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      Republicans Seek Pennsylvania Voters’ Personal Information in 2020 Review

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      Pennsylvania Republicans moved on Wednesday to seek personal information on every voter in the state as part of a brewing partisan review of the 2020 election results, rubber-stamping more than a dozen subpoenas for driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.The expansive request for personal information, directed at Pennsylvania’s Department of State and approved in a vote by Republicans on a State Senate subcommittee, is the first major step of the election inquiry. The move adds Pennsylvania to a growing list of states that have embarked on partisan-led reviews of the 2020 election, including a widely criticized attempt to undermine the outcome in Arizona’s largest county.Democrats in the State Senate pledged to fight the subpoenas in court, saying at a news conference after the vote on Wednesday that the requests for identifiable personal information were an overreach, lacked authority and potentially violated federal laws protecting voter privacy. “Senate Democrats, going forward, intend to take legal action against this gross abuse of power by filing a lawsuit, challenging in the courts, and to ask the courts to declare the Senate Republicans’ actions in violation of separation of power, as well as declaring that they had no authority to issue these subpoenas,” said State Senator Jay Costa, the minority leader.Democrats control several of the top offices in Pennsylvania — including those of governor, attorney general and secretary of state — and it was not immediately clear what legal basis they might have to challenge the subpoenas. Nor was it clear how the transfer of information would begin to take place, if it does proceed, or which people or entities involved in the review would control the information. While the review will be funded by taxpayers, its potential cost has yet to be revealed. The Department of State did not respond to requests for comment or issue a statement on the subpoenas. Josh Shapiro, the attorney general of Pennsylvania and a Democrat, vowed to fight the subpoenas as well. “There are legal consequences to turning over people’s private, personal information without their permission,” Mr. Shapiro said in an interview. “My office will not allow that to happen. And people can be assured that we will take whatever legal action necessary to protect their private personal information from this charade.”The subpoenas, 17 in all, also included a request for communications between state and county election officials. They did not include requests for election machines or equipment.But election experts still expressed worries about the amount of personal information being requested and the security risks, both to voters and to the electoral process, that could come with such a transfer of information. Such risks have grown increasingly common in partisan election reviews around the country. “That’s a really bad idea to have private information floating around in a Senate caucus,” said Marian K. Schneider, an elections lawyer for the A.C.L.U. of Pennsylvania. “And it’s really not clear how the data is going to be used, who’s going to be looking at it, who can have access, how it’s going to be secured. And it’s unclear to me why they even need the personally identifying information.” Republicans in several states have pursued similar reviews — misleadingly labeled “audits” to suggest an authoritative nonpartisan investigation — in the name of protecting “election integrity.” The reviews have often centered on baseless claims and debunked conspiracy theories about the presidential contest, spurred in part by the falsehoods promoted by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies.President Biden won Pennsylvania by more than 80,000 votes, and the results have been reaffirmed by the state’s Department of State.“The entirety of our proceedings today, issuing subpoenas, is based upon such a noncredible foundation,” said Anthony H. Williams, a Democratic state senator who represents an area near Philadelphia. He added that it was “very troubling and, in fact, leads us to darker days in this country, such as when hearings like these, during the McCarthy era, were held, where voices were silenced and liberties were denied, being bullied by the power of the government.”State Senator Jake Corman, the top Republican in the chamber, who approved the review last month, portrayed the investigation as merely trying to inform future legislation and lashed back at Democrats, asking what they were “scared of.”“All we’re doing is seeking facts, seeking information, so that we can make better public policy,” Mr. Corman said. When questioned by Democrats about why voters’ Social Security and driver’s license information was necessary for the investigation, State Senator Cris Dush, who is leading the review as chair of the Governmental Operations Committee, brought up unspecific and unfounded claims that ineligible voters had cast ballots in the Pennsylvania election. “Because there have been questions regarding the validity of people who have voted, whether or not they exist,” Mr. Dush said. “Again, we’re not responding to proven allegations, we are investigating the allegations to determine whether or not they are factual.” He continued: “If we have the sum errors within the voter registration system which allow for such activity, then we have a responsibility as a legislature to create legislation which will prevent that from happening in future elections.”A chief concern of Democrats, beyond the subpoenas, was which people or companies might gain access to the stockpile of personal information of the nearly seven million Pennsylvanians who cast a ballot in the 2020 election.State Senator Steven J. Santarsiero, a Democrat from the Philadelphia suburbs, pressed Mr. Dush on his selection process. Mr. Santarsiero asked specifically whether any of the vendors the Republicans are considering have ties to Sidney Powell, the lawyer who has popularized many false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.“The answer to that is I really don’t know, because it is not something that is relevant to my determination,” Mr. Dush responded.“So it’s possible, then?” Mr. Santarsiero asked.“It is absolutely possible,” Mr. Dush said. More

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      Top Pennsylvania Republican Vows to Review 2020 Election Results

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      The top Republican in the Pennsylvania State Senate promised this week to carry out a broad review of the 2020 election results, a move that comes as G.O.P. lawmakers continue to sow doubts about the contest’s legitimacy by pushing to re-examine votes in battleground states like Arizona.State Senator Jake Corman, who serves as president pro tempore of the G.O.P.-controlled chamber, made the comments in an interview with a right-wing radio host, and they were first reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer on Tuesday. His remarks were the strongest sign yet that Pennsylvania — which President Biden won by more than 80,000 votes — may press forward with a review of 2020 results, despite no evidence of voter fraud that would have affected the outcome.In the interview, Mr. Corman said that he wanted to begin “almost immediately” and that hearings would begin this week. He added that he expected to use the full power of the state’s General Assembly, including subpoenas, to conduct the review, which he referred to as a “forensic investigation.”“We can bring people in, we can put them under oath, we can subpoena records, and that’s what we need to do and that’s what we’re going to do,” Mr. Corman said. “And so we’re going to move forward.”Previously, State Senator Doug Mastriano, a Republican and vocal proponent of former President Donald J. Trump’s falsehoods about the election, had called for a review of results in three counties.Until recently the chair of the Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee, he sent letters requesting ballots, records and machines from Philadelphia County, which encompasses the state’s largest city and which Mr. Biden won with over 80 percent of the vote; York County, south of Harrisburg, which Mr. Trump won handily; and Tioga County, in the northern part of the state, which Mr. Trump also carried with ease. All three counties refused to comply, and Mr. Mastriano’s legal authority to enforce the requests remains unclear.Last week, Mr. Corman removed Mr. Mastriano from his position as chair of the committee and installed State Senator Cris Dush, also a Republican, to lead the panel and oversee the review.In the interview, Mr. Corman expressed his own doubts about the election.“I don’t necessarily have faith in the results,” he said. “I think that there were many problems in our election that we need to get to the bottom of.”Jason Thompson, a spokesman for Mr. Corman, said that they were “not setting a hard cap on how long the audit will take,” but that he could not comment further because “many of the details of the audit plan are still being worked out, and Senator Dush will need a little more time to settle on the final approach.” Veronica Degraffenreid, who as the acting secretary of the commonwealth oversees Pennsylvania’s elections, has discouraged counties from participating in any election reviews, noting that any inspection of voting machines by uncredentialed third parties would result in their decertification, and that counties would have to bear the considerable costs of replacing the equipment.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 4A monthslong campaign. More

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      Conor Lamb Enters 2022 Pennsylvania Senate Race

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      Democrats sense their best chance to expand their slim hold on the Senate. Republican contenders are outdoing one another courting the “Super-MAGA-Trumpy” right wing.PITTSBURGH — Representative Conor Lamb thinks he knows what it takes for Democrats to win statewide in Pennsylvania.He looks to President Biden, whose narrow victory in the state — called four days after Election Day — put him over the top and in the White House.“People will use the word moderate,’’ Mr. Lamb said at his home in Pittsburgh’s South Hills on Thursday. “We’re a swing state. I don’t think we’re too far ideologically one way or the other.’’On Friday, at a union hall on Pittsburgh’s Hot Metal Street, Mr. Lamb announced his long-expected entry into Pennsylvania’s 2022 Senate race, vowing to “fight for every single vote across our state on every single square inch of ground,” and presenting himself as just middle-of-the-road enough to get elected statewide. The question is whether he is liberal enough to win the Democratic primary.A Marine veteran and former prosecutor, Mr. Lamb, 37, is likely the last major candidate to enter what are expected to be competitive, knockdown primary battles in both parties for the seat now held by Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican who is retiring.It is the only open seat now in Republican hands in a state that Mr. Biden carried, and Democrats see it as their best opportunity to expand their hairbreadth control of the Senate, where the 50-50 partisan split leaves Vice President Kamala Harris to cast deciding votes. A single additional seat would mean a simple Democratic majority in the Senate, and at least a sliver of insulation for the White House from the whims of individual senators who now hold enormous sway, like the moderates Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.Mr. Lamb rose to prominence in 2018 when he won a special House election in a district that Mr. Trump had carried by double digits. He won twice more in a redrawn but still politically mixed district, staking out independent positions that included voting against Representative Nancy Pelosi for House Speaker. But while he bills himself as the strongest potential Democratic nominee precisely because of what he calls his Bidenesque, centrist approach, aspects of his record, including on guns and marijuana, are out of step with many primary voters.“Progressives are the most active in the party, and that makes it tough for Lamb,’’ said Brendan McPhillips, who ran Mr. Biden’s 2020 Pennsylvania campaign and is not working for a Senate candidate.Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, center, hopes to appeal to some working-class white voters who drifted over to support Mr. Trump.Jacqueline Dormer/Republican-Herald, via Associated PressThe early favorite of progressives and presumed front-runner for the Democratic nomination is Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, something of a folk hero to the national left, with some 400,000 Twitter followers who relish his posts in favor of “legal weed” and his frequent swipes at Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema for not “voting like Democrats.” As the 14-year mayor of Braddock, a poor community outside Pittsburgh, Mr. Fetterman tattooed the dates of local homicides on his arm. As lieutenant governor, he has fought to pardon longtime nonviolent inmates.Known for a casual working wardrobe of untucked tradesmen’s shirts and jeans, or even shorts, and for his imposing presence — he is 6-foot-8 with a shaved head — Mr. Fetterman, 51, hopes to appeal to some working-class white voters who drifted over to support Mr. Trump. He has lapped the field in fund-raising, pulling in $6.5 million this year.Still, Mr. Fetterman’s challenge is the flip side of Mr. Lamb’s: He could win the May primary but be seen as too liberal for Pennsylvania’s general-election voters. “He’s the candidate I think many Republicans would love to face,’’ said Jessica Taylor, an analyst for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.A potential liability in the primary also looms for Mr. Fetterman in a 2013 incident, when he was mayor of Braddock. After hearing what he took to be gunshots, Mr. Fetterman stopped a Black jogger and held him at gunpoint until police arrived. The man turned out to be unarmed and was released. Mr. Fetterman addressed the episode in February, explaining he had made “split-second decisions” when he believed a nearby school might be in danger.Still, with police and vigilante violence against Black men a highly charged issue for Democratic voters, some party officials and strategists expressed fears that, if nominated, Mr. Fetterman could depress Black turnout. An outside group that supports the election of Black candidates has already run a radio ad in Philadelphia attacking Mr. Fetterman over the incident.“It’s most certainly an issue,” said Christopher Borick, a political scientist and pollster at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa. “It hasn’t gone away and it keeps resurfacing. It raises red flags.”In a statement, Mr. Fetterman’s campaign noted that he had been “overwhelmingly re-elected” four months after the incident in Braddock, “a town that is 80 percent Black,” because voters there “know John, and they know this had nothing to do with race.” It added that he had gone on to “run and win statewide, and he is the only candidate running for this Senate seat who has done so.”Malcolm Kenyatta would be the first Black and first openly gay nominee if he wins the primary.Jose F. Moreno/The Philadelphia Inquirer, via Associated PressIf Democratic voters balk at Mr. Fetterman and Mr. Lamb, a path could open for alternative candidates, including Val Arkoosh, a county official in the electorally key Philadelphia suburbs and the only woman in the race, and Malcolm Kenyatta, a telegenic young state lawmaker from North Philadelphia.Mr. Kenyatta, who would be the state’s first Black and first openly gay Senate nominee if he won, has traveled extensively seeking local endorsements but lags behind his rivals in fund-raising.Ms. Arkoosh, a physician and the chair of the Board of Commissioners in Montgomery County, the state’s third largest county, has the endorsement of Emily’s List, which backs Democratic women who support abortion rights. Together, Mr. Fetterman, Mr. Lamb and Ms. Arkoosh significantly out-raised their Republican counterparts in the quarter ending in June.While Democrats see a model in Mr. Biden’s 81,000-vote victory in the state last year, which swept up suburban swing voters appalled by Mr. Trump, Republicans are currently playing almost exclusively to the Make America Great Again base, retelling the fable of a stolen 2020 election.There is a proven path to statewide victories for Republicans in Pennsylvania, one taken by two G.O.P. candidates last year who were elected treasurer and auditor general. They did so by running ahead of Mr. Trump in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, where many college-educated voters had traditionally supported Republicans but were repelled by the bullying, divisive former president.Val Arkoosh, a county official in the Philadelphia suburbs, is the only woman in the Democratic primary.Gene J. Puskar/Associated PressMr. Toomey, the retiring Republican senator, warned recently, “Candidates will have to run on ideas and principles, not on allegiance to a man.’’But few of the Republicans vying to succeed him seem to have listened.Sean Parnell, a former Army Ranger who lost a House race last year to Mr. Lamb, sued to throw out all 2.6 million Pennsylvania mail-in votes, a case the U.S. Supreme Court rejected, and has said he supports an Arizona-style audit of Pennsylvania’s 2020 ballots. Donald Trump Jr. has endorsed his Senate bid. And Jeff Bartos, a real estate developer and major party donor from the Philadelphia area who was expected to appeal to suburban voters, has similarly courted the Trump base, calling for a “full forensic audit” of Pennsylvania’s election, though multiple courts threw out suits claiming fraud or official misconduct.Neither Mr. Parnell nor Mr. Bartos raised as much money in the recent quarter as a dark-horse candidate, Kathy Barnette, a former financial executive who lost a congressional race in Philadelphia’s Main Line last year. Ms. Barnette has pushed claims of voter fraud on the far-right cable outlets Newsmax and OAN. A longtime Republican consultant in the state, Christopher Nicholas, said there were three lanes available to G.O.P. candidates: “Super-MAGA-Trumpy, Trump-adjacent, and not-so-much-Trump.”Lately, he said, almost everyone has elbowed into the “Super-MAGA-Trumpy” lane.“As a Republican, you have to watch how far to the right you go to win the primary, that it doesn’t do irreparable harm to them in the general election,’’ Mr. Nicholas said.Mr. Lamb faces a similar challenge as a moderate in the Democratic primary.He is sure to be hit hard over some past positions, including his opposition to an assault weapons ban in 2019 and his vote the previous year to extend permanently the Trump administration’s individual tax cuts.More recently, Mr. Lamb has stayed more in step with his party: In April, he endorsed Mr. Biden’s call to ban future assault weapons sales; in May, he endorsed ending the filibuster.Mr. Lamb said in an interview that the assault on the Capitol had been a turning point for him, particularly in how Republican leaders had come around to embrace Mr. Trump’s false charge that the 2020 vote had been rigged.He alluded to that again in his announcement speech on Friday: “If they will take such a big lie and place it at the center of the party,” he said of G.O.P. leaders, “you cannot expect them to tell the truth about anything else.” More

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      Biden swings by Pennsylvania in Covid relief tour and promises ‘more help’

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterJoe Biden stopped by a unionized, Black-owned flooring company in the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Tuesday to highlight how the provisions of his $1.9tn coronavirus relief package will help lift small businesses hurt by the pandemic, part of a cross-country campaign to promote the first major legislative achievement of his presidency.During his visit to Smith Flooring Inc, located in the Philadelphia suburb of Chester, Biden said the sweeping new law was a “big deal” and promised the owners: “More help is on the way – for real.”“We’re gonna be paying our employees,” James Smith, who co-owns the business with his wife, Kristin Smith, said of their plan for the relief checks. “We’ve been paying them. Since the first run of PPP, we decided we wanted to take that money and not lay anyone off. We put everybody in a group and said, ‘Look, we’re gonna do this for you as a team, we’re gonna get through this together.’”Biden’s visit to Smith Flooring, in a state he clawed back from Donald Trump in 2020, was his first stop on the White House’s “Help is Here” tour and comes a day after Biden announced that his administration was on track to mark two key milestones in the coming days: delivering 100m Covid vaccinations since his inauguration – far outpacing his initial promise to administer those doses in his first 100 days – and distributing 100m stimulus checks to Americans.The tour includes Biden, Kamala Harris and their spouses, Jill Biden and Doug Emhoff. Later this week, Biden and the vice-president will visit Georgia, another swing state that he narrowly won in 2020.During the visit, Biden explained how his plan would help small businesses like Smith Flooring, which saw its revenue fall by roughly 20% during the pandemic, according to the White House. The flooring company recently qualified for a federal Payment Protection Program (PPP) loan under an action taken by the president targeting businesses with 20 or fewer employees.Biden’s plan, one of the largest emergency aid packages ever enacted, will provide $1,400 direct payments to most Americans, send $350bn in aid to state, local and tribal governments, dramatically expand the child tax credit and spend tens of billions of dollars to accelerate Covid-19 vaccine distribution and testing.“Shots in arms and money in pockets,” Biden said in brief remarks on Tuesday. “That’s important. The American Rescue Plan is already doing what it was designed to do: make a difference in people’s everyday lives.“We’re just getting started.”Alawi Mohamed, the owner of a commercial strip in Chester, said the first loan given in last year’s coronavirus relief package had helped him stay afloat, but he was hoping Biden’s plan would give him a much-needed boost.“Everybody got affected by Covid-19. When they shut down everything, we got affected big time. Nobody was around and people were actually staying home,” he said. Now he said, he is “back to business, gradually, but everything came out good”.Also on Tuesday, Biden introduced Gene Sperling, a longtime Democratic policy aide, to oversee the implementation of the $1.9tn package.Democrats are increasingly confident that the stimulus package will boost their prospects in 2022, when they will attempt to keep their slim majorities in both chambers of Congress despite a long history of the president’s party losing seats during the congressional midterm elections.Every Democrat except one House member voted for the bill while Republicans unified against it.Republicans have attacked the plan as bloated, filled with liberal priorities that run far afield of the coronavirus response. But Democrats argue that the package will lift the nation from the dual crisis by rushing immediate aid to those hit hardest by the economic downturn and help ensure a more even recovery. They also say it will go further to tackle deep-seated economic inequalities, halving child poverty and expanding financial aid for families squeezed by job loss and school closures.Polling has consistently found that Americans favor Biden’s stimulus plan. According to a new CNN/SSRS poll released this week, 61% of Americans approve of the coronavirus relief package, while 37% oppose it.Haunted by their lashing in the 2010 midterms, Democrats now believe that they didn’t do enough to promote their sweeping stimulus package, shepherded by the new Obama administration and passed by Democratic majorities in response to the financial collapse.The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has touted the package as among the most consequential bills of her decades-long career, putting it on par with the Affordable Care Act. In a letter to colleagues after the bill was signed, she urged members to hold tele-town halls and send informational literature to constituents to explain how the bill could benefit them and their families.“We want to avoid a situation where people are unaware of what they’re entitled to,” Harris said during her visit to a culinary academy in Las Vegas on Monday. “It’s not selling it – it literally is letting people know their rights. Think of it more as a public education campaign.” More

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      We Still Have to Worry About the Supreme Court and Elections

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Campaign to Subvert the 2020 ElectionKey TakeawaysTrump’s RoleGeorgia InvestigationExtremist Wing of G.O.P.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyWe Still Have to Worry About the Supreme Court and ElectionsThe justices are about to consider whether the Voting Rights Act applies to policies that restrict the vote.Contributing Opinion WriterFeb. 25, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Damon Winter/The New York TimesWhen the Supreme Court on Monday rejected Pennsylvania Republicans’ after-the-fact effort to invalidate late-arriving mailed ballots, it was tempting to suppose that the country’s courthouse doors had finally closed on this most litigated of presidential elections.If only it were that simple.True, in denying the Republicans’ petitions, the court didn’t issue an opinion. Of the four votes necessary to accept a case, these two cases (treated by the court as one) garnered only three. So for the official record, the only outcome in Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. DeGraffenreid and in Corman v. Pennsylvania Democratic Party was “denied.”But the three justices who would have accepted the cases — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch — issued dissenting opinions that provide both a road map and a rationale for the Supreme Court’s future intervention in the quintessentially state matter of how to conduct elections.Remember Bush v. Gore, the case that decided the 2000 presidential election, in which five justices voted to overturn the Florida Supreme Court’s handling of a statewide recount? That decision was based on a theory of equal protection so wacky that the majority opinion insisted that “our consideration is limited to the present circumstances” — that is to say, don’t dare invoke this poor excuse for an opinion as a precedent.That didn’t stop Justice Thomas from citing Bush v. Gore in his dissenting opinion on Monday, and he did so in a particularly shameless fashion. The language he cited wasn’t even from the Bush v. Gore majority opinion, but rather from a separate concurring opinion filed in that case by only three of the majority justices, who argued that the Florida Supreme Court had violated the U.S. Constitution by substituting its will for that of the state Legislature. Justice Thomas invoked that minority portion of the decision to assert that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was constitutionally out of bounds when, citing both the Covid-19 pandemic and the collapse of the Postal Service as its reasons, it added three postelection days for lawful receipt of mailed ballots.He went on to warn that fraud was “more prevalent with mail-in ballots,” citing as evidence a 1994 Federal District Court case, an article in this newspaper from 2012 and the 2018 Republican ballot-harvesting fraud in North Carolina. Such occurrences, he said, raise “the likelihood that courts will be asked to adjudicate questions that go to the heart of election confidence.” This was the reason, he argued, that the Supreme Court should have taken and decided the Pennsylvania cases before the next election cycle.In his inventory of ballot fraud, Justice Thomas of course could not refer to fraud in the 2020 election, because there wasn’t any. Not a problem:We are fortunate that many of the cases we have seen alleged only improper rule changes, not fraud. But that observation provides only small comfort. An election free from strong evidence of systemic fraud is not alone sufficient for election confidence. Also important is the assurance that fraud will not go undetected.In other words, Justice Thomas would have it both ways: If there was fraud, the court needed to intervene, and if there was no fraud, the court needed to intervene because the fraud might simply be undetected. Despite his disclaimer, the entire structure of his opinion, suggesting that something bad had happened even if no one could prove it, is fairly read as validating the essence of the Trump narrative.Justice Alito, in a separate dissenting opinion that Justice Gorsuch also signed, was more circumspect about the fraud issue. His emphasis was the urgency of stopping state courts from substituting their judgment for that of the legislatures. He said that even though the election was over and late ballots were too few to have made a difference in Pennsylvania’s vote totals, state courts could be expected to behave in the same way in the future unless the Supreme Court used this occasion to stop them.There are several things to note about the Pennsylvania cases. The most obvious is the absence of a fourth vote. In an initial round in the Pennsylvania cases, in mid-October, Justice Brett Kavanaugh had provided Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch with a fourth vote to grant a stay of the state court decision. But a stay requires five votes rather than four. With Amy Coney Barrett not yet confirmed, the eight justices divided 4 to 4, and the stay was denied without opinions. Justice Kavanaugh withheld his vote on Monday, without explanation. Maybe he decided this was a propitious time to offer some cover for Chief Justice John Roberts, who has voted in nearly all the election cases this fall with the three remaining liberal justices.Justice Barrett was also silent. During her confirmation hearing, Senate Democrats had pressed her to promise recusal from any election cases, given that President Donald Trump had said he needed a prompt replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg so that he would have a majority of justices voting his way in any election disputes. Justice Barrett did not recuse herself from the Pennsylvania case. Perhaps her decision not to provide the fourth vote her dissenting colleagues needed was a kind of de facto recusal, in recognition that the optics of voting to hear a last-ditch Trump appeal would be awkward, to say the least.The deeper question raised by Monday’s development is why Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch are so intent on what would seem to be a counterintuitive goal for conservatives: curbing the power of state courts. I’m cynical enough to think it has to do with how these three understand the position of state legislatures and state courts in today’s political climate. It’s been widely reported that Republican-controlled legislatures are rolling out bills by the dozens to restrict access to the polls, aimed at discouraging the kind of turnout that produced Democratic victories in Georgia last month. The vote-suppression effort has become so aggressive that some Republicans are starting to worry about voter backlash, according to a recent Washington Post article.State courts, on the other hand, are capable of standing in the way of this strategy. When state high-court judges are elected, as they are in many states, they typically run in statewide races that are not subject to the gerrymandering that has entrenched Republican power in states that are much more balanced politically than the makeup of their legislatures reflects. What better way to disable the state courts in their democracy-protecting role than to push them to the sidelines when it comes to federal elections.So there is no way the Supreme Court is finished with elections. Next Tuesday, as it happens, the justices will hear a crucial voting rights case. The case, from Arizona, asks the court to decide for the first time how Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 applies to policies that restrict the vote, through such measures as voter ID requirements.Section 2, which pertains nationwide, is the major remaining provision of the Voting Rights Actfollowing the Supreme Court’s dismantling of the act’s Section 5, in the 2013 Shelby County case. That section barred certain states and smaller jurisdictions from making changes in their election procedures without first receiving federal permission, known as “preclearance.” Section 5 provided vital protection in parts of the country where racism had not released its grip on the levers of power.The issue now is whether Section 2 can be deployed to fill that gap. It prohibits any voting practice that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” It has typically been used to challenge redistricting plans that dilute the electoral power of racial and ethnic minorities. The question of whether it can be useful in challenging the wave of vote-suppression schemes, which can present complex problems of proof, hands the justices arguably the most important civil rights case of their current term.With the country exhausted and still reeling from the turmoil of the 2020 election and its bizarre aftermath, the urge not to think about elections for a while is powerful. I share it. But it’s a luxury the Supreme Court hasn’t given us, not now, not as long as some justices have more to say.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Supreme Court Won’t Hear Pennsylvania Election Case on Mailed Ballots

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySupreme Court Won’t Hear Pennsylvania Election Case on Mailed BallotsIn dissent, three justices said the court should have used the case to provide guidance in future elections.Election workers counting ballots in Philadelphia after the presidential election last year.Credit…Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesFeb. 22, 2021Updated 7:58 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it would not hear an appeal from Pennsylvania Republicans who sought to disqualify mailed ballots in the 2020 presidential election that arrived after Election Day.The court’s brief order gave no reasons for turning down the case, which as a practical matter marked the end of Supreme Court litigation over the election. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch dissented, saying the court should have used it to provide guidance in future elections.The dissenting justices acknowledged that the number of ballots at issue in the case was too small to affect President Biden’s victory in the state. But the legal question the case presented — about the power of state courts to revise election laws — was, they said, a significant one that should be resolved without the pressure of an impending election.The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in September that ballots sent before Election Day could be counted if they arrived up to three days after. On two occasions before the election, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene in the case, though several justices expressed doubts about the state court’s power to override the State Legislature, which had set an Election Day deadline for receiving mailed ballots.On Monday, Justice Thomas wrote that the time was now right to take up the case.“At first blush,” he wrote, “it may seem reasonable to address this question when it next arises. After all, the 2020 election is now over, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision was not outcome determinative for any federal election. But whatever force that argument has in other contexts, it fails in the context of elections.”“Because the judicial system is not well suited to address these kinds of questions in the short time period available immediately after an election,” Justice Thomas wrote, “we ought to use available cases outside that truncated context to address these admittedly important questions.”In a separate dissent, Justice Alito, joined by Justice Gorsuch, agreed that “our review at this time would be greatly beneficial.”“A decision in these cases would not have any implications regarding the 2020 election,” Justice Alito wrote. “But a decision would provide invaluable guidance for future elections.”On Oct. 19, before Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court, the justices deadlocked, 4 to 4, on an emergency application in the case. Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh said they would have granted a stay blocking the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision. On the other side were Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s three-member liberal wing: Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.Later that month, the justices refused a plea from Republicans in the state to fast-track a decision on whether the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had acted lawfully.In a statement issued at the time, Justice Alito, joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, criticized the court’s treatment of the matter, which he said had “needlessly created conditions that could lead to serious postelection problems.”“The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania has issued a decree that squarely alters an important statutory provision enacted by the Pennsylvania Legislature pursuant to its authority under the Constitution of the United States to make rules governing the conduct of elections for federal office,” Justice Alito wrote, adding that he regretted that the election would be “conducted under a cloud.”“It would be highly desirable to issue a ruling on the constitutionality of the State Supreme Court’s decision before the election,” Justice Alito wrote. “That question has national importance, and there is a strong likelihood that the State Supreme Court decision violates the federal Constitution.”But there was not enough time, he wrote. Still, Justice Alito left little doubt about where he stood on the question in the case.“The provisions of the federal Constitution conferring on state legislatures, not state courts, the authority to make rules governing federal elections would be meaningless,” he wrote, “if a state court could override the rules adopted by the legislature simply by claiming that a state constitutional provision gave the courts the authority to make whatever rules it thought appropriate for the conduct of a fair election.”Even after the election, Pennsylvania Republicans continued to seek Supreme Court review in the case, Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Boockvar, No. 20-542, saying the justices should address the issue it presented in an orderly way.“By resolving the important and recurring questions now, the court can provide desperately needed guidance to state legislatures and courts across the country outside the context of a hotly disputed election and before the next election,” their brief said. “The alternative is for the court to leave legislatures and courts with a lack of advance guidance and clarity regarding the controlling law — only to be drawn into answering these questions in future after-the-fact litigation over a contested election, with the accompanying time pressures and perceptions of partisan interest.”On Monday, Justice Thomas wrote that the court had missed an opportunity.“One wonders what this court waits for,” he wrote. “We failed to settle this dispute before the election, and thus provide clear rules. Now we again fail to provide clear rules for future elections.”“The decision to leave election law hidden beneath a shroud of doubt is baffling,” Justice Thomas wrote. “By doing nothing, we invite further confusion and erosion of voter confidence. Our fellow citizens deserve better and expect more of us.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How the Pennsylvania GOP is Trying to Increase Their Control of State Courts

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPennsylvania G.O.P.’s Push for More Power Over Judiciary Raises AlarmsAfter fighting the election results, state Republicans are trying to increase their control of the courts. Outraged Democrats and good government groups see it as a new kind of gerrymandering.The Pennsylvania Capitol building, which houses chambers for the State Supreme Court. Under a Republican proposal, the legislative branch would have more control over the courts. Credit…Hilary Swift for The New York TimesFeb. 15, 2021Updated 10:29 a.m. ETWhen the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unanimously rejected a Republican attempt to overturn the state’s election results in November, Justice David N. Wecht issued his own pointed rebuke, condemning the G.O.P. effort as “futile” and “a dangerous game.”“It is not our role to lend legitimacy to such transparent and untimely efforts to subvert the will of Pennsylvania voters,” wrote Justice Wecht, a Democrat who was elected to a 10-year term on the bench in 2016. “Courts should not decide elections when the will of the voters is clear.”Now Pennsylvania Republicans have a plan to make it less likely that judges like Justice Wecht get in their way.G.O.P. legislators, dozens of whom supported overturning the state’s election results to aid former President Donald J. Trump, are moving to change the entire way that judges are selected in Pennsylvania, in a gambit that could tip the scales of the judiciary to favor their party, or at least elect judges more inclined to embrace Republican election challenges.The proposal would replace the current system of statewide elections for judges with judicial districts drawn by the Republican-controlled legislature. Those districts could empower rural, predominantly conservative areas and particularly rewire the State Supreme Court, which has a 5-to-2 Democratic lean.Democrats are now mobilizing to fight the effort, calling it a thinly veiled attempt at creating a new level of gerrymandering — an escalation of the decades-old practice of drawing congressional and state legislative districts to ensure that political power remains in one party’s hands. Democrats are marshaling grass-roots opposition, holding regular town hall events conducted over Zoom, and planning social media campaigns and call-in days to legislators, as well as an enormous voter education campaign. One group, Why Courts Matter Pennsylvania, has cut a two-minute infomercial.Republicans in Pennsylvania have historically used gerrymandering to maintain their majority in the legislature, despite Democratic victories in statewide elections. Republicans have controlled the State House of Representatives since 2011 and the State Senate since 1993.Current schedules for the legislature make it unlikely the Republicans could marshal their majorities in the House and Senate to pass the bill by Wednesday and put the proposal before voters on the ballot in May. Passing the bill after that date would set up a new and lengthy political war for November in this fiercely contested state.Republicans have some history on their side: Pennsylvania voters tend to approve ballot measures.“You should be very suspicious when you see a legislature who has been thwarted by a Supreme Court in its unconstitutional attempts to rig the democratic process then trying to rig the composition of that Supreme Court,” said Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.She added, “It is way too much control for one branch to have over another branch, particularly where one of its charges is to reign in the excesses of the legislative branch.”If the Republican bill becomes law, Pennsylvania would become just the fifth state in the country, after Louisiana, Kentucky, Mississippi and Illinois, to wholly map its judicial system into electoral districts, according to the Brennan Center. And other states may soon join Pennsylvania in trying to remake the courts through redistricting.Republicans in the Texas Legislature, which is also controlled by the G.O.P., recently introduced a bill that would shift districts for the state appellate courts by moving some counties into different districts, causing an uproar among state Democrats who saw the new districts as weakening the voting power of Black and Latino communities in judicial elections and potentially adding to the Republican tilt of the Texas courts.Gilberto Hinojosa, the chair of the Texas Democratic Party, called the bill a “pure power grab meant to keep Blacks and Latinos from having influence on courts as their numbers in the state grow.”These judicial redistricting battles are taking shape as Republican-controlled legislatures across the country explore new restrictions on voting after the 2020 elections. In Georgia, Republicans in the state legislature are seeking a host of new laws that would make voting more difficult, including banning drop boxes and placing sweeping limitations on mail-in voting. Similar bills in Arizona would restrict mail-in voting, including barring the state from sending out mail ballot applications. And in Texas, Republican lawmakers want to limit early voting periods.The nationwide effort by Republicans follows a successful four-year drive by the party’s lawmakers in Washington to reshape the federal judiciary with conservative judges. Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, until recently the majority leader, and Mr. Trump, the Senate confirmed 231 federal judges, as well as three new Supreme Court justices, over the former president’s four-year term, according to data maintained by Russell Wheeler, a research fellow at the Brookings Institution.In a state like Pennsylvania, which has two densely populated Democratic cities and large rural areas, this could give outsize representation to sparsely populated places that lean more conservative, particularly if the legislature resorts to a gerrymandering tactic similar to one used in Pennsylvania in 2011.“Republicans have been good at gerrymandering districts in Pennsylvania, or good in the sense that they’ve been successful,” said State Senator Sharif Street, a Democrat. “I think they would like to remain successful, and they are confident that they can gerrymander judicial districts.”Republicans in the state legislature argue that their proposed move would give different regions of Pennsylvania more representation.Russ Diamond, the Republican state representative who is sponsoring the bill, said in an email that regional representation was necessary for the judiciary “because the same statewide consensus which goes in making law should come to bear when those statutes are heard on appeal, are applied in practical real-life situations, and when precedent is set for the future of the Commonwealth.”State Representative Russ Diamond during a town hall meeting in Llewellyn, Pa. He sponsored the bill to reshape the judiciary, after first introducing a similar one in 2015. Credit…Lindsey Shuey/Republican-Herald, via Associated Press“The overall goal is to include the full diversity of Pennsylvania’s appellate courts,” Mr. Diamond added. “There is no way to completely depoliticize the courts, other than choosing judges via random selection or a lottery system. Every individual holds some political opinion or another.”Geographic diversity, however, rarely equates to racial diversity in the courts. The four states that use judicial districts in state Supreme Court elections — Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi and Kentucky — have never had more than one justice of color on the court at any given time, according to data from the Brennan Center.While eight states use some form of judicial districts to elect judges, Pennsylvania’s proposal remains an outlier on a few key elements. First, a partisan legislature would have the power to redraw the districts every 10 years, whereas those elsewhere remain for longer or are based on statute. Additionally, the judicial districts in Pennsylvania would not be bound by or based on any existing legislative or congressional districts, created from scratch by the Republican-controlled legislature.The move has caught the attention of national Democratic groups that are at the forefront of redistricting battles across the country.“A decade ago, Pennsylvania Republicans gerrymandered themselves into majorities in the legislature and congressional delegation,” said Eric H. Holder Jr., the former United States attorney general and current chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “Now that their grip on power has been forcibly loosened by the courts, they want to create and then manipulate judicial districts in a blatant attempt to undermine the independence of the judiciary and stack the courts with their conservative allies.”Because the bill has already passed the House once, in 2020, it needs only to pass both chambers of the state legislature again to make it on the ballot.Further stoking Democrats’ fears: The bill does not need the signature of Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat. Since it would be an amendment to the Constitution, it would head to the ballot as a referendum question to be voted on in the next election (if the bill passes before Wednesday, it would go to voters during the May primary). Historically, Pennsylvania voters have voted more in favor of ballot measures than against them, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures.Good government groups have teamed up with Democrats to mount a huge voter education campaign, anticipating that the judicial question may soon be on the ballot. Progressive groups including the Judicial Independence Project of PA, a new coalition that includes the voting rights group Common Cause, have been holding digital town halls about the judicial redistricting proposal, with attendance regularly topping 100 people.On a Thursday evening late last month, more than 160 people logged into Zoom to hear from coalition leaders about the bill and to hatch plans to further mobilize against it. Rebecca Litt, a senior organizer from a local Indivisible group, proposed a call-your-legislator day. Ricardo Almodovar, an organizing director with We the People PA, another progressive group, noted the graphics and other social media campaigns already underway to help educate voters.“We’re also trying to humanize the courts,” Mr. Almodovar explained during a smaller session with southeastern Pennsylvania residents, sharing stories of how specific court decisions “impact our lives.”Throughout the full, hourlong meeting, organizers repeatedly sought to make the stakes very clear.“We are in the last legislative session of this,” said Alexa Grant, a program advocate with Common Cause. “So we are the last line of defense.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Pennsylvania G.O.P.’s Push for More Power Over Judiciary Raises Alarms

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPennsylvania G.O.P.’s Push for More Power Over Judiciary Raises AlarmsAfter fighting the election results, state Republicans are trying to increase their control of the courts. Outraged Democrats and good government groups see it as a new kind of gerrymandering.The Pennsylvania Capitol building, which houses chambers for the State Supreme Court. Under a Republican proposal, the legislative branch would have more control over the courts. Credit…Hilary Swift for The New York TimesFeb. 15, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETWhen the Pennsylvania Supreme Court unanimously rejected a Republican attempt to overturn the state’s election results in November, Justice David N. Wecht issued his own pointed rebuke, condemning the G.O.P. effort as “futile” and “a dangerous game.”“It is not our role to lend legitimacy to such transparent and untimely efforts to subvert the will of Pennsylvania voters,” wrote Justice Wecht, a Democrat who was elected to a 10-year term on the bench in 2016. “Courts should not decide elections when the will of the voters is clear.”Now Pennsylvania Republicans have a plan to make it less likely that judges like Justice Wecht get in their way.G.O.P. legislators, dozens of whom supported overturning the state’s election results to aid former President Donald J. Trump, are moving to change the entire way that judges are selected in Pennsylvania, in a gambit that could tip the scales of the judiciary to favor their party, or at least elect judges more inclined to embrace Republican election challenges.The proposal would replace the current system of statewide elections for judges with judicial districts drawn by the Republican-controlled legislature. Those districts could empower rural, predominantly conservative areas and particularly rewire the State Supreme Court, which has a 5-to-2 Democratic lean.Democrats are now mobilizing to fight the effort, calling it a thinly veiled attempt at creating a new level of gerrymandering — an escalation of the decades-old practice of drawing congressional and state legislative districts to ensure that political power remains in one party’s hands. Democrats are marshaling grass-roots opposition, holding regular town hall events conducted over Zoom, and planning social media campaigns and call-in days to legislators, as well as an enormous voter education campaign. One group, Why Courts Matter Pennsylvania, has cut a two-minute infomercial.Republicans in Pennsylvania have historically used gerrymandering to maintain their majority in the legislature, despite Democratic victories in statewide elections. Republicans have controlled the State House of Representatives since 2011 and the State Senate since 1993.Current schedules for the legislature make it unlikely the Republicans could marshal their majorities in the House and Senate to pass the bill by Wednesday and put the proposal before voters on the ballot in May. Passing the bill after that date would set up a new and lengthy political war for November in this fiercely contested state.Republicans have some history on their side: Pennsylvania voters tend to approve ballot measures.“You should be very suspicious when you see a legislature who has been thwarted by a Supreme Court in its unconstitutional attempts to rig the democratic process then trying to rig the composition of that Supreme Court,” said Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.She added, “It is way too much control for one branch to have over another branch, particularly where one of its charges is to reign in the excesses of the legislative branch.”If the Republican bill becomes law, Pennsylvania would become just the fifth state in the country, after Louisiana, Kentucky, Mississippi and Illinois, to wholly map its judicial system into electoral districts, according to the Brennan Center. And other states may soon join Pennsylvania in trying to remake the courts through redistricting.Republicans in the Texas Legislature, which is also controlled by the G.O.P., recently introduced a bill that would shift districts for the state appellate courts by moving some counties into different districts, causing an uproar among state Democrats who saw the new districts as weakening the voting power of Black and Latino communities in judicial elections and potentially adding to the Republican tilt of the Texas courts.Gilberto Hinojosa, the chair of the Texas Democratic Party, called the bill a “pure power grab meant to keep Blacks and Latinos from having influence on courts as their numbers in the state grow.”These judicial redistricting battles are taking shape as Republican-controlled legislatures across the country explore new restrictions on voting after the 2020 elections. In Georgia, Republicans in the state legislature are seeking a host of new laws that would make voting more difficult, including banning drop boxes and placing sweeping limitations on mail-in voting. Similar bills in Arizona would restrict mail-in voting, including barring the state from sending out mail ballot applications. And in Texas, Republican lawmakers want to limit early voting periods.The nationwide effort by Republicans follows a successful four-year drive by the party’s lawmakers in Washington to reshape the federal judiciary with conservative judges. Led by Senator Mitch McConnell, until recently the majority leader, and Mr. Trump, the Senate confirmed 231 federal judges, as well as three new Supreme Court justices, over the former president’s four-year term, according to data maintained by Russell Wheeler, a research fellow at the Brookings Institution.In a state like Pennsylvania, which has two densely populated Democratic cities and large rural areas, this could give outsize representation to sparsely populated places that lean more conservative, particularly if the legislature resorts to a gerrymandering tactic similar to one used in Pennsylvania in 2011.“Republicans have been good at gerrymandering districts in Pennsylvania, or good in the sense that they’ve been successful,” said State Senator Sharif Street, a Democrat. “I think they would like to remain successful, and they are confident that they can gerrymander judicial districts.”Republicans in the state legislature argue that their proposed move would give different regions of Pennsylvania more representation.Russ Diamond, the Republican state representative who is sponsoring the bill, said in an email that regional representation was necessary for the judiciary “because the same statewide consensus which goes in making law should come to bear when those statutes are heard on appeal, are applied in practical real-life situations, and when precedent is set for the future of the Commonwealth.”State Representative Russ Diamond during a town hall meeting in Llewellyn, Pa. He sponsored the bill to reshape the judiciary, after first introducing a similar one in 2015. Credit…Lindsey Shuey/Republican-Herald, via Associated Press“The overall goal is to include the full diversity of Pennsylvania’s appellate courts,” Mr. Diamond added. “There is no way to completely depoliticize the courts, other than choosing judges via random selection or a lottery system. Every individual holds some political opinion or another.”Geographic diversity, however, rarely equates to racial diversity in the courts. The four states that use judicial districts in state Supreme Court elections — Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi and Kentucky — have never had more than one justice of color on the court at any given time, according to data from the Brennan Center.While eight states use some form of judicial districts to elect judges, Pennsylvania’s proposal remains an outlier on a few key elements. First, a partisan legislature would have the power to redraw the districts every 10 years, whereas those elsewhere remain for longer or are based on statute. Additionally, the judicial districts in Pennsylvania would not be bound by or based on any existing legislative or congressional districts, created from scratch by the Republican-controlled legislature.The move has caught the attention of national Democratic groups that are at the forefront of redistricting battles across the country.“A decade ago, Pennsylvania Republicans gerrymandered themselves into majorities in the legislature and congressional delegation,” said Eric H. Holder Jr., the former United States attorney general and current chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “Now that their grip on power has been forcibly loosened by the courts, they want to create and then manipulate judicial districts in a blatant attempt to undermine the independence of the judiciary and stack the courts with their conservative allies.”Because the bill has already passed the House once, in 2020, it needs only to pass both chambers of the state legislature again to make it on the ballot.Further stoking Democrats’ fears: The bill does not need the signature of Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat. Since it would be an amendment to the Constitution, it would head to the ballot as a referendum question to be voted on in the next election (if the bill passes before Wednesday, it would go to voters during the May primary). Historically, Pennsylvania voters have voted more in favor of ballot measures than against them, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures.Good government groups have teamed up with Democrats to mount a huge voter education campaign, anticipating that the judicial question may soon be on the ballot. Progressive groups including the Judicial Independent Project of PA, a new coalition that includes the voting rights group Common Cause, have been holding digital town halls about the judicial redistricting proposal, with attendance regularly topping 100 people.On a Thursday evening late last month, more than 160 people logged into Zoom to hear from coalition leaders about the bill and to hatch plans to further mobilize against it. Rebecca Litt, a senior organizer from a local Indivisible group, proposed a call-your-legislator day. Ricardo Almodovar, an organizing director with We the People PA, another progressive group, noted the graphics and other social media campaigns already underway to help educate voters.“We’re also trying to humanize the courts,” Mr. Almodovar explained during a smaller session with southeastern Pennsylvania residents, sharing stories of how specific court decisions “impact our lives.”Throughout the full, hourlong meeting, organizers repeatedly sought to make the stakes very clear.“We are in the last legislative session of this,” said Alexa Grant, a program advocate with Common Cause. “So we are the last line of defense.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More