Election subversion update; Supreme court pulse check; Same-sex marriage update

40 sec. video clip from 1980

The NYT reports (not paywalled) about election games that some states play:

How Some States Are Making It Harder to Register Voters

LaVon Bracy has been registering Florida voters ever since Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, because she wanted, she said, to give others the voice she was denied as a Black student in a largely white high school. In an average year, she said, the nonprofit Faith in Florida, where she serves as democracy director, used to add 12,000 new voters to the state’s rolls.

That ended last year, when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation that imposed tough new rules on voter registration drives in the name of stopping fraud — and made voter registration groups that break the rules liable for fines as high as $250,000.

These days, Faith in Florida canvassers no longer help would-be voters fill out registration forms. Instead, they hand out slips of paper with a QR code that links to the state’s online registration website. And it’s not just small-time civic groups that are affected: The Florida chapter of the League of Women Voters has scaled back its trademark voter registration drives, too.

“These draconian laws and rules are like taking a sledgehammer to hit a flea,” said Cecile Scoon, a lawyer and the president of the Florida league.

The political right has long sought to winnow voter rolls in the name of stopping fraud, including a stream of challenges this year. As Democrats prepare for a sprint to capitalize on the excitement of a new presidential ticket by signing up new voters, they are finding entirely new barriers in Florida and some other states to the sorts of voter registration drives that have been a campaign staple for both parties.  

Registrations also have slowed markedly at Florida colleges and universities, where more than a million students are enrolled.

“You have to tell every volunteer that if they screw up, there may be a $50,000 fine,” said Connor Efrian, the president of the University of Florida College Democrats. “The consequences are that there are a lot fewer people going around the campus registering people. People are a lot more intimidated.”

The article reports that other states involved in their own election subversion efforts include Kansas, Tennessee, Alabama, Missouri and Georgia. This is more evidence of the undeniable political power and anti-democratic intent of America's radical right authoritarian wealth and power political-social movement.

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An opinion/analysis article the editors of Scientific American discuss some recent USSC decisions that evince Republican hostility to inconvenient facts and substitution of falsity when necessary to get the right decision, i.e., right wing:

The Supreme Court’s Contempt for 

Facts Is a Betrayal of Justice

The Supreme Court majority’s recent decisions about homelessness, public health and regulatory power, among others, undermine the role of evidence, expertise and honesty in American democracy

When the Supreme Court’s Ohio v. EPA decision blocked Environmental Protection Agency limits on Midwestern states polluting their downwind neighbors, a sad but telling coda came in Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion. In five instances, it confused nitrogen oxide, a pollutant that contributes to ozone formation, with nitrous oxide, better known as laughing gas.

You can’t make this stuff up. This repeated mistake in the 5-4 decision exemplifies a high court not just indifferent to facts but contemptuous of them.

The crescendo to this assault on expertise landed in June, when the majority’s Chevron decision arrogated to the courts regulatory calls that have been made by civil servant scientists, physicians and lawyers for the last 40 years. (With stunning understatement, the Associated Press called it “a far-reaching and potentially lucrative victory to business interests.” No kidding.) The decision enthrones the high court—an unelected majority—as a group of technically incompetent, in some cases corrupt, politicos in robes with power over matters that hinge on vital facts about pollution, medicine, employment and much else. These matters govern our lives.

The 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton School District school prayer decision hinged on a fable of a football coach offering “a quiet personal prayer,” in the words of the opinion. In reality, this coach was holding overt post-game prayer meetings on the 50-yard line, ones that an atheist player felt compelled to attend to keep off the bench. Last year’s 303 Creative v. Elenis decision, allowing a Web designer to discriminate against gay people, revolved entirely on a supposed request for a gay wedding website that never existed that (supposedly) came from a straight man who never made the request. Again, you can’t make this stuff up. Unless you are on the Supreme Court. Then it becomes law.

Summing up the Court’s term on July 1, the legal writer Chris Geidner called attention to a more profound “important and disturbing reality” of the current majority’s relationship to facts. “When it needs to decide a matter for the right, it can and does accept questionable, if not false, claims as facts. If the result would benefit the left, however, there are virtually never enough facts to reach a decision.”  

Climate change, in particular, seems to draw out the Court’s taste for fiction. The 2022 West Virginia v. EPA decision that halted efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions from coal power plants, another 6-3 opinion, saw the majority enshrine a “major questions” doctrine. This legal theology, conjured from the penumbras and emanations of past antiregulatory decisions, insists that sizable regulations require patently-impossible-to-acquire congressional authorization. This is a “power grab” by the Court, anointing itself the economy’s czar.  

A Clean Waters Act case last year decreed wetlands only environmentally protected if their waters possessed a “continuous surface connection” with a larger body of water. This invented requirement is wholly at odds with how water and wetlands actually work, leaving up to half of the country’s protected wetlands now available for dredging. (emphases added)

This is more evidence of the undeniable legal power and anti-democratic intent of America's radical right authoritarian wealth and power political-social movement.

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In the 2015 Obergefell decision, the USSC held that there is a right to same sex marriage. Authoritarian Republicans, including those on the USSC bitterly criticized that decision. Clarence Thomas warned that this issue would be re-examined one day, subject to the same legal analysis that led to the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. That day is coming. Jezebel reports:

Kim Davis Tees Up Supreme Court to 

Reverse Marriage Equality Ruling

In an appeal over damages awarded to a same-sex couple, Davis says the 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges is wrong and should be overruled just like Roe v. Wade

The former Kentucky county clerk [Kim Davis]—who became infamous for denying marriage licenses to gay couples after the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges—is now arguing in federal court that Obergefell should be overturned, for the same reasons the high court shredded Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Christian nationalist Kim Davis wants

God in government and gays to stay unmarried

Davis is appealing a jury’s 2023 decision that she should have to pay $100,000 to a gay couple to whom she denied a marriage license. Davis argued that granting a license to David Ermold and David Moore in 2015 violated her religious beliefs; a deputy clerk eventually gave them a license. (The case is called Ermold v. Davis.) In a brief to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, her lawyers argue that “Obergefell should be overturned for the same reasons articulated by the court in Dobbs”—mainly that it “was wrong when it was decided and it is wrong today because it was based entirely on the ‘legal fiction’ of substantive due process, which lacks any basis in the Constitution.”

This is more evidence of the undeniable legal power and anti-democratic intent of America's radical right authoritarian Christian nationalist wealth and power political-social movement. 

In the Obergefell decision, Clarence Thomas was crystal clear that Obergefell was wrong for the same reason that Roe v. Wade was wrong. Now there are six Republican votes on the USSC to turn that sentiment into Christian Sharia law. One can reasonably expect Obergefell to be overturned in June of 2026, maybe 2027 if the courts are slow or less likely, 2025 if the courts are really fast.