly before Justice Scalia died, but it took its own sweet time scheduling it for oral arguments. When it finally did, a year later, the case was set for the second-to-last week of arguments for the term. The court’s reluctance to decide this case may stem from the fact that it’s the most controversial church-state separation case on the docket this year, and the closest thing to a culture war case that’s likely to break out before the court recesses in June.

Here’s how we described it last fall:

A Michigan church applied for a grant from Missouri’s Scrap Tire Grant program for assistance resurfacing a playground at its preschool with a safer, rubber top made of old tires. While the church’s grant proposal was well rated, the state ultimately turned it down because the state constitution prohibits direct aid to a church. The church sued, with help from a legion of lawyers fresh off the gay marriage battles. They argue that Missouri’s prohibition, originally conceived as part of an anti-Catholic movement, violates the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, especially when the money was going to a purely secular use.

While this might have been an easy win for the church before the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, who was on the court when the justices took the case in January, the remaining eight-members might not be quite so well-disposed to rule in its favor. Forcing taxpayers to underwrite improvements to church property is in direct conflict with some of the court’s earlier rulings. Critics see a ruling for the church as a slippery-slope sort of argument, leading to compulsory government support of religion, which the Founders deeply opposed.

Once again, Gorsuch’s views in Hobby Lobby and religious freedom seem likely to predispose him to support church, but we’ll know more about his position on April 19, when he will be on the bench for the oral arguments in this case.

Liberal court watchers, having lost the confirmation fight, are now moving into breath-holding mode as they look to these cases for clues as to just what sort of justice Gorsuch is really going to be. As Elizabeth Wydra, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center said Friday, “Now that he has been confirmed, we certainly hope that Justice Gorsuch will fulfill Judge Gorsuch’s commitments: To be an independent jurist, to be a good judge who respects precedent, to be an originalist who respects the Constitution’s radical guarantee of equality, and follows the text and history of the Constitution wherever it leads.” She added, “The burden remains on Gorsuch to prove that he will be a Justice who fairly applies the law and the Constitution and does not, contrary to President Trump’s promises, just represent certain segments of the population.”

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These Four Cases Will Quickly Show Who Gorsuch Really Is

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Trump’s Immigration Order Is Now Effectively Dead

by RebeccaArringto Posted on March 30, 2017

Mother Jones

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The Hawaii judge who halted enforcement of President Trump’s executive order on immigration has now gone a step further, turning his temporary restraining order into a preliminary injunction. Dara Lind explains:

A temporary restraining order is only supposed to last a couple of weeks. It’s supposed to grant enough time for the judge to do another round of briefs and hearings, and then issue a more considered decision about whether to keep the provision on hold indefinitely while the case works its way through the courts. That indefinite hold is called a preliminary injunction, and a judge in the Western District of Maryland (part of the Fourth Circuit) has already issued one against part of the executive order.

With two separate courts ruling against the travel ban, the administration’s only hope to get the ban back into effect without Supreme Court intervention was for both of those rulings to be overturned — or for the Maryland injunction to be overturned and Judge Watson to decide not to extend his temporary order into a preliminary injunction.

The first option wasn’t likely. The Ninth Circuit is famously liberal, and it’s the same court that put the first version of the travel ban on hold. So the administration’s last hope was Watson.

On Wednesday night, Watson did exactly what the administration hoped he wouldn’t. He issued a preliminary injunction covering both the section of the travel ban temporarily banning people from particular countries and the part temporarily banning refugees.

This may seem like it’s not too big a deal. The immigration order has been on hold for weeks, and now it’s going to stay on hold. But it’s actually a huge deal. For all practical purposes, it means Trump might as well give up.

As you’ll recall, the original immigration order was temporary: it would last about three months, which would give the Trump administration time to put “extreme vetting” procedures into place. That three months is up at the end of May. Presumably, DHS has been working diligently on the new procedures all along, so they should be ready to put them into effect by then.

At some point in May or June, the case becomes legally moot. But that doesn’t really matter. More practically, by the end of May it means that the extreme vetting procedures should be in place and Trump no longer needs the travel ban. After all, its only purpose was to provide time to work out the new procedures.

This is only about six weeks away. Maybe eight if they’ve run into snags. There’s no realistic chance that this case is going to get through two levels of lower courts and the Supreme Court in that time. Trump may keep fighting in order to save face, but it’s pointless. This case is now dead.

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Trump’s Immigration Order Is Now Effectively Dead

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Reports Suggest Trump Won’t Take Travel Ban to Supreme Court

by PhillipAngulo Posted on February 10, 2017

Mother Jones

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Update, 6:20 p.m.: The White House has apparently changed its mind again and may appeal to the Supreme Court after all.

NBC News and The Hill are both reporting that a White House official has said Trump won’t be appealing to the Supreme Court the 9th Circuit decision not to reinstate his “Muslim ban.”

This doesn’t mean, however, that the ban is dead—it only means the stay against enforcement of the ban will continue until the constitutionality of the executive order itself is ultimately decided in court on the merits.

Earlier Friday, CNN reported that Trump is considering a revised executive order.

This is a developing story. We’ll update when more news is available.

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Reports Suggest Trump Won’t Take Travel Ban to Supreme Court

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Anti-Abortion Activists Say Trump’s Court Picks Aren’t Extreme Enough

by AlberthaODea0 Posted on January 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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During the presidential campaign, President-elect Donald Trump pledged to nominate pro-life Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade “automatically,” and he released a list of 21 candidates he would consider for a spot on the high court. The conservative legal organization the Federalist Society, as well as the Heritage Foundation, an influential right-wing think tank, helped draft the list. But since the election, some pro-life activists have been pushing the Trump team to jettison most of the people on his short list on the grounds that they aren’t sufficiently committed to overturning the landmark 1973 abortion ruling.

In mid-December, Andrew Schlafly, president of the Legal Center for the Defense of Life and son of the late anti-feminist icon Phyllis Schlafly, wrote an open letter to Trump, signed by more than 70 anti-abortion activists, urging him to appoint a Supreme Court justice with a “proven pro-life record.” In a not–so–subtle reminder that pro-life voters may have played a huge role in putting Trump in the White House despite his obvious moral failings, Schlafly wrote:

Exit polls in the election showed that 21% of voters felt that this issue of the Supreme Court was ‘the most important factor’ in determining for whom they voted. Among that group of voters, you defeated your opponent by a landslide of 15%, 56-41%.

“I’m worried that Trump’s advisers will pull a Souter,” Schlafly explains, referring to President George H.W. Bush’s nomination of Justice David Souter. Souter was something of a blank slate when he was nominated, and he proved to be far more liberal than Republicans had believed. When it comes to the Supreme Court, Schlafly and his supporters don’t want to leave anything to chance, which means a nominee who doesn’t just profess pro-life convictions, but has a documented track record of ruling in abortion cases. But Schlafly suspects some of the people advising Trump on a court pick want “a stealth candidate, someone without a record,” who would generate less opposition in a confirmation hearing.

Among those he’s singled out for supposedly pushing such a candidate is Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society—which Schlafly insists is “not a pro-life organization,” despite Leo’s stated opposition to abortion. (Leo did not respond to a request for comment.)

Among those whom Schlafly has targeted on Trump’s short list are some pretty stalwart conservative federal judges, including Diane Sykes, a 7th Circuit judge who reportedly ranks as one of Trump’s top two choices. Schlafly believes Sykes is not pro-life because as an Indiana state court judge she sentenced two anti-abortion protesters to 60 days in jail for a clinic protest. Later, on the federal bench, she also helped strike down a law defunding Planned Parenthood—another black mark against her in his book. Another potential nominee, 10th Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch, who was appointed to the federal bench by George W. Bush, won’t be pro-life on the bench, according to Schlafly, because he doesn’t invoke the term “unborn child” in his decisions or public comments.

Candidates who meet Schlafly’s litmus test are few and far between, but there are two women from the highly conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas, Judges Edith Jones and Jennifer Elrod, who make the cut. Jones is a conservative poster gal who has been floated as a candidate for a GOP Supreme Court slot so many times that she’s been dubbed the “Susan Lucci” of Supreme Court nominations, after the soap opera star who was nominated 18 times for an Emmy before finally winning. As Tim Noah explained in Slate in 2005, “Presidents have been not choosing Jones since 1987,” back when Ronald Reagan needed a Supreme Court nominee to replace Robert Bork, whom the Senate rejected as too much of an extremist.

Today, Jones’ far-right views would make the late Bork look like a bleeding-heart liberal. In 2006, Jones made the Texas Observer’s list of worst judges in the state for rulings such as the one that upheld the execution of a man whose lawyer slept through his trial. Her performance in a sexual-harassment case was also noteworthy. “After hearing testimony that a woman had endured, among other things, a co-worker pinching her breast at work, Jones retorted, ‘Well, he apologized,'” wrote the Observer.

In 2014, lawyers and law students filed a judicial misconduct complaint against Jones over a speech she gave at a 2013 Federalist Society event. Jones allegedly said the death penalty provided a “positive service” to defendants because they are “likely to make peace with God only in the moment before imminent execution.” She also allegedly said, “African Americans and Hispanics are predisposed to crime” and “prone to commit acts of violence.” (Because there was no recording of Jones’ remarks, the complaint against her was dismissed.)

But for anti-abortion activists, her record is stellar: She was part of a three-judge panel that upheld a 2012 mandatory sonogram law in Texas, forcing doctors to give women seeking an abortion medically unnecessary information designed to persuade them to change their minds. In 2014, she was on a panel of judges considering a challenge to a Texas abortion law that closed 22 abortion clinics in the state. During oral arguments, she told lawyers for the Texas clinics that the 300-mile round trip some women would have to endure to reach a clinic under the new law was no big deal if they drove fast. The road, she said, was flat.

Elrod, who is also on Schlafly’s short list, wrote a circuit opinion in a preliminary phase of the case upholding that controversial law, which was struck down by the US Supreme Court last year in Women’s Whole Health v. Hellerstedt. In her opinion, Elrod gave almost complete deference to the state’s argument that the abortion-closing law was designed to protect women’s health, despite having no evidence to support that claim. She wrote, “In our circuit, we do not balance the wisdom or effectiveness of a law against the burdens the law imposes,” suggesting that the difficulties women might face obtaining an abortion in Texas were not relevant to her deliberations.

Florida Supreme Court Chief Judge Charles Canady is one of Trump’s potential candidates who meets with Schlafly’s approval as well. Canady, as a member of Congress in 1995, coined the term “partial-birth abortion” when he sponsored legislation banning dilation and extraction abortions in which doctors removed an intact fetus after collapsing its skull to minimize health complications in the woman. As a state court judge, he blocked a young woman from getting an abortion without her parents’ consent. His anti-abortion credentials are rock solid.

Schlafly complains that Trump’s advisers, including the Federalist Society’s Leo, are pushing him to tap younger judges while ignoring older, more proven judges such as Jones, who is 67, or Canady, 62. He wrote recently, “Mr. Leo’s approach runs afoul of conservative principles, which recognize that the longer someone is in D.C., the more liberal they generally get. That’s apparently true for some think tank executives as well, by the way.”

The anti-abortion movement as a whole has not gotten on board with Schlafly’s campaign, largely because everyone on Trump’s Supreme Court list is very conservative and likely to be hostile to abortion, even if they have not yet ruled on it. The signatories of Schlafly’s letter to Trump are B-listers of the anti-choice movement. Many of them represent state chapters of his late mother’s organization, the Eagle Forum, or the much-diminished Operation Rescue. But the most politically powerful anti-abortion groups such as Americans United for Life, National Right to Life, and the Family Research Council have not weighed in on his picks. Even anti-abortion stalwart Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, has shied away, despite being approached by Schlafly for support, saying that Schlafly’s letter “doesn’t reflect my judgment on all of the candidates.”

Ed Whelan, a former Scalia law clerk and attorney in the George W. Bush administration’s Department of Justice, has been one of the most outspoken conservative critics of Schlafly’s abortion purity campaign. He declined to comment for this story, but in his “Bench Notes” column in National Review, Whelan has explicitly defended potential Trump nominees from Schlafly’s attacks. He points out, for instance, that Schlafly’s own mother approved of the judges on Trump’s list before she died. In her last book, The Conservative Case for Trump, she and her co-author wrote, “It is to Trump’s credit that his shortlist is as good as it is.”

And he counters Schlafly’s criticism of the 7th Circuit’s Sykes by noting that while Sykes did rule in a case involving abortion protesters, “she didn’t sentence them for protesting abortion. She sentenced them for cementing their legs to the front of a car parked at the entrance to an abortion clinic and thus shutting down the clinic. What sentence does Schlafly believe Sykes should have imposed?”

But Whelan’s primary opposition to Schlafly’s campaign is that he believes the anti-abortion purists “want judges to indulge pro-life values to misread the law in order to reach pro-life results,” something he argues Scalia would never have approved of. Schlafly dismisses Whelan’s criticism as sour grapes: “Ed Whelan was a strident opponent of Trump himself.”

On Wednesday, during his first press conference since July, Trump said he would announce his Supreme Court choice during the first week or two after the inauguration. It’s unclear whether he’s taking Schlafly’s input under advisement. Neither Trump nor his advisers have responded to Schlafly. But Schlafly notes that his letter was featured on Fox News, and he’s hopeful it’s making an impact. “Nothing else a president does even compares to the significance of this decision,” Schlafly says, noting that its ramifications could last 30 years or more. Yet he thinks when it comes to the potential justices, Trump’s team hasn’t done its homework on the abortion issue, and he’s simply trying to fill in the research gaps. “Everybody knows that’s what’s at stake,” he says. “A very thorough vetting process is in order.”

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Anti-Abortion Activists Say Trump’s Court Picks Aren’t Extreme Enough

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The Standing Rock Sioux will be ready to take a Trump challenge to courts

by SamaraCooke Posted on December 6, 2016

In the wake of the Obama administration’s surprise decision to block the Dakota Access Pipeline, company reps seem confident they need only wait for President-elect Trump to keep building. But the lawyer who represents the Standing Rock Sioux says it won’t be so easy to overcome the legal hurdles.

“If an agency decides that a full environmental review is necessary, it can’t just change its mind with a stroke of a pen a few weeks later,” EarthJustice attorney Jan Hasselman told Grist. “That would be violation of the law, and it’s the kind of thing that a court would be called upon to review. It doesn’t mean they’re not going to try.”

Trump could force the pipeline through along the dispute route at Lake Oahe. He technically could ignore the Corps’ decision to fulfill a public Environmental Impact Statement with his newfound executive powers, but that might not be wise.

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“He could in the sense that you can rob a bank, but you’d get in trouble,” Hasselman said.

If that were the case, Standing Rock would be prepared to take the matter to courts again, their lawyer told Grist.

“Circumventing the environmental assessment now that the agency has determined it’s the right course of action shouldn’t pass muster under legal standards,” he added.

For example, the Ninth Circuit has ruled that federal agencies can’t just flip on a dime on settled rulemaking that is based on facts because a new administration has taken over. The Supreme Court this year declined to take up the case, leaving the Circuit’s decision standing that the Bush administration couldn’t exempt the Tongass rainforest in Alaska from a conservation rule, when the agency’s fact-finding found otherwise.

Unless a conservative Supreme Court reverses course, then Standing Rock still has that advantage in a Trump era.

Going further to weaken environmental regulations overall would require a more robust change to the law with congressional action. With the law on their side for now, environmental justice advocates could challenge administration decisions just as they did in the Bush administration. (Talk about government interference: Trump is reportedly also considering privatizing oil-rich Native American land to boost oil companies.)

Energy Transfer Partners has its share of options, too — even if Trump didn’t reverse the decision, it could still sue to maintain the current route.

One of the surer bets on what’s next is that the company is going to have to wait longer to build its pipeline than it originally intended. Energy Transfer Partners wanted it to be operational by the end of the year. If the Corps decision holds, it could potentially be tied up as long as a year or two. It would have to undergo a full environmental assessment of route alternatives, which is the traditional way government agencies solicit input from the public and weigh the pros and cons of environmentally risky projects.

The pipeline is far from dead. But it’s also far from a sure thing.

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The Standing Rock Sioux will be ready to take a Trump challenge to courts

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A Federal Appeals Court Just Sided With the Ohio GOP in a Voting Rights Case

by MikelFoy988 Posted on August 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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A divided panel of judges on the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that a lower court erred by reinstating Ohio’s “Golden Week,” a period when Ohio voters could register to vote and cast absentee ballots at the same time.

“This case presents yet another appeal (there are several pending in the Sixth Circuit alone) asking the federal courts to become entangled, as overseers and micromanagers, in the minutiae of state election processes,” reads the majority opinion written by Judge David McKeague. He added that Ohio is a “leader” compared with other states when it comes to early voting opportunities, and that the “undisputed factual record shows that it’s easy to vote in Ohio. Very easy, actually.”

The case, Ohio Democratic Party v. Husted, was filed after Republican state lawmakers introduced a host of voting restrictions in 2013, including the elimination of Golden Week and same-day voter registration. The Ohio Democratic Party, among others, sued in May 2015, arguing that the reductions violated the 14th Amendment and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discriminatory voting practices or procedures. A district court judge in Ohio agreed, ruling in May 2016 that the cuts impose “a modest, as well as a disproportionate, burden on African Americans’ right to vote.”

Judge Jane Stranch, the one dissenting vote on the ruling, wrote that the majority opinion overturned a decision that was based on a 10-day bench trial that included more than 20 witnesses (8 of whom were experts) and produced a 120-page opinion that dismissed many of the claims by voting-rights advocates. But this decision acknowledged that the elimination of both Golden Week and same-day voter registration went too far, even as the lower court disagreed with other challenges to voting restrictions originally brought in the case. Judge Stranch noted that the trial included evidence that African Americans in Ohio used early in-person voting and Golden Week at higher rates than whites in 2008 and 2012, and that it demonstrated the importance of early voting for black voters because of factors including more limited overall access to transportation and less flexible work schedules than their white counterparts.

“A great deal of work underlies the district court’s conclusion on this important subject,” Stranch wrote. “Both that work and the substantial support found in the record stand in opposition to the majority opinion’s blithe assertion ‘that it’s easy to vote in Ohio. Very easy, actually.'”

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, celebrated Tuesday’s ruling:

Marc Elias, one of the main Democratic lawyers working the case (and the attorney for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, which was not a party to this case), tweeted:

The Constitutional Accountability Center, a judiciary advocacy group, which had filed an amicus brief in support of keeping Golden Week on the books, slammed Tuesday’s decision. David Gans, the center’s director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights, and Citizenship Program, wrote in a statement, “Today’s 2-1 decision…rubber-stamps Ohio’s decision to cut back on early voting and same-day registration, failing to ensure that the state respected the voting rights of all Ohioans. The court’s decision will make it harder for racial minorities and others to cast a ballot this coming Election day.”

Rick Hasen, an elections expert at the University of California-Irvine, wrote on Tuesday that Ohio’s 29-day early voting period was already “exceedingly generous.” He acknowledged that while he “might support Golden Week as good policy, I worry when courts are used in this way to prevent every cutback in voting, especially after voting rights proponents had settled a suit with Ohio on favorable terms.”

Unless the Ohio Democratic Party appeals to the full 6th Circuit or the US Supreme Court, Golden Week and same-day registration will not be in place for the election in November.

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A Federal Appeals Court Just Sided With the Ohio GOP in a Voting Rights Case

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Wisconsin’s GOP Tried to Make It Harder to Vote. Their Plans Just Got Shot Down.

by Chong0688314236 Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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A panel of three federal judges on Monday denied Wisconsin’s request to block an earlier court ruling that struck down several voting rights restrictions in the state including cuts for early voting hours, a requirement that cities have only one location for early voting, residency requirements aimed at limiting college students’ votes, and a number of restrictive voter ID requirements.

This decision means many more people in Wisconsin will be able to cast a ballot in November, and the state will be forced to provide state-issued IDs for those who might have had problems assembling paperwork in order to get identification.

Only one way remains for the restrictive laws to stay in place, Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California-Irvine, wrote on his blog Monday. Wisconsin would have to immediately file an emergency stay request with the US Supreme Court. “Even then, getting over the 4-4 ideological split seems iffy,” Hasen wrote, saying that it is unlikely the state would attempt to appeal to the entire 7th Circuit Court of Appeals after Monday’s decision by three of the circuit’s judges.

This ruling follows the July 29 decision by Judge James Peterson in which he described the state Legislature’s attempts to limit voting rights as demonstrating that “a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections, particularly in minority communities.” Wisconsin officials asked the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals to stay Peterson’s ruling on August 12, a request the three judges denied on Monday.

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Wisconsin’s GOP Tried to Make It Harder to Vote. Their Plans Just Got Shot Down.

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Voting-Rights Advocates Keep Scoring Major Victories, But the Fight Isn’t Over Yet

by ShaniceTxy Posted on August 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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Update, 8/16/16, 12:04 p.m.: North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory formally asked the Supreme Court late Monday night to reinstate the state’s voter ID law. “Allowing the Fourth Circuit’s ruling to stand creates confusion among voters and poll workers and it disregards our successful rollout of Voter ID in the 2016 primary elections,” McCrory said in a statement. “The Fourth Circuit’s ruling is just plain wrong and we cannot allow it to stand. We are confident that the Supreme Court will uphold our state’s law and reverse the Fourth Circuit.”

Over the last month and a half, voting rights advocates have scored a string of legal victories against state-level voting restrictions in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Texas, Kansas, Ohio, Michigan, and North Dakota. Still, for many voters, the rules for Election Day remain in flux.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty on what the rules are going to be, and we’re getting closer to the early voting period,” says election law expert Rick Hasen. “That kind of uncertainty creates problems.”

Where do the problems begin? First, it will be up to state and local election officials to inform voters of their rights months before the general election. On Wednesday, nearly three weeks after a federal appeals court determined that Texas’ voter identification law had a discriminatory effect on black and Latino voters, state officials reached an agreement that gave people the option to sign a form stating they had a “reasonable impediment” in acquiring a photo ID to vote in November. (Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has said he planned to appeal the decision in the future.)

As part of the arrangement, Texas officials agreed to allocate $2.5 million toward an education campaign to let voters know about the changes. Poll workers would have to know that voters can cast ballots without an ID, leaving open the potential for confusion on Election Day, Hasen says. “There are a lot of polling places in Texas,” he adds. “It’s going to take a lot of effort to get the word out.”

Restrictive voting laws in Wisconsin and North Carolina also went in front of federal judges earlier this summer. In late July, a federal appeals court found that North Carolina’s voter identification law was passed with “discriminatory intent” that burdened African American voters “with almost surgical precision.” The ruling brought down numerous provisions that included instituting new identification requirements, eliminating same-day voter registration, and reducing the time for early voting, among others. The decision has left it up to county election officials to decide how long voters will have during the early voting period to cast their ballots as state officials prepare for a high voter turnout. Meanwhile, Gov. Pat McCrory said he plans on appealing the decision to the Supreme Court.

Last Wednesday, a panel of federal judges took a different tack in Wisconsin, putting on hold a lower-court ruling that let voters without the necessary ID sign a form showing that they had reasonable issues with obtaining an ID. They concluded that the case would “likely to be reversed on appeal and disruption of the state’s electoral system in the interim will cause irreparable injury.” A federal judge in a separate case found that several of Wisconsin’s voting restrictions were unconstitutional and that its voter ID rules should be changed. The appellate panel decision effectively ensures Wisconsin voters operate under the state’s voter ID law, pending an appeal to the 7th Circuit or the Supreme Court.

Now, with the general election quickly approaching, those hoping to further shape the voting rights landscape via the courts have only a few weeks left to appeal their cases. The ACLU filed a petition on Thursday to get the entire 7th Circuit to rule on the case in Wisconsin. In the North Carolina case, Hasen notes, the court gave its decision in late July under the state’s assurances it could comply with any possible changes ordered before the November election. It’s been 17 days and counting since the decision came down, and the state has yet to file an appeal.

In the past, the Supreme Court has issued emergency stays on orders shortly before elections. A month before the 2014 midterm elections were set to begin, for example, the justices took action in three familiar cases involving North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin. The justices blocked Wisconsin’s attempt to implement its strict voter ID law, yet permitted Texas’ and North Carolina’s voting restrictions to continue for the midterms without an opinion. A stay in the more recent North Carolina’s case “threatens to confuse voters further, and to make election administrators’ life hell,” Hasen wrote in a recent blog post.

And this time around, timing isn’t the only question for the justices. With the Supreme Court currently divided after the death of Antonin Scalia, last-minute challenges before the justices could result in split decisions that could ultimately empower the lower courts’ decisions. “Everyday it’s a different set of rules,” Hasen says, “so you can’t really have a concerted education effort until you have some finality.”

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Voting-Rights Advocates Keep Scoring Major Victories, But the Fight Isn’t Over Yet

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Wisconsin’s Strict Voter ID Law Is Back on the Books

by GroverTovlw Posted on August 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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Wisconsin voters will likely vote this November under the state’s strict voter ID law after a federal appeals court struck down a trial court’s ruling that would have allowed voters to cast ballots without identification.

In Wednesday’s ruling, a three-judge panel from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that the trial court’s decision would likely be reversed on appeal. The lower court ruled on July 19 that election officials had to let people vote without ID if they signed a form saying they had problems getting proper documents.

The trial court’s ruling, in turn, came in response to an appeals court ruling in April finding that the state’s 2011 voter ID law would likely prevent people from voting who had legitimate difficulties obtaining documentation to get IDs, and it tasked the trial court with coming up with a method to help those people. That method was the affidavit, which the appeals court ruled Wednesday wasn’t targeted enough, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

“Instead of attempting to identify these voters, or to identify the kinds of situations in which the state’s procedures fall short, the district court issued an injunction that permits any registered voter to declare by affidavit that reasonable effort would not produce a photo ID—even if the voter has never tried to secure one, and even if by objective standards the effort needed would be reasonable (and would succeed),” the appeals court judges wrote, adding that the trial court judge did not attempt to distinguish between genuine difficulties voters might have in obtaining the proper documents and “any given voter’s unwillingness to make the effort that the Supreme Court has held that a state can require.”

Rick Hasen, an elections expert at the University of California-Irvine, wrote Wednesday that the ACLU, which originally brought this case, might appeal the case to the full 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. But the practical effect of the ruling, he noted, is that the strict voter ID law will be in place for November. The ACLU could also appeal Wednesday’s ruling to the Supreme Court.

Dale Ho, the director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, says he is disappointed that the judges “removed a safety net for voters after earlier this year holding that such a safety net would be appropriate. Their decision will guarantee disenfranchisement of many Wisconsonites in this fall’s election.”

Ho says the ACLU is evaluating its options, but that an appeal to either the full 7th Circuit or the Supreme Court will happen soon.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, said in a statement that Wednesday’s ruling was “a step in the right direction” and that his administration would “continue to work to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.”

A separate case challenged the 2011 voter ID law and other voter restrictions put in place by Wisconsin Republicans, including limits on early voting and on college students’ ability to register to vote. A federal district judge struck down those provisions on July 29, but its ruling on voter ID affected the ways in which voters can obtain a voter ID. The case is still awaiting appeal. Wednesday’s ruling, for its part, addressed what happens when voters get to the polls without an ID.

This story has been updated with comments from Dale Ho.

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Wisconsin’s Strict Voter ID Law Is Back on the Books

Posted in FF, GE, Jason, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Wisconsin’s Strict Voter ID Law Is Back on the Books