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Supreme Court of Canada

Voter-ID Fight Gets Down to the Wire in Wisconsin

Abby RapoportAug 24, 2012
(Flickr/Bethany Weeks)

We may be months away from Election Day, but in states fighting legal battles over newly minted voter-ID laws, time is short. These laws, which require residents to show government-issued identification to vote, have been shown to disenfranchise poor and minority voters in the first place. But as I've written before, the timeframe for implementing them poses another major problem; just look at Pennsylvania, where volunteers and activists are rushing to inform residents about a voter-ID law passed in March. The fact is, comprehensive voter-education efforts can hardly be conducted in two months. It is this basic issue—whether there is enough time to properly implement voter-ID laws before November 6—that has kept voter-ID from going into effect in many states. 

Don't Wish For Judicial Overreach

Scott LemieuxMar 30, 2012
Wikimedia Commons.

Given the hostility the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court showed to the Affordable Care Act during oral arguments this week, some progressives are seeking a silver lining. At least, some have argued, striking down the ACA would substantially undermine the legitimacy of the conservative-dominated federal courts.

Law and Politics on the Supreme Court.

Scott LemieuxApr 29, 2010

Common knowledge: Supreme Court confirmation hearings are now conducted on a kindergarten level. The dominant theme is that some judges follow the law, while other judges are "political." And of course the nominee issues an endless stream of vacuous banalities assuring the country that he or she is one of the former. But at the level of the Supreme Court, this is an essentially meaningless distinction. Cases generally get to the Supreme Court precisely because reasonable people can disagree about what the law requires in a given case, and in political salient cases the resolution of such indeterminacy is likely to fall along political lines.