June 2012

by Jeremy Leaming

Unless the Department of Justice and civil rights groups are able to block or greatly minimize Florida’s onerous new restrictions on voting and kill the state’s tawdry attempt to purge voter rolls, the constitutional right to vote for many will face serious obstacles in the sunshine state.

Florida is by no means the only state bent on making the right to a vote a major pain. Wisconsin, South Carolina, Texas, and other Republican controlled states have been working feverishly to ensure that turnout among Latino voters, African American voters, low-income voters, the elderly, and college voters is greatly reduced in this year’s general election. Because Florida is deemed a swing state by political reporters, it garners more attention than some of the other state actions. But Fla. Gov. Rick Scott has also helped attract attention with his staunch defense of the voter suppression tactics.

The DOJ and a string of civil rights groups, such as the Advancement Project, the Brennan Center for Justice, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the League of Women voters, and others, are fighting the purge and the state’s onerous new voter restrictions.  

Co-Director of the Advancement Project Judith Browne blasted Gov. Scott’s purge as a partisan effort to “suppress the vote.”

Ryan P. Haygood, director of the Political Participation Group at NAACP Legal Defense Fund, in a press statement about a lawsuit challenging changes to Florida’s voting laws, said his group is battling an attempt to “discourage political participation” especially of the state’s minority voters.

“Implementation of these additional discriminatory changes to Florida’s voting laws would be devastating for Black and other minority voters in the state,” Haygood said.

The groups’ efforts may irk the state’s right-wing politicians and their apologists in the media, but they are likely the only hope for salvaging the right to vote for scores of Latinos, African Americans, the elderly and many others.

The Brennan Center for Justice and the League of Women Voters, among other groups, have sued to scuttle portions of Florida’s new voter suppression law, such as the rigid requirements on voter registration drives and stringent requirements for voter identification. As noted here they have had some success with a federal judge blocking the provision against third-party voter registrations.

By Erin Ryan, a Fulbright Scholar in China. She is a professor of law at Lewis & Clark Law School, where she will return this summer.  Ryan is also the author of Federalism and the Tug of War Within.This piece first appeared on RegBlog.

This month, the Supreme Court will decide what some believe will be among the most important cases in the history of the institution. 

In the “Obamacare” cases, the Court considers whether the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”) exceeds the boundaries of federal authority under the various provisions of the Constitution that establish the relationship between local and national governance. Its response will determine the fate of Congress’s efforts to grapple with the nation’s health care crisis, and perhaps other legislative responses to wicked regulatory problems like climate governance or education policy. Whichever way the gavel falls, the decisions will likely impact the upcoming presidential and congressional elections, and some argue that they may significantly alter public faith in the Court itself. But from the constitutional perspective, they are important because they will speak directly to the interpretive problems of federalism that have ensnared the architects, practitioners, and scholars of American governance since the nation’s first days.