Tag: Florida

Categories
News

The Supreme Court likely decided control of the House in this year’s elections

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court very likely decided control of the House of Representatives.

Kevin McCarthy should consider sending Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas holiday cards. The incoming razor-thin Republican majority in the House of Representatives – the exact size of which is still unknown – can thank the United States Supreme Court.

Utilizing the shadow docket, the Supreme Court issued a stay, reversing a lower court’s ruling that forced the state of Alabama to comply with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in time for the midterm elections. At issue is whether Alabama is compelled to create a second black-majority congressional district in a state where over a quarter of the population is black. It’s a case that we previously covered back in January.

“Black people drove a disproportionate share of Alabama’s population growth. Throughout last year, Black Alabamians publicly called on the Legislature to recognize this reality and sought equal representation in Congress,” said NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Senior Counsel Deuel Ross. 

The Brennan Center calls the Supreme Court’s intervention “dangerous,” noting that SCOTUS was setting the stage for overturning four decades of precedent that has resulted in greater representation for non-white voters.

Michael Li, Senior Counsel at the Brennan Center, writes:

The case centers on whether Alabama has an obligation under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to create a second district where Black voters have a reasonable opportunity to elect community-preferred candidates. Black Alabamians are currently 27 percent of the state’s population, but under the map passed by the Republican controlled Alabama legislature, have the ability to successfully elect candidates in only one of the state’s seven congressional districts.

This anomalous result is the product of a carefully constructed two-step maneuver. First, lawmakers packed a large portion of Black Alabamians into the sprawling, heavily Black 7th Congressional District, which joins much of the state’s historic Black Belt with parts of both Birmingham and Montgomery. For the rest of the state, map drawers then surgically divided Black voters among the remaining six white-majority districts. The outcome is a map where the 7th District is more than 56 percent Black, but where no other district is more than 30 percent Black, well below the level needed for Black Alabamians to sway elections given the high levels of racially polarized voting in the state.

The Alabama case resulted in federal courts allowing racially gerrymandered maps to go into effect in Georgia and Louisiana. A federal judge found that Georgia’s Congressional map likely violated the Voting Rights Act but cited the Supreme Court’s decision in the Alabama case to allow the map to remain in place for the 2022 elections. The Supreme Court itself intervened after a federal court ordered Louisiana to redraw its racially gerrymandered maps.

All told, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Alabama directly resulted in at least three fewer black-majority districts in the South – seats that were all but guaranteed to go to the Democrats. Beyond those seats, it’s important to point out that gerrymanders in Florida, Ohio, Tennessee, and Wisconsin cost the Democrats between a half dozen and a dozen seats.

In 2019, the conservatives on the Supreme Court decreed that federal courts could not rule on partisan gerrymanders but left the door open to ruling on racial gerrymanders. With its shadow docket rulings in Alabama and Louisiana, it looks as if those guardrails against racially-discriminatory maps are now gone as well.

We are a nation of laws, but it is increasingly obvious that the United States Supreme Court is bending our nation’s laws to benefit one particular political party.

Photo Credit: Wally Gobetz, Flickr

Categories
News

Florida is the latest state to restrict voting rights

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a voter suppression bill into law earlier today during a Fox & Friends segment.

The Washington Post reports:

Like similar bills that Republicans are pushing in dozens of state legislatures nationwide, the Florida measure adds hurdles to voting by mail, restricts the use of drop boxes and prohibits any actions that could influence those standing in line to vote, which voting rights advocates said is likely to discourage nonpartisan groups from offering food or water to voters as they wait.

Florida’s law is immediately drawing challenges from nonpartisan voting rights, civil rights, and good government groups. The League of Women Voters of Florida is among those suing the state.

“Senate Bill 90 does not impede all of Florida’s voters equally,” the League of Women Voters argues in a lawsuit that they filed with two civil rights groups. “It is crafted to and will operate to make it more difficult for certain types of voters to participate in the state’s elections, including those voters who generally wish to vote with a vote-by-mail ballot and voters who have historically had to overcome substantial hurdles to reach the ballot box, such as Florida’s senior voters, youngest voters, and minority voters.”

CNN reports that in addition to the League of Women Voters lawsuit, other groups filed their own legal challenges to the new law:

A separate lawsuit filed Thursday morning by Common Cause, Florida branches of the NAACP and a disabilities rights group describes the new law as “the latest in a long line of voter suppression laws targeting Florida’s Black voters, Latino voters, and voters with disabilities.”

Florida’s new voting restrictions come a little more than a month after Georgia passed a similar bill derided as Jim Crow 2.0. The Georgia voter suppression law makes it illegal to give food or water to voters waiting in line. It also limits the use of convenient and secure ballot drop boxes, shortens the window to request a mail-in ballot, and restricts in-person early voting hours.

The assault on voting rights looks likely to continue. Texas and other Republican-led states are considering similar bills. HR 1 (also known as the For the People Act) is necessary to combat these concerted and organized attacks on our democracy.

Categories
Analysis News

License to kill: Republican bills grant immunity to drivers who kill protesters

A few key rights are at the core of democracy. The first and arguably most important of these is the right to vote in free and fair elections. This establishes the principle that those who are in power can be peacefully replaced once they lose the support of voters.

We call this the consent of the governed. It differs from past justifications for holding political power, such as a monarch’s claim to the divine right to govern. Kings claim that their legitimacy comes from God and birthright; the legitimacy of a democratically-elected government comes from the people.

So when voting rights come under assault – as they have in recent years with everything from extreme gerrymandering to Georgia’s new voter suppression law that makes it illegal to give water to voters waiting in hours-long lines – the very legitimacy of government is at stake.

Other key democratic rights include the right to peacefully assemble and organize, as well as free speech and the free press. All of these rights are now under attack as Republican lawmakers concoct schemes to muscle political power without the consent of the governed.

As the New York Times reports:

Republican legislators in Oklahoma and Iowa have passed bills granting immunity to drivers whose vehicles strike and injure protesters in public streets.

A Republican proposal in Indiana would bar anyone convicted of unlawful assembly from holding state employment, including elected office. A Minnesota bill would prohibit those convicted of unlawful protesting from receiving student loans, unemployment benefits or housing assistance.

And in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed sweeping legislation this week that toughened existing laws governing public disorder and created a harsh new level of infractions — a bill he’s called “the strongest anti-looting, anti-rioting, pro-law-enforcement piece of legislation in the country.”

The measures are part of a wave of new anti-protest legislation, sponsored and supported by Republicans, in the 11 months since Black Lives Matter protests swept the country following the death of George Floyd.

We’ve previously covered Florida’s HB1, which targets critical First Amendment rights. It’s clearly an unconstitutional power grab that pushes the United States away from democracy and toward authoritarian minority-party rule where the majority of Americans are forcefully silenced.

Why do these bills matter?

Black Lives Matter and other civil rights protesters were the target of violence throughout 2020. There were numerous instances where drivers used their vehicles to ram through protesters. Some of those drivers faced criminal charges, but Oklahoma’s new law would instead provide belligerent drivers with a shield.

This contrasts sharply with how Oklahoma is treating protesters. The state just made it a misdemeanor punishable with up to a year in prison for blocking a public road – a tactic that has been used during peaceful protests dating back at least to the civil rights movement.

To be clear, the law does not provide blanket immunity. It protects drivers who are trying to flee a “riot.” It’s a law in search of a problem that does not exist since no reasonable prosecutor would charge a driver who was in imminent danger.

But as Florida and other states targeting peaceful protesters have shown, the definition of “riot” is loose. What they really mean is “protest.”

Categories
News

Florida anti-protest bill targets 1st Amendment

As a multitude of Republican-led states move to restrict the right to vote, Florida is going beyond voter suppression and targeting the 1st Amendment.

HB1 – which its authors are dubbing an “anti-riot” bill – has the potential to criminalize peaceful protests. According to Micah Kubic, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida (via The Hill):

How easy will it be to stifle political protest in Florida if this new law passes? This easy: Under the new law, if a thousand people are marching peacefully to protest the current leadership, all it will take is for a handful of people to decide to throw a brick through a shop window and the entire crowd will be subject to arrest, a felony conviction and a hefty fine if law enforcement deems the peaceful protest “a riot.” That brick thrower could be an infiltrator acting to deliberately derail a perfectly legal demonstration.

And to make sure that peaceful protesters can’t continue demanding change, they will be denied bail until they see a judge. That’s right. You don’t have to commit a crime yourself or engage in any disorderly and violent conduct; you just need to be exercising your constitutional right to peaceful protest while someone else — with no connection to you — is engaging in such conduct.

Will police and local elected leaders shut down a protest as quickly as that? There’s a good chance they will, and here’s why. [Governor] DeSantis’ bill states that if they don’t, the city itself can be held liable for any amount of personal injury or property damage. This is a radical change in the law, which currently protects municipalities from such sweeping liability, and it will drive local officials to over-militarize their law enforcement response to peaceful protests in an attempt to avoid costly civil litigation.

But how about if no one throws a brick through a window? How about if people with different political positions just yell at each other on the street? No problem, the DeSantis law takes care of that too. The proposed law: “Creates the crime of mob intimidation, prohibiting a mob from forcefully compelling or attempting to compel another person to do any act or to assume or abandon a particular viewpoint.”

Florida is one of at least 11 states where similar legislation has been introduced that would greatly restrict the right to assemble and protest in the wake of last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests.

Image Credit: Mike Shaheen, Flickr