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      Biden orders commission to study supreme court expansion and reform

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      Joe Biden on Friday ordered a study of adding seats to the supreme court, creating a bipartisan 36-member commission that will spend the next six months examining the politically incendiary issues of expanding the court and instituting term limits for its justices.The executive order fulfills a campaign promise to examine court reform, including expanding the number of justices or setting term-limits, amid growing calls from progressive activists to realign the supreme court after its composition tilted sharply to the right during Donald Trump’s presidency. Biden has not said whether he supports expanding the court, also known as “court packing”.Trump appointed three justices to the high court. One was a seat that Republicans had blocked Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, from filling. Despite arguing in 2016 that the seat should be filled by winner of the year’s presidential election, Republicans rushed to fill the supreme court seat vacated by death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg just weeks before the 2020 election.The result was one of the most ideologically conservative courts in modern times.Biden’s executive order directs the commission to complete its report within 180 days of its first meeting. But it was not charged with making a recommendation under the White House order that created it.The panel is composed of a “bipartisan group of experts” that includes constitutional and legal scholars; former federal judges; practitioners who have appeared before the court as well as reform advocates.The commission co-chairs are Bob Bauer, professor of practice and distinguished scholar in residence at New York University School of Law and a former White House counsel for Obama, as well as the Yale Law School professor Cristina Rodriguez, former deputy assistant attorney general in the office of legal counsel at the US Department of Justice under Obama.The commission will hold public meetings appraising the “merits and legality of particular reform proposals”, according to the White House.The announcement comes after the supreme court justice Stephen Breyer warned this week that efforts to expand the court could erode public “trust that the court is guided by legal principle, not politics”.The remarks by Breyer, 82, the court’s oldest justice and a member of its minority liberal bloc, prompted calls for his resignation from reform advocates while Democrats still control the Senate and the confirmation process. Demand Justice, a progressive group focused on the supreme court, started an online petition calling for his retirement.“Tell Justice Breyer: put the country first. Don’t risk your legacy to an uncertain political future. Retire now,” the petition states.If an opening should arise, Biden has promised to appoint the nation’s first ever Black female justice.On Friday, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters that Biden was not pushing for Breyer to retire.“He believes that’s a decision Justice Breyer will make when he decides it’s time to no longer serve on the supreme court,” she said.During his presidential campaign, Biden repeatedly sidestepped questions on expanding the court. A former chair of the Senate judiciary committee, Biden has asserted that the system of judicial nominations is “getting out of whack”, but has not said if he supports adding seats or making other changes to the current system of lifetime appointments, such as imposing term limits.The size of the court has been set at nine members since just after the civil war. Any effort to alter it would be explosive, particularly at a moment when Congress is nearly evenly divided. Changing the number of justices would require congressional approval.“With five justices appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote, it’s crucial that we consider every option for wresting back political control of the supreme court,” said Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, a liberal judicial advocacy group.“President Biden’s commission demonstrates a strong commitment to studying this situation and taking action.”Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      Alcee Hastings, congressman who was impeached as a judge, dies aged 84

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      Alcee Hastings, a fiercely liberal Florida congressman who was dogged by an impeachment that ended his career as a federal judge, died on Tuesday. He was 84.

      Hastings’ death was confirmed by his chief of staff, Lale Morrison. The Democrat announced two years ago that he had pancreatic cancer.
      Hastings was known as an advocate for minorities, a defender of Israel and a voice for gays, migrants, women and the elderly. He held senior posts on the House rules committee and the Helsinki Commission, which works on multinational issues.
      But his impeachment remained a nagging footnote. It was repeatedly invoked in news accounts and seen as derailing his ambitions for a greater leadership role.
      “That seems to be the only thing of significance to people who write,” Hastings said in 2013, predicting that the impeachment would be in the lead paragraph of his obituary.
      Hastings was passed over for chairmanship of the House intelligence committee when the Democrats took Congress in 2006.
      “Sorry, haters,” he said then. “God is not finished with me yet.”
      Under Florida law, Governor Ron DeSantis will now call a special election to fill the vacant seat.
      Hastings’ district is overwhelmingly Democratic – he received 80% of the vote in November. But his death lowers the Democrats’ majority to 218-211. The narrow margin is forcing the party to muster nearly unanimous votes to push legislation and bolstering Republican hopes for 2022. There are six vacancies, four from seats that were held by Democrats, two by Republicans.
      Hastings was born on 5 September 1936 in Altamonte Springs, Florida, a largely black Orlando suburb, the son of a maid and a butler. He attended Fisk University and Florida A&M. After a law degree he went into private practice, taking on civil rights cases. He made a bid for the US Senate in 1970, then earned a state judgeship.
      In 1979, Jimmy Carter named him to the federal bench. He was the first Black person to hold a federal judgeship in Florida since Reconstruction.
      His career was marked by controversy. His harsh criticism of Ronald Reagan, his appearance at a rally in 1984 for the then presidential candidate Jesse Jackson and other moves raised questions about his impartiality. He insisted he was doing nothing wrong.
      “Outside the courtroom, I speak out because I’m a citizen and I have the interests of a great number people of this country at heart,” he said. “I think it’s better to have public officials express themselves. I don’t think being a judge means I’m neutered.”
      It wasn’t long before he became the first sitting US judge tried on criminal charges. Along with the Washington lawyer William Borders Jr, Hastings was accused of soliciting a $150,000 bribe from two racketeers seeking to shorten their sentences.
      Borders was convicted and sentenced to five years. Hastings contended Borders acted without his knowledge and was acquitted but a judicial panel accused him of fabricating his defense. The House impeached him in 1988 and the Senate convicted him in 1989.
      A federal judge reversed the impeachment, saying Hastings was improperly tried by a 12-member panel instead of the full Senate, but his exoneration was short-lived. Ruling in the case of another ousted judge, the US supreme court decided 7-2 that courts could not second-guess the Senate’s power to remove federal officials.
      By then, Hastings had won a seat in Congress. He won the seat after two bitter runoffs fueled by accusations of racism in the largely Black district. At one point, in his heated race against Lois Frankel, he snapped to a reporter: “The bitch is a racist.” He went on to win and was re-elected time after time.
      Frankel earned her own ticket to Congress 20 years later, as a Democratic colleague.
      Hastings remained no stranger to controversy. In 2011, a former aide filed a sexual harassment lawsuit, claiming he hugged her against her will and suggested they go to his hotel room. Hastings called the accusations “ridiculous, bizarre, frivolous”. The House ethics committee cleared him.
      “I’ve enjoyed some of the fights, and even the process of being indicted and removed from the bench,” he said in 2013. “All of those are extraordinary types of circumstances that would cause lesser people to buckle. I did not and I have not.” More

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      'Best and brightest': Biden announces 'trailblazing' slate of judicial nominees

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      Joe Biden has announced a “trailblazing” set of federal judicial nominees, 11 picks including three Black women.Ketanji Brown Jackson, a US district judge, was nominated on Tuesday to replace attorney general Merrick Garland on the influential US appeals court for the District of Columbia circuit.In 2016, Garland was nominated for the supreme court by Barack Obama but blocked from even receiving a hearing by Republicans determined to fill the vacancy themselves.It was a hugely dramatic gambit by then Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, as he set out to transform the federal judiciary. With McConnell’s help, Donald Trump was able to do so.On the campaign trail last year, Biden pledged to name the first Black woman to the supreme court. Jackson, who regularly clashed with the Trump administration, now moves into that spotlight. Many liberals are eyeing retirement for Stephen Breyer, at 82 the oldest member of the court, for whom Jackson once clerked.When she was sworn in as a district judge, in May 2013, Breyer delivered the oath.“She sees things from different points of view,” he said, “and she sees somebody else’s point of view and understands it.”In December, Biden asked senators for a diverse slate of possible judicial picks.“We are particularly focused on nominating individuals whose legal experiences have been historically underrepresented on the federal bench,” he said, “including those who are public defenders, civil rights and legal aid attorneys and those who represent Americans in every walk of life.”His first picks, which the Washington Post called “the largest and earliest batch … by a new administration in decades”, also include the first Muslim named to a district court, Zahid Quraishi, a New Jersey judge.Biden also named Candace Jackson-Akiwumi for the Chicago-based seventh circuit and Tiffany Cunningham for the federal circuit in Washington.Among other appointments, Florence Pan will if confirmed be the first Asian American woman on the DC district court, while Lydia Griggsby will be the first black woman on the Maryland district court.Judge Rupa Ranga Puttagunta, a Washington DC local judge of Indian ancestry, is nominated for DC superior court.Carl Tobias, Williams chair in Law at Richmond University, said the president had delivered on his promise and chosen “an incredible group of people”.“There is diversity along a number of lines, ethnicity, gender, I assume sexual orientation and experiential diversity in terms of former federal public defenders or criminal defense lawyers as opposed to big, firm, lawyers and federal prosecutors,” he said.“Biden made promises both on the campaign trail and since being elected that he wants to rebalance the bench, which was unbalanced in terms of ideology with the appellate appointments that Trump made.“The question is how quickly they can be confirmed and how many more similar nominees he will bring forward. There are seven vacancies now on the appeals courts, 61 on the district court, and I think he’s committed to bringing forward many more very similar nominees.”In a statement to the Post, Biden said: “This trailblazing slate of nominees draws from the very best and brightest minds of the American legal profession.“Each is deeply qualified and prepared to deliver justice faithfully under our constitution and impartially to the American people – and together they represent the broad diversity of background, experience and perspective that makes our nation strong.”Alliance for Justice, a liberal advocacy group, praised Biden’s choices.“Today’s nominees embody the demographic and professional diversity and forward-thinking that will ensure justice is served to the American people when they enter a courtroom,” the group’s president, Nan Aron, said in a statement.Referring to recent battles over picks for cabinet posts and other administration positions, she added: “We have already seen Senate Republicans’ willingness to maliciously smear Biden’s nominees, particularly targeting those who are not white men. We will not abide their callous attacks. Today’s nominees, and the many more outstanding jurists to come, will be confirmed.”Nomination hearings could begin in April. Biden and the Democratic Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, have work to do.McConnell and Trump placed three justices on the supreme court, giving it a 6-3 conservative majority. But the extensive reshaping of the judiciary below the highest court could be their most lasting legacy.Observers have noted, for example, that though punitive voting rights restrictions being passed in Republican-led states are being challenged in court, the judiciary that will hear such cases is heavily staffed with conservatives.McConnell was proud of his ruthlessness, telling Fox News there was one reason so many vacancies were left for Trump to fill.“I’ll tell you why,” he said, in December 2019. “I was in charge of what we did the last two years of the Obama administration.”Last April, he told an interviewer his “motto for the year is leave no vacancy behind”.Biden, Tobias said, will have paid attention.“I think Obama had one person on 17 March, but then it was very slow the first year, and Biden was vice-president. He and his people have learned from that, that you have to move very expeditiously,” he said.“I expect to see other similar packages sooner rather than later and [Biden is] watching the 2022 election because [Democrats] can lose the Senate.”Trump’s success contributed to his strength at the polls. In 2019, Josh Blackman, a professor at the South Texas College of Law, told the Guardian: “Not all conservatives are happy with a lot of things Trump has done, but on judges he’s killing it. It’s an across-the-board success that we’ve seen in this area.”Tobias, and others, saw Biden’s picks on Tuesday as the first steps in redressing the balance. More

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      Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue review: how Ruth Bader Ginsburg changed America

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      Two and a half years ago, at a naturalization ceremony for newly minted Americans, Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked: “What is the difference between a bookkeeper in New York City’s garment district and a supreme court justice?”Her answer: “One generation … the difference between opportunities available to my mother and those afforded me.”From this new selection of Ginsburg’s arguments, speeches and opinions – the justice’s greatest hits – it is clear she deserves at least as much credit as any other American for that remarkably rapid transformation.This book is full of evidence that even in a nation like ours, where over the last 50 years the concentration of power in the hands of the top 1% has steadily worsened, a brilliant and determined individual with the right alliances can still bring about extraordinary change within her own lifetime.The book’s co-author, Amanda L Tyler, writes that Ginsburg’s work for gender equality is comparable to Justice Thurgood Marshall’s trailblazing quest to dismantle segregation.The burning determination of the gay activist Frank Kameny similarly transformed the status of LGBTQ people – and Ginsberg’s commitment to equal rights for all meant that she ended up doing just as much to expand the rights of sexual minorities as she did for the rights of women.Looking back from the third decade of the 21st century, the breadth and depth of the discrimination women of Ginsberg’s generation faced at the beginning of their careers is astonishing.Harvard Law School never allowed a woman student until 1950. When Ginsburg entered, in 1956, she was one of just nine women in a class of 500. Across America, women were routinely excluded from jury pools. Through the 1960s, the supreme court even declined to disturb a law that prohibited women from bartending “unless they did so under the auspices of a husband or father”.In 1963, when she started teaching law at Rutgers, Ginsburg was only the 19th woman professor at an American law school – and the dean proudly disobeyed the newly passed Equal Pay Act by paying her much less than her male colleagues, because she had a “husband with a well-paid job”.Ginsburg’s determination was obvious. When she was still in law school, her husband, Marty, developed a virulent form of cancer. They also had an infant daughter. But neither handicap prevented her or her husband from excelling in their studies and she actually described her child-rearing duties as an advantage in law school, because they gave her a more balanced life than most of her classmates.“Each part of my life was a respite from the other,” Ginsberg explained, six decades later. “After an intense day at the law school, I was glad to have the childcare hours. And then when Jane went to bed, I was ready to go back to the books. I think it was an appreciation that there is more to life than law school that accounts for how well I did.”In one of the first cases she litigated with her husband, in 1971, Moritz v Commissioner of Internal Revenue, they argued that Charles Moritz, a never-married man who cared for his mother, was denied a caregiver deduction a woman in his position would have received.Congress amended the law to permit all caregivers to claim the deduction going forward, but the government kept the appeal going anyway. It was then that Ginsburg received her greatest gift from her adversary: a list of every provision in the United States Code that differentiated on the basis of sex.“There it was, right in front of us,” she recalled, “all the laws that needed to be changed or eliminated … it was our road map, a pearl beyond price, that list of federal statutes.”In the 60s, excelling in law school didn’t mean a woman would be a strong candidate to be hired by any of the fanciest firms. But in retrospect Ginsberg agreed with the first woman on the supreme court, Sandra Day O’Connor, that even this kind of adversity had its advantages.Ginsburg often repeated O’Connor’s comment: “Suppose you and I had gone to law school … when there was no barrier to women in the legal profession. Where would we be now? We would be retired partners of a large law firm.” But because they had to find a different path, “both of us ended up on the US supreme court.”This book is also a reminder of the wisdom of Vincent Scully, the great Yale architectural historian, who noted just two years after Ginsburg was appointed to the court that “ours is a time which, with all its agonies, has … been marked most of all by liberation” – black liberation, women’s liberation and gay liberation.“Those movements, though they have a deep past in American history, were almost inconceivable just before they occurred,” Scully said. “Then, all of a sudden in the 1960s, they burst out together, changing us all.”Ginsberg’s energy and perspicacity gave her a singularly important role in bringing about many of those fundamental changes. More

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      Dominion Voting Systems sues Fox News for $1.6bn over election fraud lies

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      The North American voting machine company Dominion has hit Fox News with a $1.6bn defamation lawsuit, accusing the network of spreading election fraud lies in a misguided effort to stop an exodus of enraged viewers after Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.The complaint accuses some of Fox’s biggest personalities Maria Bartiromo, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro “and their chosen guests” of spreading “defamatory falsehoods” about Dominion.Fox supercharged false conspiracy theories about Dominion, the lawsuit says, by plucking the lies from relatively obscure corners of the far-right internet and broadcasting them to tens of millions of viewers on television and online.“Fox took a small flame and turned it into a forest fire,” the complaint says. “As the dominant media company among those viewers dissatisfied with the election results, Fox gave these fictions a prominence they otherwise would never have achieved.”Fox vowed to fight the case in a statement Friday morning: “Fox News Media is proud of our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of American journalism, and will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court.”Dominion, a large US and Canadian voting machine company, earlier sued Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani for $1.3bn each for spreading election lies during weeks of legal challenges to Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in what officials have called the most secure election in US history.On Tuesday, Powell defended herself against the Dominion suit by arguing in court that “no reasonable person” could have mistaken her wild claims about election fraud last November as statements of fact.A Dominion employee separately sued the Trump campaign after receiving death threats. The company also sued the chief executive of a pillow company, Mike Lindell, a Trump friend who produced a video about election conspiracies.Baseless conspiracy claims about Dominion accusing the company of using technology that flipped votes away from Trump appear to have originated in anonymous comments on a pro-Trump blog.But in an effort to steal the presidential election, Trump himself gave the claims the broadest possible platform, including with a 12 November tweet in which he wrote in part: “REPORT: DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE.”Dominion said the lies had threatened its reputation and business.“Dominion brings this lawsuit to set the record straight, to vindicate its rights, and to recover damages for the devastating economic harm done to its business,” the company said in the Fox lawsuit.Fox is fighting a legal battle over spreading election lies on multiple fronts. The voting technology company Smartmatic earlier brought a $2.7bn lawsuit against Fox and network commentators accusing them of a “disinformation campaign”.Fox has filed multiple motions to dismiss the Smartmatic case.Dominion’s lawsuit says that after the 3 November election, “viewers began fleeing Fox in favor of media outlets endorsing the lie that massive fraud caused President Trump to lose the election.“They saw Fox as insufficiently supportive of President Trump, including because Fox was the first network to declare that President Trump lost Arizona,” the complaint continues. “So Fox set out to lure viewers back – including President Trump himself – by intentionally and falsely blaming Dominion for President Trump’s loss by rigging the election.”Dominion brought the suit in Delaware, where Fox is incorporated.“Fox recklessly disregarded the truth,” the lawsuit says. “Indeed, Fox knew these statements about Dominion were lies …“Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process. If this case does not rise to the level of defamation by a broadcaster, then nothing does.” More

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      Roger Stone faces fresh scrutiny as Capitol attack investigation expands

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      As the federal investigation of the 6 January Capitol insurrection expands, scrutiny of Donald Trump’s decades-long ally Roger Stone is expected to intensify, given his links to at least four far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who had been charged, plus Stone’s incendiary comments at rallies the night before the riot and in prior weeks, say ex-prosecutors and Stone associatesAlthough Stone was not part of the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob that shocked America, the self-styled “dirty trickster” – who was convicted on seven counts in the Russia investigations into the 2016 elections but later pardoned by Trump – had numerous contacts with key groups and figures involved in the riot in the weeks before and just prior to its start.The night before the riot, Stone spoke at a Washington DC “Rally to Save America” where the former president’s unfounded claims that the election was stolen by Democrats were pushed and Stone urged an “epic struggle for the future of this country, between dark and light, between the godly and the godless, between good and evil”.Early on 6 January, Stone was seen in cellphone videos near a Washington hotel hanging out with six members of the far-right militia Oath Keepers serving as his “bodyguards”, including three who have been charged in the federal investigation. Stone, according to Mother Jones, also raised funds for “private security” events on 5 January and 6 January before the Capitol attack, which included a rambling talk by Trump urging his supporters to “fight like hell”.Back on 12 December, Stone also spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally that amplified Trump’s erroneous claims of massive election fraud, and urged hundreds of Trump loyalists to “fight until the bitter end … Never give up, never quit, never surrender, and fight for America,” Stone implored the crowdCongressional investigators looking into the far-right Proud Boys, including some charged in the riot, have also reportedly been looking into ties that Stone had with their leaders Enrique Tarrio and Ethan Nordean, who were seen in a video in contact with Stone at another demonstration in DC the night before the December 12 rally, according to Just SecurityNordean is one of at least a dozen Proud Boys who have been charged so far in the riot investigation, and one of several who are facing conspiracy chargesTarrio, who attended Stone’s trial and had other contacts with him, was arrested in DC two days before the riot and charged with setting fire in December to a Black Lives Matter flag and for carrying high capacity magazines for weaponsBack in 2016, Stone first set up the group “Stop the Steal” which raised false claims that the election would be stolen from Trump, a baseless charge that grew exponentially post election in 2020 to try to undermine Biden’s victory.Last year Trump railed against Stone’s conviction in the Russia inquiry which included lying to Congress and drew a 40-month jail sentence. But shortly before Stone was to enter prison in mid 2020 Trump commuted his sentence, and in December gave him a full pardon.Former senior prosecutors say that Stone could be a growing focus of the federal inquiry of the riot which has already charged more than 300 people including at least a dozen Proud Boys and 10 Oath Keepers for illegal acts related to their roles in the Capitol attack.“Prosecutors follow the facts and evidence where they lead, and certainly should be investigating any connections between Stone and those who were responsible for the insurrection on January 6,” Mary McCord, a veteran prosecutor who led the national security division at Justice at the end of the Obama administration until May 2017, said in an interviewOther ex-prosecutors go further and see Stone as a potential target.“As a result of the pardon corruptly granted by Trump, it would not be surprising for Roger Stone to become a federal prosecutor’s holy grail,” said Phil Halpern, who retired last year after 36 years as an assistant US attorney who specialized in corruption cases. “In this quest, the charged Oath Keepers and Proud Boys are merely pawns leading to the ultimate prize. Rest assured, prosecutors will be dangling lenient treatment and other inducements in return for any testimony implicating Stone in the Capitol riot.”But some ex-prosecutors caution that charging Stone will be difficult “absent direct evidence of an intent to commit or aid and abet treason or seditious conspiracy”, said Paul Pelletier, a former acting chief of the justice department’s fraud sectionThe Washington Post and other outlets have reported that Stone and Alex Jones, the host of the conspiracy driven InfoWars talk show where Stone has often appeared as a guest and promoted disinformation, are being investigated related to their ties with figures in the riot and if they had any role in its planning.Jones, who has boasted he paid $500,000 for the rally on 6 January, and Stone have had close links since at least the 2016 campaign, when Stone spoke glowingly of Jones declaring in an interview that his show is “the major source of everything”.In an email, Stone vehemently denied having anything to do with the Capitol riot.“Any statement, claim, insinuation, or report alleging, or even implying, that I had any involvement in or knowledge, whether advance or contemporaneous, about the commission of any unlawful acts by any person or group in or around the US Capitol or anywhere in Washington DC on January 6, 2021, is categorically false.”Stone has previously said that he simply wanted to spur “peaceful” protests of Congress on 6 January and stressed that he “denounced the violence at the Capitol”.On his website, StoneColdTruth, he has launched appeals to help with legal expenses by requesting checks for “the STONE LEGAL DEFENSE FUND to help prepare to fend off this malicious assault on me once again”.Stone’s denials notwithstanding, some former lobbying partners of his at Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly voice dismay at his decades long fealty to Trump, a client of the firm in the 1980s, about a decade after Stone earned notoriety for playing a small part in the scandal-ridden 1972 Richard Nixon campaign.“Roger has been totally devoted to Trump for over 30 years and that has clouded his judgment about his own ethical values and led to a criminal conviction,” said Charlie Black in an interview.“I’m not surprised that the devotion is still there, even post-election and post-pardon.”Similarly, ex-Stone partner Peter Kelly said he’s been shocked by Stone’s recent drive to discredit the election results – and similar efforts by Michael Flynn, who was also convicted in the Russia inquiry and pardoned by Trump. “To see people like Gen Flynn and Stone who just escaped a serious encounter with the law, walking the edge again is stunning,’” Kelly said in an interview.In 2016, Kelly blasted Stone’s modus operandi, telling the Guardian that “Roger operates by a different set of rules, and his object is to disrupt. He traffics in the unusual.” More

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      US supreme court could deal blow to provision protecting minority voters

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      The US supreme court will hear a case on Tuesday that could allow the court’s conservative majority to deal a major blow to the most powerful remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 law designed to prevent racial discrimination in voting.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterThe case, Brnovich v Democratic National Committee, involves a dispute over two Arizona measures. One is a 2016 law that bans anyone other than a close family member or caregiver from collecting absentee ballots, sometimes called ballot harvesting. The second is a measure that requires officials to reject ballots cast in the wrong precinct, even if the voter has cast a vote in statewide races.Arizona rejected more than 38,335 ballots cast in the wrong precinct between 2008 and 2016 and minority voters were twice as likely as white voters to have their ballots rejected, the DNC noted in its brief. Minority voters, including the state’s Native American population, are disproportionately harmed by the ballot collection ban because they are more likely to lack reliable mail service.The DNC argues that the policies violated section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting laws that discriminate based on race. A trial court ruled in 2018 that the policies did not violate the law, and a three-judge panel on the US court of appeals for the ninth circuit later upheld that ruling. But the full circuit voted to rehear the case and last year found that the policies did violate the Voting Rights Act. Now, the Arizona attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican, and the Arizona Republican party are appealing that ruling to the US supreme court.And though the facts in the case are about Arizona, the stakes could extend far beyond it. Brnovich and the Arizona Republican party are urging the court to use the case as a vehicle for announcing a narrower view of section 2 than the one currently in use.Such a ruling would take away one of most powerful tools that voting rights groups have to challenge discriminatory voting laws. Section 2 was elevated after the supreme court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v Holder that struck down another Voting Rights Act provision requiring certain places with a history of voting discrimination, including Arizona, to submit voting laws to the federal government for pre-clearance before they went into effect.“Without preclearance on the books, we’ve all had to rely more heavily on section 2 in order to address racial discrimination in voting,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice who helped author an amicus brief in the case in support of the DNC’s position. “If section 2 is limited, then we have even fewer tools.”Losing the full power of section 2 would also make it harder for litigants, including the justice department, to challenge the wave of restrictive bills bubbling in Georgia and other state legislatures that would make it harder to vote, added Deuel Ross, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), which also filed an amicus brief in support of the DNC.The case arrives at a supreme court where conservatives now have a powerful 6-3 majority that appears increasingly hostile to voting rights. It repeatedly refused to expand access to the ballot during the pandemic last year. And since its decision in Shelby County v Holder, the court has given the green light to aggressive voter purging and severe partisan gerrymandering.Brnovich and the Arizona GOP want the supreme court to clarify the approach courts should take when they are evaluating whether a law violates section 2. Brnovich is also asking the supreme court to set a high bar for minority voters and their lawyers to clear in order to prove that a law runs afoul of section 2. Generally, he argues that courts should use an approach for evaluating section 2 claims that would make it harder to challenge facially neutral measures, such as voter ID laws, that do not explicitly make it harder for a specific group to vote. And if minority voters are able to prove that a law has a “substantial disparate impact” on them, Brnovich argues, they should be required to show that disparity is directly connected to the voting policy.But discriminatory voting laws often don’t work that way. There is a long history in the US of using policies that, taken in a vacuum, appear racially neutral because they apply to everyone, but are designed to interact with economic, social and other factors to make it harder to vote, LDF wrote in its amicus brief. Literacy tests and property requirements, the suppressive devices used in Jim Crow, applied to everyone, but made it harder for Black voters to register because of unequal education and economic factors, the group noted.“You’re talking about two very specific voting laws that have a really obvious connection to the history of discrimination against indigenous, Black and brown voters in this state,” said Allison Riggs, the interim executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which filed an amicus brief in support of the DNC’s position. “Poverty, lack of transportation, lack of access to flexible work and living wages is why out of precinct voting is important and why ballot collection, particularly on indigenous lands is so important.”One of the most interesting votes in the case will be that of Chief Justice John Roberts. When he authored the Shelby opinion in 2013, he specifically pointed to section 2 as one of the most powerful tools still in place to combat voting discrimination. But in 1982, then a young lawyer in the justice department, he strongly advocated against expanding section 2 and keeping it only limited to cases in which there was evidence of intentional discrimination. Roberts ultimately lost the argument.Democrats argue in their brief that Arizona is proposing an “overly narrow” way of looking at section 2. The ninth circuit, Democrats say, appropriately analyzed the measures, finding that it disproportionately affected minority voters and worked in combination with social and historical conditions in Arizona to make it harder for those voters to cast a ballot.Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, noted in a blogpost last month that voting rights litigators have generally been hesitant about pushing section 2 claims too far. The Democratic party, he wrote, didn’t seem to have that concern in this case, opening up an opportunity for Republicans to narrow the law.“Section 2 has done important work to rein in some of the worst forms of vote denial in recent years, and it would be a tremendous shame if this overreach of a case ends up serving as the vehicle to eviscerate what remains of the crown jewel of the civil rights movement,” he wrote in a post on SCOTUSBlog.In December, Donald Trump’s justice department filed an amicus brief backing Brnovich and endorsing a narrower framework for interpreting section 2. But in February, the Biden administration filed a letter with the court abandoning that position. The justice department said it still believed the Arizona measures did not violate the Voting Rights Act, but no longer backed the framework for interpreting section 2 put forth by the Trump administration.There are multiple ways the court could choose to rule in the case without weakening the scope of section 2. Morales-Doyle, the Brennan Center attorney, said he hoped the court recognized the climate around elections and race in which they were hearing the case.“There’s a big-picture narrative as to what’s going on with our democracy and race in American society. The court’s going to get to weigh in right now,” he said. “I think our hope is that the court instead sees it as an opportunity to reaffirm the values and the protections we have in place for our democracy.” More

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      Voting machine maker Dominion sues MyPillow CEO over false election claims

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      The voting machine manufacturer Dominion is suing the Donald Trump-supporting chief executive of MyPillow for more than $1.3bn, claiming he damaged the company with his “Big Lie” that it distorted the results of the 2020 election.Dominion delivered on its earlier threat to sue Mike Lindell by lodging the lawsuit on Monday in a federal court in Washington. The complaint alleges that the MyPillow boss used the falsehood that Dominion voting machines had been used to rig the election in favour of Joe Biden as a marketing ploy to sell his product, “because the lie sells pillows”.The suit accuses Lindell and MyPillow of deceptive trade practices and seeking to profit by making false and defamatory statements. It highlights discounts MyPillow offered on its products linked to the rigged-election conspiracy theory, and points out that the company advertised on rightwing media outlets that were pushing the baseless claims and sponsored public rallies that propagated Trump’s lies.After Dominion warned that they were minded to sue, Lindell responded by stepping up attacks on the company. Earlier this month he released a three-hour film, Absolute Proof, devoted to the fantasy that last November’s defeat of Trump at the ballot box amounted to a “communist coup”.His relentless pursuit of the stolen election lie earned Lindell a permanent suspension from Twitter.On Monday, Lindell told the Wall Street Journal he was “very, very happy” that the Dominion lawsuit had gone ahead.“I have all the evidence on them,” he said. “Now this will get disclosed faster, all the machine fraud and the attack on our country.”No credible evidence of fraud on the scale needed to overturn the 2020 presidential election result has ever been presented. Numerous election officials, including prominent Republicans, have rebuffed the idea, as did Trump attorney general William Barr and homeland security secretary Chad Wolf.The Dominion legal action is the latest in a flurry of lawsuits swirling around Trump’s baseless claim that the election was stolen. Last month Dominion sued Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and another pro-Trump attorney, Sidney Powell, over their role in forwarding the conspiracy theory.A rival voting machine company, Smartmatic USA, has sued Fox News for $2.7bn, alleging defamatory comments about its products were broadcast on the network. Fox News has filed to dismiss the case. More