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      US supreme court deals blow to voting rights by upholding Arizona restrictions

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      The US supreme court has upheld two Arizona voting restrictions in a ruling that dealt a major blow to the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 civil rights law designed to prevent voting discrimination.In a 6-3 ruling, the justices upheld Arizona statutes that prohibit anyone other than a close family member or caregiver from collecting mail-in ballots, which are widely used in the state.The court also upheld a statute that requires officials to wholly reject votes from people who show up to cast a ballot in the wrong precinct, even if the person is otherwise entitled to vote in the state.“Neither Arizona’s out-of-precinct rule nor its ballot-collection law violates §2 of the VRA. Arizona’s out-of-precinct rule enforces the requirement that voters who choose to vote in person on election day must do so in their assigned precincts,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for a majority that included the court’s five other conservative justices, referring to section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.He added: “Having to identify one’s own polling place and then travel there to vote does not exceed the ‘usual burdens of voting’.”The decision means that the Arizona statutes will remain in effect and make it harder to challenge discriminatory voting laws across the US at a time when a swath of Republican-run state legislatures are pushing a wave of new voting restrictions that voting rights advocates say are aimed at suppressing the vote and especially target communities of color.“Today the supreme court made it much harder to challenge discriminatory voting laws in court. The justices stopped short of eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, but nevertheless did significant damage to this vital civil rights law and to the freedom to vote,” Sean Morales-Doyle, the acting director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said in a statement.Richard Hasen, an election law scholar at the University of California, Irvine, said the decision was a significant blow to the Voting Rights Act, one of America’s landmark civil rights laws.“The conservative supreme court has taken away all the major available tools for going after voting restrictions. This at a time when some Republican states are passing new restrictive voting law[s],” he wrote in a blogpost. “This is not a death blow for section 2 claims, but it will make it much, much harder for such challenges to succeed.”The larger dispute in the case, Brnovich v Democratic National Committee, was how courts should interpret section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits any voting practice that results in the “denial or abridgment” of the right to vote based on race. The provision has become a critical tool for civil rights lawyers to challenge discriminatory voting laws in recent years, especially after a 2013 supreme court ruling that dramatically weakened the Voting Rights Act.Alito declined to endorse a specific test for future section 2 cases, but outlined five “guideposts” that could be applied in future cases.Courts should weigh the size of the burden that a voting law imposes, the magnitude of disparities in how they affect different minority groups, the state’s interest in enacting such a law, as well as how far the challenged law departs from standard practice in 1982, the year when the relevant portion of the Voting Rights Act was adopted, Alito wrote.And when courts evaluate a voting law, they need to consider the accessibility of a state’s entire electoral system, rather than just the law at hand, Alito added.Alito used those five factors to set an extremely high bar for challenging the Arizona law.Arizona’s prohibition on out-of-precinct voting only required voters to ensure they showed up at the right precinct on election day, a minimal burden in Alito’s view. Alito also dismissed evidence that minority voters were about twice as likely to have their provisional ballots rejected than white voters, noting that only a small percentage of Arizona voters overall cast an out-of-precinct provisional ballot on election day.“A policy that appears to work for 98% or more of voters to whom it applies – minority and non-minority alike – is unlikely to render a system unequally open,” he stated.Alito took a similar approach in upholding Arizona’s ban on third-party ballot collection. He noted that voters who cast their ballot by mail have several ways to return the ballot other than having someone collect it. The plaintiffs in the case also failed to provide statistically significant evidence, Alito said, that the ban disproportionately harmed Native American voters.Alito also gave states significant leeway to use voter fraud – which is extremely rare – as an excuse to restrict voting. “It should go without saying that a state may take action to prevent election fraud without waiting for it to occur and be detected within its own borders,” he wrote.Justice Elena Kagan wrote a searing dissenting opinion for the court’s three liberal justices, bluntly saying the majority opinion “enables voting discrimination”.The Voting Rights Act, Kagan wrote, makes any voting law that results in racial discrimination illegal, no matter how small the burden is for the voter, since even burdens that seem small can lead to discrimination in voting.She also rejected Alito’s suggestion that the Arizona laws did not provide more of a burden on minority voters because 98% of voters overall were unaffected.“Suppose a state decided to throw out 1% of the Hispanic vote each election. Presumably, the majority would not approve the action just because 99% of the Hispanic vote is unaffected,” she wrote.She also dismissed Alito’s acceptance of voter fraud as an excuse to pass voting restrictions. “Of course preventing voter intimidation is an important state interest. And of course preventing election fraud is the same. But those interests are also easy to assert groundlessly or pre-textually in voting discrimination cases,” she wrote.Joe Biden said in a statement he was “deeply disappointed” with the ruling and renewed his call for federal voting legislation, which Republicans blocked in the US Senate last month.“In a span of just eight years, the court has now done severe damage to two of the most important provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – a law that took years of struggle and strife to secure,” he said in a statement.Biden added: “While this broad assault against voting rights is sadly not unprecedented, it is taking on new forms. It is no longer just about a fight over who gets to vote and making it easier for eligible voters to vote. It is about who gets to count the vote and whether your vote counts at all.”Democrats in Washington are scrambling to find a way to pass new federal voting rights protections.One of the bills under consideration would restore the portion of the Voting Rights Act that section 2 has been used in lieu of in recent years and require certain states across the country to get voting changes approved by the federal government before they go into effect, in a bid to minimize discrimination.Kagan also noted in her dissenting opinion that the case came to the court at a time when states were considering hundreds of laws that would make it harder to vote, a moment she described as uniquely dangerous for American democracy.“The court decides this Voting Rights Act case at a perilous moment for the nation’s commitment to equal citizenship. It decides this case in an era of voting-rights retrenchment,” she wrote. “What is tragic here is that the court has (yet again) rewritten – in order to weaken – a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses. What is tragic is that the court has damaged a statute designed to bring about ‘the end of discrimination in voting’.” More

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      Legal scholars publish letter calling for Stephen Breyer to retire from supreme court

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      A group of 18 legal academics has issued an extraordinary joint letter urging the US supreme court justice Stephen Breyer to retire so that Joe Biden can name his successor.The intervention came after Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader in the Senate, warned that Biden would not get a supreme court nominee confirmed in 2024 if Republicans regain control of the chamber and a vacancy arises.With conservatives holding a 6-3 majority on the court, progressive activists have been calling for the liberal Breyer, who at 82 is the oldest member on the bench, to step down this year while Democrats narrowly control the Senate.“It is time for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer to announce his intent to retire,” the legal scholars say in a statement. “Breyer is a remarkable jurist, but with future control of a closely divided Senate uncertain, it is best for the country that President Biden have the opportunity to nominate a successor without delay.”The signatories include Niko Bowie of Harvard Law School, Erwin Chemerinsky and David Singh Grewal of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law; Daniel Morales of the University of Houston Law Center; Samuel Moyn of Yale Law School, Zephyr Teachout of Fordham University; and Miranda Yaver of Oberlin College.The statement was released by Demand Justice, a progressive group mounting a concerted campaign to make Breyer consider his position, with everything from reproductive rights to voting rights and gun control potentially at stake.This week it is among 13 liberal groups, including Black Lives Matter, the Sunrise Movement and Women’s March, publishing an advertisement in prominent media outlets. It says: “Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer should immediately announce his intent to retire from the bench.“With future control of a closely divided Senate uncertain, President Biden must have the opportunity to nominate a successor without delay and fulfill his pledge to put the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.”The ad concludes: “If Breyer were replaced by an additional ultra-conservative justice, an even further-right Supreme Court would leave our democracy and the rights of marginalized communities at even greater risk. For the good of the country, now is the time to step aside.”While serving as majority leader, McConnell blocked Barack Obama from filling a vacancy left by the death of the conservative justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016, contending that it would be inappropriate to confirm a supreme court nominee during a presidential election year.McConnell and his fellow Senate Republicans refused to consider Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, who now serves as Biden’s attorney general. That enabled Donald Trump, the winner of the November 2016 election, to appoint the conservative justice Neil Gorsuch in 2017.Democrats accused McConnell of hypocrisy last year when he allowed the Senate to confirm Trump’s conservative nominee Amy Coney Barrett to replace the liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in September, about six weeks before the 2020 presidential election.Christopher Kang, co-founder and chief counsel of Demand Justice, told the Guardian’s Politics Weekly Extra podcast: “I think certainly that looking back, and even at the time, a lot of people thought that the prudent thing for Justice Ginsburg to do to ensure her legacy would have been to retire.“I think this is the same conversation that a lot of progressives are having right now with respect to Justice Breyer, who is one of those three Democratic-appointed justices on the supreme court. He’s 82 years old. He could retire and we believe he should retire now and make way for the first Black woman to serve on the supreme court.Kang, who served in the Obama White House, added: “But it’s challenging because supreme court justices are nominated right now for life and the decision when to retire is completely up to them.“I was not part of the decision-making process at the time with respect to whether or not to reach out to Justice Ginsburg. I understand that the White House chose at the time not to do that but I think certainly looking at the impact of what happened, we could be in a very different place.” More

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      Lock him up! Why is repeat offender Donald Trump still a free man?

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      A sudden fall from power always comes hard. King Alfred was reduced to skulking in a Somerset bog. A distraught Napoleon talked to coffee bushes on St Helena. Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia hung around the haberdashery department of Jolly’s in Bath. Uganda’s Idi Amin plotted bloody revenge from a Novotel in Jeddah. Only Alfred the Great made a successful comeback.All of which brings us to Donald Trump, currently in exile at his luxury club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Whingeing amid the manicured greens and bunkers of his exclusive golf course, the defeated president recalls an ageing Bonnie Prince Charlie – a sort of “king over the water” with water features. Like deposed leaders throughout history, he obsesses about a return to power.Yet as Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell moves to kill off a 9/11-style national commission to investigate the 6 January Capitol Hill insurrection, the pressing question is not whether Trump can maintain cult-like sway over Republicans, or even whether he will run again in 2024. The question that should most concern Americans who care about democracy is: why isn’t Trump in jail?The fact he is not, and has not been charged with anything, is a genuine puzzle – some might say a scandal, even a conspiracy. Trump’s actual and potential criminal rap sheet long predates the Capitol siege. It includes alleged abuses of power, obstruction of justice, fraud, tax evasion, Russian money-laundering, election tampering, conflicts of interest, hush-money bribes, assassination – and a lot of lies.Let’s take these allegations one at a time. District of Columbia investigators say they have charged 410 people over the Capitol breach. Some could be tried for plotting to overthrow the US government – a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison – or even for murder, given that five people died. Yet Trump, who urged supporters at a Washington rally that day to “fight like hell” to stop Congress certifying his election loss, is not among them. He has not even been questioned over his indisputably pivotal role.For sure, Trump was impeached – but he declined to appear before Congress, and Republican toadies made a mockery of the process, voting to acquit him of inciting insurrection. In March, DC attorney Michael Sherwin said federal investigations involving Trump are still under way. “Maybe the president is culpable,” he mused. But updates about this key aspect of the affair are unaccountably lacking.Letitia James, New York’s attorney-general, last week confirmed a criminal investigation into alleged wrongdoing by Trump’s business empire. This inquiry is running in tandem with another criminal investigation into the Trump Organisation by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance. Alleged false accounting and tax irregularities appear to be the main focus.Yet these long-running investigations lack tangible results. Nor do they appear to be examining potentially more politically illuminating allegations such as Trump’s dealings with Vladimir Putin and Russia’s oligarchs, money-laundering via the New York property market, and the past role of disgraced Deutsche Bank. While claiming it’s all a “witch-hunt”, Trump may be happy for these limited inquiries to drag on indefinitely.Why, meanwhile, has Trump not already been arraigned on charges of obstruction of justice and abuse of power? Exactly two years ago, special counsel Robert Mueller cited 10 instances of the then president allegedly obstructing investigations into collusion between the Trump 2016 campaign and Russia. They included his firing of the FBI director, James Comey, and an attempt to sack Mueller himself.Mueller plainly indicated there was a case to answer, but said he was unable to bring indictments. “A president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office,” he said. Even if that is legally correct, Trump is no longer in office. Merrick Garland, William Barr’s thankfully less Uriah Heep-ish successor as attorney-general, should be all over this. Why isn’t he?Trump’s well-attested attempts to induce Georgia state officials to manipulate November’s election count in his favour were a crime, Fulton County prosecutors suggest. If so, why the delay? Charge him! Add to the rap sheet allegations of the ex-president corruptly channelling US taxpayer and foreign funds into his hotel and resort businesses.Trump, who promised to ‘drain the swamp’, waddled knee-deep in sleaze. So charge him!“Special interest groups likely spent more than $13 million at Trump properties” in order to gain access and influence, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an independent watchdog, reports. This typified an administration “marked by self-interest, profiteering at the highest levels, and more than 3,700 conflicts of interest”.In short, Trump, who promised to “drain the swamp”, waddled knee-deep in sleaze. So investigate and charge him!Trump has much to answer for internationally, too. The UN says the assassination he ordered last year, without just cause, of an Iranian general, Qassem Suleimani, was an unlawful act – possibly a war crime. And if all that is not enough, then consider – from a moral if not a legal standpoint – the thousands of avoidable Covid-19 deaths attributable to Trump’s denialism, stupidity and reckless incompetence.It’s truly strange that in a land of laws, Trump still walks free, strutting around his fancy-pants golf course, holding $250,000 a head fundraisers, evading justice, encouraging sedition, and daily blogging divisive bile about a stolen election. The Big Kahuna peddles the Big Lie. What other self-respecting country would allow it?The dismaying answer may be that to lock him up – the fate he wished on Hillary Clinton – would be to risk another insurrection. That’s the last thing Joe Biden and America’s wobbly democracy needs. But letting him get away with it harms democracy, too. In office, Trump ruled by lawlessness and fear. In exile, fear keeps him beyond the reach of the law. More

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      US split on vaccine passports as country aims for return to normalcy

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      With summer around the corner, Americans are desperate for some sense of normalcy as the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine continues. Some businesses and lawmakers believe they have a simple solution that will allow people to gather in larger numbers again: vaccine passports.But as with so many issues in the US these days, it’s an idea dividing America.Vaccine passport supporters see a future where people would have an app on their phone that would include their vaccine information, similar to the paper record card from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that is given when a person is vaccinated. People would flash the app when entering a large venue for something like a concert or sports game.While many other countries have implemented or are considering vaccine passports, in a country where political divides have determined belief in mask usage, social distancing and even the lethality of the virus, it comes as no surprise that there is already a political divide over whether vaccine passports should be used at all.Leaders of some Democratic states have embraced the idea of vaccine passports at big events like concerts and weddings.New York launched its Excelsior Pass with IBM in late March with the intention of having the app used at theaters, sports stadiums and event venues. California health officials will allow venues that verify whether someone has gotten the vaccine or tested negative to hold larger events. Hawaii is working with multiple companies on a vaccine passport system that would allow travelers to bypass Covid-19 testing and quarantine requirements if vaccinated.“Businesses have lost a lot of money during this whole period here so there’s a lot to recoup,” Mufi Hannemann, president and chief executive of the Hawaii Tourism and Lodging Association, told local news station Hawaii News Now. “We’re anxious to get this economy moving forward in a safe and healthy manner.”On the flip side, a growing number of states are passing laws banning vaccine passports, citing concerns of privacy and intrusion on people’s decisions to get vaccinated.“Government should not require any Texas to show proof of vaccination and reveal private health information just to go about their daily lives,” said Governor Greg Abbott, who ordered that no government agency or institution receiving government funding should require proof of vaccination.The governors of Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee, Arizona and Indiana have passed or voiced support for similar laws.Splits have already taken place. Norwegian Cruise Line, for example, told the CDC it would be willing to require passengers be fully vaccinated before boarding, but Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, said his ban on vaccine passports prohibits such a mandate.Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, like many colleges and universities, said they would require students to be vaccinated before returning to campus in the fall, but the school is considering backtracking the policy following DeSantis’s order.Though conservative figures like Donald Trump Jr, who called vaccine passports “invasive”, have started to broadly attack Democrats for backing vaccine passports, the White House has made it clear the federal government has no plans to release a vaccine passport, or require mandatory vaccines.“The government is not now nor will we be supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential,” said Jen Psaki, White House press secretary, earlier in April.Psaki said the White House would release guidance for businesses and local governments who wish to implement vaccine passports.Vaccine passports have historically been used when crossing country borders. For example, some countries, including Brazil and Ghana, require people to have the vaccine against yellow fever before entering their countries. And while vaccine passports have not been used widely domestically in the US, vaccine mandates, and the proof of vaccines needed to carry them out, are common. Many schools require students to get a host of vaccines, while many healthcare systems often require the annual flu vaccine for employers.Sensitivity around a vaccine passport is probably an offshoot of a broader vaccine hesitancy. Recent polling has shown that vaccine skepticism has a partisan bent: 30% of Republicans said they would not get the vaccine versus 11% of Democrats, according to the Covid States Project. David Lazer, professor of political science at Northeastern University and a researcher with the Covid States Project, said “partisan divides on behaviors and policies have been acute throughout the pandemic”, but Democrats and Republicans are more evenly split on vaccines compared with other policies against Covid-19, like mask-wearing and social distancing.The term “passport” could also be turning people away from the concept, said Maureen Miller, an epidemiologist with Columbia University, as it implies that verification requires more personal information beyond vaccination status. A recent poll from the de Beaumont Foundation confirmed this, with Republican respondents being more supportive of vaccine “verification” over a “passport”.Miller said the World Health Organization, which is developing its own Smart Vaccine Certificate and standards for vaccine verification programs, has been adamant about making the distinction between a certificate and a passport.“A passport contains a lot of personal information, and a vaccine certificate does not,” Miller said. “It contains only the information necessary to convey the fact that the person has been vaccinated.”Other groups including the Vaccine Credential Initiative and the Covid-19 Credential Initiative are working on coming up with standards for digital vaccine passports with the aim of building trust in vaccine verification programs.Miller said the ultimate goal would be to reach herd immunity in the US, which would nix the need for vaccine passports but would require working through the skepticism that exists in the country.“People are not going to feel comfortable in large numbers, in social environments until we hit a kind of herd immunity, where, when you bump into someone, the risk of an infectious person bumping into someone who’s susceptible is decreased tremendously,” Miller said. 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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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      '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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      Losing our marbles over Stonehenge | Brief letters

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      Donald Trump’s acquittal in the US Senate (Report, 14 February) surely provides the best possible evidence for never allowing politicians to get involved in judicial decision-making. Their priorities lie in other directions. Les Baker Fordingbridge, Hampshire• The Queen gets £220m a year for seabed lease options for windfarms (Queen’s property chief delays sale of Scottish seabed windfarm plots, 12 February). Really? Perhaps she could give the country her cut given the future costs of the climate crisis, Covid and the expected hardships to come? Stephen King London• While I can empathise with Elizabeth Kerr (Letters, 11 February) my own travel aspirations are more mundane. I would just like to be able to visit Scotland to hand-deliver the teddy bear I have bought for my first grandchild, born six weeks ago. Nick Denton Buxton, Derbyshire• I assume that the original site in Wales was the manufacturer’s showroom (Dramatic discovery links Stonehenge to its original site – in Wales, 12 February). After all, you wouldn’t buy a circle of standing stones unless you’d seen it standing up and circular, would you? Katy JennisonWitney, Oxfordshire• If the people of Wales call – quite rightly – for the return of the “Preseli marbles” (Letters, 12 February) please can the stones go home by the same route and method so that we can all enjoy the spectacle? Sue BallBrighton More