Lyle Denniston

by Jeremy Leaming

The U.S. Supreme Court may rule soon on the constitutionality of a race-conscious admissions policy employed by the University of Texas at Austin, but as the AP’s Mark Sherman reports that justices are ready to consider another case involving a race-conscious admissions – this time a state ban on the use of such policies.

The justices have already heard oral argument in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, regarding a white woman’s challenge to the university’s admissions policy, which takes an array of factors, including race, into account when building its student body. SCOTUSblog’s Lyle Denniston notes that while the justices in Fisher could potentially produce a broad ruling, they could as easily craft a narrow one that may “not go much beyond that plan.”

The Michigan case, Schuette v. Michigan Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, however could prove to be a platform for a more sweeping announcement on race-conscious admissions policies. Denniston writes that the Michigan case “involves a move by a state to deny its public colleges and universities any right to use race as a factor in choosing the incoming class of students. It thus has the potential to produce a far more sweeping decision.”

As Sherman notes, the Michigan movement to pass a law outlawing race-conscious admissions policy “has its roots” in the high court’s 2003 opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger. In Grutter, a majority of the Court led by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor upheld the University of Michigan law school’s race-conscious admissions policy. The majority concluded that the school’s use of race it its admission policy supported a compelling educational interest and did not violate the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

After the Grutter opinion, opponents of race-conscious admissions policies formed to advocate for a ballot initiative, Proposal 2, banning the state’s universities and colleges from using such policies. After voters approved the initiative, a group of civil liberties groups, including the NAACP LDF, formed to lodge a lawsuit against Proposal 2. Eventually the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled against Proposal 2, saying it subverted equal protection rights.

LDF’s President and Director-Counsel Sherrilyn Ifill said today that Michigan’s Proposal 2 “unconstitutionally gerrymanders Michigan’s political process and relegates the critical topics of racial diversity and access to educational opportunity to a separate, distant, and far more cumbersome playing field – one that is unplayable for all practicable purposes.”

LDF notes Proposal 2 has already led to a decline of minority enrollment, citing a University of Michigan study that shows African-American “undergraduate enrollment fell from 6.7 percent in 2006 to 4.5 percent in 2010.”

The justices heard oral argument in Fisher last fall.

by Jeremy Leaming

If you thought the U.S. Supreme Court’s right-wing justices were finished tackling the scope and reach of campaign finance law with its 2010 Citizens United v. FEC, you were wrong.

The high court, with its announcement today to review limits on contributions to candidates during two-year election cycles, could be ready to extend even more leeway to the nation’s most powerful to influence elections.

The justices, as The Huffington Post’s Paul Blumenthal reports, agreed to review a case called McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, which will provide the opportunity to overturn the limits. As Blumenthal notes the limits on contributions were upheld in the Court’s Buckley v. Valeo case, but campaign finance regulations took a major hit with the Court’s Citizens United opinion, which gave corporations greater power to spend freely to influence elections.

SCOTUSblog’s Lyle Denniston reports that a more pressing concern than tinkering with limits on campaign donations may be lurking in the background. “Since the Supreme Court’s landmark opinion in 1976 in Buckley v. Valeo, it has always given government more leeway to control contributions to candidates or political organizations than over spending by candidates or by independent political activists.  That differing constitutional treatment potentially is at stake in the new case ….”

Denniston continues, “What is at stake directly is the constitutionality of the two-year ceilings that federal law sets on what an individual can give during a campaign for the presidency or Congress, in donations to candidates, to political parties, or to other political committees.

Democracy 21, a nonpartisan group working to “eliminate undue influence of big money in American politics,” said the outcome of the case could have “enormous consequences for the country."

The group’s president, Fred Wertheimer, in a press statement, said the “aggregate limit on contributions by individuals is necessary to prevent circumvention of the limits on contributions to candidates and political parties and the prohibition on federal officeholders soliciting huge corrupting contributions.”

Wertheimer and the group's counsel, Don Simon, also exmaine in a new ACS Issue Brief the extensive problems with the Federal Election Commission, the agency charged with enforcing the nation's campaign finance laws. The two write that the president has failed to appoint commissioners to the six-member entity and that the FEC is now controlled by members who are "ideologically opposed to the campaign finance laws."

If the high court were to gut or weaken the limit on contributions it would “open the door to $1 million and $2 million dollar contributions from an individual buying corrupting influence with a powerful officeholder soliciting these contributions, and with the political party and federal candidates benefiting from these seven figure contributions.”