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From Vox
Why some Republicans are turning against the death penalty -
An employee of the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility demonstrates how a curtain is drawn between the death chamber and the witness room at the prison in Lucasville, Ohio, in 2005. | Kiichiro Sato/AP
A new — and surprising — bipartisan coalition is taking shape around one of the country’s most controversial issues.
It’s rare for a politician to admit they were wrong. But Jean Schmidt will own up to this: She used to support the death penalty.
In 2001, Schmidt was an Ohio state representative when the legislature debated ending the use of the electric chair. Schmidt, a Republican, argued on the house floor that even if the electric chair was on the way out, the death penalty was still necessary as a deterrent to, and a punishment for, the worst kinds of crimes. “I was just very, very forceful about keeping it,” she says.
Times have changed — and so have her feelings about capital punishment. Schmidt, who went on to serve in Congress from 2005 until she was defeated in a 2012 primary, ran for the state house again in 2020 and won. One of her primary motivations for coming out of retirement was trying to end the state’s death penalty. “I’m a true conservative, a Trump supporter all the way,” she says, “and I have changed my mind on this.” She thinks other Republicans are ready to change their minds, too.
Schmidt, along with a Democratic cosponsor, introduced legislation last year that would end the death penalty in Ohio. The bill is currently working its way through committees. A similar bill has been introduced in the state’s senate, and a survey of 44 Ohio state lawmakers from the final week of February showed that 46 percent of Republican lawmakers felt that the state should eliminate the death penalty, while 38 percent of Democrats said the same (and half of the Democrats polled were undecided).
Supporters of the legislation expect it to pass sometime in the next year or so; they say it’s not a matter of if, but when. “I have no doubt that the votes are there,” says Rep. Ron Ferguson, a Republican cosponsor of the bill. “I think we’re going to get it done because of how many people from across party lines support this bill.”
State Sen. Nickie Antonio, an Ohio Democrat, has been introducing a death penalty repeal bill every legislative session since she was elected in 2010. This time, she thinks, will be different. “I’m really very optimistic,” she says, “because we have the largest number of Republicans who have joined Democrats on the bill.” It’s also the first time, she says, that bills with both Republican and Democratic cosponsors have been moving through the state house and senate simultaneously.
“When you have this much bipartisan support for something, you get to peel off that layer of partisan partiality, move that aside, and take a look at: What are we really doing here? It’s hard to do that, especially in this climate right now that is so divided.” Some of the conservative lawmakers, she says, are people she’s been talking to about the issue for years. “There’s been a lot of conversation and movement” in the party, she says.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Anti-death penalty activist Judy Coode of Pax Christi International demonstrates in front of the US Justice Department’s Robert F. Kennedy Building in Washington, DC, in July 2020.
At the national level, Democrats opposing the death penalty are still largely on their own. President Joe Biden’s Justice Department enacted a moratorium on federal executions, and his campaign said he would work to pass legislation ending the federal death penalty, but legislation introduced by Democrats in the House hasn’t yet made it out of committee.
On a state level, though, Ohio isn’t an anomaly. Republicans are leading or cosponsoring efforts to repeal or limit the death penalty in Kentucky, Georgia, Missouri, Kansas, and Pennsylvania (another bill introduced by GOP lawmakers in Utah was narrowly defeated in committee last month) and an advocacy group, Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, has been highlighting the growing numbers of Republicans speaking out against it.
The efforts represent one of the few remaining issues where some conservative and libertarian lawmakers can find common ground with their liberal and progressive counterparts.
“Things are pretty divided, but thankfully this is an area where it does feel like an exception,” says Jamila Hodge, executive director of Equal Justice USA, which has worked on death penalty repeal efforts in several states, “maybe because it’s easier to tie the issue directly to the conservative value of being pro-life and coupling that with fiscal restraint.”
Proponents of the bills believe it makes sense to have conservatives take the lead in red states. In more liberal-leaning states, Ferguson says, it might not be necessary, “but here, you just have to or it’s not going to happen.”
For decades, polls have shown, the majority of the American public has supported the death penalty. In recent years, however, opinions have started to change. Gallup has tracked a decline in public support for capital punishment, from a record high of 80 percent in the mid-1990s to 54 percent in October 2021. Much of the change has come from Democrats, as growing awareness of racial inequities and the proliferation of DNA evidence has made clear that the criminal justice system is unfairly enforced and sometimes condemns the innocent.
Only 46 percent of Democrats currently support capital punishment, according to a 2021 survey from Pew Research Center. Yet the numbers show some movement on the Republican side, too: In June 2021, according to the Pew Research Center, the number of Republicans supporting the death penalty had declined seven percentage points over the previous two years. During the same period, GOP lawmakers in Colorado and New Hampshire played a role in the successful repeal efforts in their states. They’ve done it by making arguments that other conservatives can get behind.
For Schmidt, that has meant sharing her personal evolution on the issue. “For a long time it gnawed at me, being pro-life,” she says, “that I was willing to let somebody be killed.”
After leaving Congress, Schmidt met Sister Helen Prejean, the Catholic nun who has worked with people on death row, and has become a leading death penalty abolitionist. Schmidt found her arguments — that the death penalty is contrary to Catholic teachings and basic humanitarian principles — difficult to ignore.
<img alt="Jean Schmidt holds her hands together in a prayer-like gesture, face grave." src="https://cdn.vox-
<figcaption>Then-US Rep. Jean Schmidt prays before a news conference at the US Capitol in 2009.</figcaption>
Not long after, the former Congresswoman met Joe D’Ambrosio, an Ohio man who was convicted of murder and spent two decades on death row before he was released because a judge found that prosecutors had withheld evidence in his trial. Meeting D’Ambrosio was transformative. “It wasn’t until I met Joe that I truly met someone who was innocent. It was like a smack in the face,” Schmidt says. “We really have people who are innocent on death row. This isn’t a storybook.”
By the time Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was on trial for the Boston Marathon bombing, Schmidt — who ran the marathon and spent a few anxious minutes at the finish line waiting for her sister after the bombs went off — realized she couldn’t support the death penalty even in the extreme cases where she might have previously thought it was necessary. (Tsarnaev’s death penalty was thrown out by a federal appeals court in 2020, only to be reinstated last week by the Supreme Court.)
It’s the pro-life argument that Bernard Smith, a retired federal prosecutor who has been working on the repeal effort with Ohioans to Stop Executions, finds conservatives are especially receptive to. Smith has been giving talks to Catholic groups about Pope John Paul II’s teachings about the death penalty, and the Church’s blanket opposition to the death penalty under Pope Francis. He thinks that getting conservative Catholics on board is mostly a matter of educating them about the position of the Church.
“There are a lot of Roman Catholics living in Northeast Ohio,” Smith says. From his home in Akron, he’s trying to mobilize them to get in touch with their lawmakers. “We’re better situated now to get it done than we’ve ever been,” he says. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, Rep. Ferguson says, it could be another opportunity to convince his colleagues that now is the time to abolish the death penalty: “I’d be articulating to my colleagues that if we really want to be a pro-life state, let’s be a pro-life state,” he says.
It’s not the only argument they’re making. Schmidt and Ferguson are also emphasizing that the death penalty is too costly and that it doesn’t deter crime, and they’re seizing on public dissatisfaction with the government.
“I barely trust the government to deliver the mail, let alone make a decision on executing a human being,” Ferguson says. “That seems to resonate quite a bit with everyone from progressives to staunch conservatives and everyone in between.”
Andrew Welsh-Huggins
Ohio Public Defender Tim Young testifies at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus in September 2021 in favor of a bill that would abolish capital punishment in the state.
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, declared an “unofficial moratorium” on capital punishment in the state in 2020, telling the Associated Press that lawmakers would need to find a new alternative to lethal injection. The state hasn’t executed anyone during his time in office. He also seemed to show some openness to the anti-death penalty movement’s arguments, saying that he was “much more skeptical about whether it meets the criteria that was certainly in my mind when I voted for the death penalty and that was that it in fact did deter crime, which to me is the moral justification.”
Schmidt says that working with Democrats has been majorly beneficial in trying to build support for the measure. “It makes the lift a whole lot easier when you’ve got people on the other side of the aisle supporting your effort,” she says. “You can figure out where the commonalities are. There will be naysayers within your own caucus and on the other side of the aisle, but you can make sure their issues are addressed because your joint sponsor has an inside track to what their caucus is thinking, just as I have an inside track to my colleagues in the house.”
The ability to work on bipartisan legislation is one advantage, she says, of working in a state legislature instead of Congress, where the ideological lines are more rigidly established and lawmakers rarely work across partisan lines. Schmidt says she’s already working on other bipartisan legislation — including increased access to breast cancer screenings and public safety initiatives — and hopes to do more.
She also thinks that voters are ready to have this debate. She pointed to polling that showed that 48 percent of Republicans favored the idea of replacing the death penalty with life without the possibility of parole. The bill does face powerful opposition, including from prosecutors who want to keep capital punishment, and recent efforts in other states show how difficult convincing the public can be. In 2016, voters in Nebraska chose to repeal their own state legislature’s death penalty ban. That same year, voters in both Oklahoma and California both voted to affirm their state’s death penalty policies.
Still, Schmidt is hopeful Ohio can become the 24th state to abolish state executions. When she speaks about the death penalty repeal, she sounds like a true believer. “Every life is sacred under the eyes of God,” she says, “no matter how much we do in our life that’s horrific.”
Why voting rights activists aren’t giving up -
People march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, with placards bearing the image of the late US Rep. John Lewis, for whom the most recent voting rights bill is named, during commemorations for the 57th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” on March 6. The Edmund Pettus Bridge was the site of the brutal beatings of civil rights marchers, including Lewis, at the hands of police during the first march for voting rights on March 7, 1965. The televised attacks prompted public support for the civil rights activists in Selma and for the voting rights campaign. | Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Though the movement has faced setbacks in Congress and at the Supreme Court, organizers say they must keep fighting “Jim Crow 2.0.”
Is the push to protect voting rights dead?
Democrats’ voting rights legislation, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, was defeated in the Senate in January. A few weekslater, the Supreme Court allowed a racially gerrymandered congressional map in Alabama to take effect for the 2022 election, signaling the court’s continued willingness to gut the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Despite the repeated setbacks, activists are still working to protect and restore voters’ rights on the ground. In January, to mark the 57th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” when state troopers bludgeoned voting rights activists as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, thousands of activists, lawmakers, and supporters crossed the bridge to signal their dedication to the cause and all those who fought for voting rights before them.
Cliff Albright, the co-founder of Give Us the Ballot and co-founder of Black Voters Matter Fund, one of the organizers of the event, told Vox that the movement for voting rights is only gaining momentum. Though Biden and Democratic leaders failed to move key legislation forward in January, the moment wasn’t all a loss, Albright said.
“This voting rights battle is happening on the same cracks in the foundation of this country that existed back then. There was never an intent that everybody be able to vote. It was always about white men with property. You had all of these restrictions on who could vote and that’s the same battle we’re fighting today,” Albright said.
Though Congress will not debate the merits of the voting rights bills anytime soon, Albright says it is up to activists to keep pressuring lawmakers as we move forward toward the midterm elections. I talked to Albright about how the movement will shift this year and why voting rights concerns aren’t overblown. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Fabiola Cineas
We just got through a period of what some have called a historic defeat for voting rights. Was what happened in January a total loss in your eyes? What have you taken away from what happened in Congress?
Cliff Albright
Obviously, we were hugely disappointed with the outcome of the vote. But with that said, we think that it was important for that vote to take place. We have to keep in mind that the previous three votes on the voting rights legislation were not actual votes on the legislation. They voted on whether or not to debate. [Laughs] In the world’s so-called “most deliberative body” we didn’t even get to deliberate.
We kept the pressure on the Senate and White House all spring, summer, fall, and winter last year to make sure that the debate and voting took place. We had to put people on the record. It’s not enough that Manchin and Sinema were always doing gaggles or writing op-eds talking about what they’re not going to do. At some point, they have to vote and go on the record.
Even the fact that the president belatedly came out calling for filibuster reform was the result of movement. There’s no sugar coating it: It’s frustrating; it’s a disappointment that these bills didn’t pass. But when we talk about organizing, and assessing our impact, there are examples of the movement moving the needle.
Fabiola Cineas
Then, at the beginning of February, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Merrill v. Milligan that upholds Alabama’s racially gerrymandered congressional map. How did this decision impact the movement?
Cliff Albright
It’s really symbolic, right? Because we are talking about this as Jim Crow 2.0. For that analogy to be accurate, you need an onslaught of states that are under the guise of states’ rights taking away voting rights. We saw that happen during Reconstruction. You also need a Congress that is going to demonstrate its own inability to put in the appropriate protections. And, more importantly, you need to have a Supreme Court that is going to either roll back whatever protections exist or one that is actually going to go out of the way to instill a new doctrine.
Here we have a Supreme Court that has consistently been doing the same thing, at least since the Shelby decision in 2013. When you look at the series of decisions they’ve had from Shelby to Brnovich last year, to this most recent one, what you see is that they are systematically tearing apart the Voting Rights Act.
Just looking at the legal arguments behind it — it’s absolutely ridiculous. The decision is reminiscent of two things: the early Supreme Court and the Dred Scott case and Bush v. Gore.
The Supreme Court is now literally trying to impact the midterm elections. It can’t even pretend to be a nonpartisan court. It is clearly a partisan body that is trying to tip the scales of the midterm elections in favor of the Republican Party. This highlights the fact that as part of these discussions of voting rights and other issues, there has to be a serious discussion about expanding the court.
Fabiola Cineas
Some pundits have suggested that fears over voter suppression have been overblown, that according to research, voter ID laws don’t actually depress voter turnout and that we should be setting our sights on election subversion. As an activist mapping out strategy right now, what’s your response to that?
Cliff Albright
Election subversion is clearly a threat, so we need to give that adequate attention. But this notion that voter suppression doesn’t have an impact is really just a silly one. Part of the problem is that we become victims of our own success. We live voter suppression — having to overcome it is just a part of our lives. Georgia is the perfect example. In 2020, we didn’t win the state because there was no voter suppression. We won the state and had massive Black turnout because we had to work to make that happen. It’s not that we win things because there’s no suppression. We win things because we were able to overcome it.
But in overcoming it, that then becomes the rationale in people saying, “Oh, it must not have been that bad.” That’s the rationale that Roberts used in the Shelby decision.
In regards to the study, there are a lot of reasons why a lot of that data is just really faulty. Sometimes it’s because they’re looking at states that are just adding certain provisions or just taking away certain provisions, and they’re not looking at the effect of taking away something that’s been in existence for 10 years or for 20 years versus a state that just never had a certain provision. But they’re really comparing apples and oranges.
But if you even put all that aside and think about common sense. What we know is anytime you close or move a polling place, turnout goes down. In fact, you can just look at how far extra somebody has to travel to get to their polling places and you can see a correlation between how much turnout goes down. The same thing happens with all of these different provisions, whether it is reducing days of early voting, making ID restrictions or something else.
Just look at what’s happening in Texas right now. Forty percent or so of ballot applications are being returned. Anytime you add on these provisions, we see that turnout is impacted.
Fabiola Cineas
What about the idea that voting has just become easier overall — that we are at a point in American history when a significant number of Americans can vote?
Cliff Albright
I say come to come to the communities where we do our work. There are some people who when we describe the impact of these provisions, whether it’s the line warming or the long lines or the food and water that we have to bring to people, or the drop boxes, for some people it’s just a foreign notion. It’s an experience that just does not match their lived experience. There are white folks in this country who have never had to wait more than five minutes to vote
So there’s really no reason for somebody to be that ignorant of the realities that other people are living with when it comes to this voting experience. And it may not always be five or six hours. Maybe it’s just an hour or thirty minutes, which is still too much especially when you consider that there is a white neighborhood 30 minutes to an hour away where there is absolutely no line.
So to the people who say it’s not that hard to vote or not that hard to get an ID, we’ve seen that these policies don’t exist in isolation. They exist in a context where there are other things that are layered on top of the policy.
Alabama is the perfect example. When they passed their photo ID law, simultaneously, they closed every department of motor vehicles in the Black Belt counties. So at the same time that they were requiring you to get a photo ID they literally closed down the places in the Black community where you could get a photo ID.
This is what Jim Crow was when it came to voting. Jim Crow and voting weren’t just about a “Black Only” sign or “White Only” sign. Jim Crow and voting was always race neutral on its face. The law didn’t say only Black people had to count the jelly beans or pay the poll tax. The law was very neutral, but it’s implementation was clearly racist and that’s what these policies are. There are ways that they create these things where they know what the impact is going to be. Sometimes it is surgical precision when they target Black communities and Black polling places.
The last thing I’ll say to them is can you imagine the opposite? Imagine those videos of the six-hour lines. Can you imagine that those people waiting are white folks? Can you imagine a situation where it’s in white communities that’s they’re closing six out of seven polling places like they’re currently doing in Lincoln County, Georgia. Can you imagine a map being gerrymandered in such a way where white people make up 60 percent of the population of a state but only getting 30 percent of the seats? You can’t even imagine that. Your mind can’t wrap itself around that reality in this country.
Fabiola Cineas
Some people have also argued that with the amount of states passing legislation that protects and expands voting rights, voter suppression will be sort of canceled out. For example, Colorado is making it easier to vote for people who don’t speak English. The law establishes a hotline that provides voting and election information in a number of different languages. Is it the case that these kinds of laws provide a balance to voter suppression?
Cliff Albright
Unfortunately, no, it doesn’t work that way. It’s always a good thing to see states that are expanding access. These states saw how popular and effective and safe vote by mail was during the pandemic, and finally opened up their eyes. They are making these options that worked during the pandemic universally available to have some of the best turnout in the country.
And there are other techniques these states are considering that deal with structural issues, like ranked-choice voting or proportional representation.
The reality is all of these states could expand access, even states in the North and in the West. We’re fighting a battle of just trying to hold on to some stuff that we thought we had in 1965, but we need to be fighting this battle on the offensive side of the field. We can’t just always be talking about how we’re fighting against voter suppression. We need to be discussing how we expand access to the vote. We’ve got to be thinking more radically and creatively about how we really, truly expand access to voting.
Fabiola Cineas
What do you believe is missing from conversations about voting rights?
Cliff Albright
We’ve got to rethink what fair representation looks like. There’s a piece of this voting rights legislation battle that hasn’t received a lot of discussion. The Freedom to Vote Act is critical. The John Lewis Voting Rights Act is critical. All the provisions that are in both of those things combined are critical.
But there’s a Fair Representation Act that has gotten no discussion that deals with this issue of proportional representation, which would structurally reduce the possibility of racial gerrymandering. But it’s not getting any attention because that’s the kind of structural change that, quite frankly, probably scares not just one side of the aisle but the other side as well. We need to be having a much more expansive discussion around this democracy. Either we want people to vote, or we don’t. What’s sad is that this battle is happening on the same fault line that was present at the start of this country.
Fabiola Cineas
So what is the strategy on the ground right now? Through your work with Gives Us the Ballot and the Black Voters Matter Fund, can you give me an idea of what the voting rights activism landscape looks like?
Cliff Albright
On John Lewis’s birthday, we launched a campaign that we call 1 million for voting rights, which is an effort to get a million people to sign a pledge that says they’ll engage in this battle through a variety of call to actions that we are making available. They’ll be called to action around the legislation, around making phone calls and texting about getting this legislation passed.
Then there will be calls to action around engaging in this election cycle because until we get some people replaced, we’re always going to be running up against this filibuster issue.
We’re also working on doing a pledge for candidates. We’re going to be pitching this to the party, saying, anybody who gets party support needs to sign a pledge that says if elected, they will support voting rights, including modifying the filibuster. We went out two years ago and told people, “Hey, if we win the Senate seats, we’ll have control of the Senate and Congress and we’ll be able to get some stuff done.”
We went out, did that, and made history. But they didn’t pass stuff. And now they’re asking us to go back and tell our community the same thing. But the problem was we didn’t really have a commitment up front that they would get done what they said they would do. So if we’re going to go out and try to get people to come out and vote again, my organization can’t just tell people that this time is going to be different.
We need these candidates upfront to sign a pledge. Will you commit to modifying this filibuster? Are you going to get voting rights passed? Will you commit to fair representation? Will you commit to DC statehood, which is one of the old forms of voter suppression?
We are going to come out and mobilize our community but this time we’re going to do it with some promissory notes in hand. We plan to continue doing rallies, putting pressure on the senators, and doing civil disobedience. I’ve been arrested five times since the summer. We recognize that just doing things the way we were doing things wasn’t going to be enough. We had to be willing to use some principles of nonviolent civil disobedience to keep the conversation going and to keep the pressure on.
Fabiola Cineas
At this stage, what keeps you motivated to keep organizing and hopeful the Black voters won’t be taken for granted any longer?
Cliff Albright
Our history gives me faith, and the strength of our current movement gives me faith. My faith gives me faith because we ain’t been brought this far for nothing. The small victories that we’ve seen along the way also keep me going.
Last year in Georgia, we flipped 41 seats that were primarily in rural areas, for example. Black voters helped make that happen. It’s these little things that let me know that the battle is not over, that we have power and at the end of the day we will win.
A grand Supreme Court showdown over gerrymandering ends in a whimper -
Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. | Doug Mills/Getty Images
Republicans face a significant, but temporary, defeat in the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court handed down a pair of orders Monday evening that leave in place congressional maps drawn by the North Carolina and Pennsylvania Supreme Courts — although both orders could prove to be very temporary.
Both orders defer until a future date a grand showdown over whether these lawmakers have free rein to draw gerrymandered congressional maps in defiance of their states’ constitutions. It is likely, moreover, that the Court will return to this issue fairly soon. But it won’t do so ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.
Moore v. Harper and Toth v. Chapman are both redistricting cases. In Moore, the North Carolina Supreme Court struck down gerrymandered congressional maps drawn by the state’s Republican legislature. In Toth, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court chose a congressional map for that state after its Republican legislature and Democratic governor deadlocked on what the state’s new map should look like.
In both cases, Republican lawmakers asked the US Supreme Court to overturn these court- drawn maps by relying on the so-called “independent state legislature doctrine,” which claims that state lawmakers — and only state lawmakers — are allowed to determine how states conduct federal elections.
The doctrine is rooted in a simplistic reading of a constitutional provision stating that “the times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.” In its strongest form, the independent state legislature doctrine claims that governors are not allowed to veto election laws (because the governor is not the “legislature”), and state courts are not allowed to strike down election laws impacting federal elections (because courts are not the “legislature”).
Hildebrant (1916), the word “legislature,” as it is used in the relevant constitutional provision, refers to any body that is empowered to make laws — what the Court referred to as the “legislative power.”
Thus, if states ordinarily give their governor the power to veto bills enacted by the state legislature, the governor may veto election-related bills. If states ordinarily give the people of the state the power to shape laws through a referendum or initiative process, then this process may also be used to shape election laws.
There’s also considerable evidence that the generation of Americans who wrote the Constitution understood it the same way that it was interpreted in Davis.
As recently as three years ago, the Court stood behind this interpretation: In Rucho
Common Cause (2019), the Court said that state courts may apply their state’s constitution to strike down state election laws. “Provisions in state statutes and state constitutions can provide standards and guidance for state courts to apply” in gerrymandering cases, the Court explained in Rucho. The Court also suggested that state “constitutional amendments creating multimember commissions that will be responsible in whole or in part for creating and approving district maps for congressional and state legislative districts” are also permitted.
Nevertheless, in the leadup to the 2020 election, four justices — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh — all endorsed some version of the independent state legislature doctrine. Notably, all four of these justices previously joined the Court’s opinion in Rucho. But, in 2020, the independent state legislature doctrine might have bolstered Republican former President Donald Trump’s chance of winning reelection.
The Moore and Toth cases won’t do much to clear up whether there are five votes to implement this doctrine today. Though the Court did not produce a majority opinion in either the Moore or Toth case, Justices Alito and Kavanaugh both wrote opinions hinting at how the Court could handle future cases invoking the independent state legislature doctrine. Significantly, Justice Amy Coney Barrett — the only member of the Court who has not revealed whether she supports the doctrine — said nothing.
Last month, in Merrill v. Milligan, Kavanaugh wrote an opinion strongly suggesting that federal courts should not interfere with state election law during an election year. In Moore, Kavanaugh penned a brief concurring opinion explaining that he will apply this rule consistently to North Carolina. “It is too late for the federal courts to order that the district lines be changed for the 2022 primary and general elections,” Kavanaugh writes, suggesting that he is perfectly willing to change them in future elections.
Alito’s dissenting opinion, meanwhile, would have reinstated the maps drawn by North Carolina’s Republican legislature. Interestingly, however, Alito’s opinion suggests that he does not endorse the strongest version of the independent state legislature doctrine — the version that would cut state governors and state courts completely out of the process of determining how federal elections should be run altogether.
“If the language of the Elections Clause is taken seriously, there must be some limit on the authority of state courts to countermand actions taken by state legislatures when they are prescribing rules for the conduct of federal elections,” Alito writes, suggesting that he would rather give himself maximal flexibility to overrule state court decisions that he disagrees with than hand down a bright-line rule that could lead to results that Alito does not like in a future case.
Alito’s opinion is joined by Thomas and Gorsuch.
In any event, the upshot of these two brief orders is that the 2022 midterm elections will run using the same ordinary process — where state legislatures write laws, governors can often veto those laws, and state courts can strike those laws down if they violate the state constitution — that has governed pretty much every single American election in living memory.
After 2022, however, all eyes are likely to be on Barrett.
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Spectrum Job Fair 2022 tomorrow -
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From Ars Technica
Linux has been bitten by its most high-severity vulnerability in years - Dirty Pipe has the potential to smudge people using Linux and Linux derivitives. - link
Rosario Dawson hunts for her son as Second Civil War rages in DMZ trailer - HBO Max miniseries adapts critically acclaimed comics by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli. - link
DOJ, FTC, FDA sue man who claims $60 herbal tea cures COVID - Feds say the herbal tea is “nothing more than snake oil” - link
Android 12L is official as “Android 12.1,” rolling out now to Pixel phones - Google says actual 12L tablet hardware will be out by the end of the year. - link
Utah’s red rock towers shake and shimmy to a predictable beat - The fundamental frequencies of 14 red rock towers fall between 1 Hz and 15 Hz. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
A blonde suspects her boyfriend of cheating on her, so she goes out and buys a gun. She goes to his apartment unexpectedly and sure enough, she finds him in the arms of a redhead. -
She gets so angry and opens her purse to take out the gun. But then, she is overcome with grief. She takes the gun and puts it to her head.
A Blonde calls her boyfriend and says, “Please come over here and help me. I have a killer jigsaw puzzle, and I can’t figure out how to get started.” -
Her boyfriend asks, “What is it supposed to be when it’s finished?”
The blonde says, “According to the picture on the box, it’s a rooster.”
Her boyfriend decides to go over and help with the puzzle. She lets him in and shows him where she has the puzzle spread all over the table. He studies the pieces for a moment, then looks at the box, then turns to her and says,
“First of all, no matter what we do, we’re not going to be able to assemble these pieces into anything resembling a rooster.”
He then takes her hand and says, “Secondly, I want you to relax. Let’s have a nice cup of tea, and then….. he said with a deep sigh” …………
A lawyer married a woman who had previously divorced ten husbands. -
On their wedding night, she told her new husband, “Please be gentle, I’m still a virgin.” “What?” said the puzzled groom. “How can that be if you’ve been married ten times?”
"Well, Husband #1 was a sales representative. He kept telling me how great it was going to be.
Husband #2 was in software services. He was never really sure how it was supposed to function, but he said he’d look into it and get back to me.
Husband #3 was from field services. He said everything checked out diagnostically, but he just couldn’t get the system up.
Husband #4 was in telemarketing. Even though he knew he had the order, he didn’t know when he would be able to deliver.
Husband #5 was an engineer. He understood the basic process, but wanted three years to research, implement, and design a new state-of-the-art method.
Husband #6 was from finance and administration. He thought he knew how, but he wasn’t sure whether it was his job or not.
Husband #7 was in marketing. Although he had a nice product, he was never sure how to position it.
Husband #8 was a psychologist. All he ever did was talk about it.
Husband #9 was a gynecologist. All he did was look at it.
Husband #10 was a stamp collector. All he ever did was…God, I miss him!
But now that I’ve married you, I’m really excited!" “Good,” said the new husband, “but, why?” "You’re a lawyer. This time I know I’m going to get really screwed!
… is that he has managed to take Russia’s military from being the second most powerful in the world allllllll the way to being the second most powerful in Ukraine.
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Andrew Welsh-Huggins
