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      Alito’s wrongdoing makes a supreme court ethics overhaul an imperative | Margaret Sullivan

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      The US supreme court is an extraordinarily exclusive club. The nine members are unelected and employed for life, or until they step down voluntarily. And, as in many exclusive clubs, the membership likes to keep things just as they have always been.Tradition has its merits, of course, but recent events clearly show that change is urgently needed.The court, shockingly, is not bound by a code of ethics as lower courts are. Federal laws about financial disclosures, for example, do apply to them, but there is no clear method of enforcement.The remedy, a bad one, apparently is that these justices are so wise that they will police themselves. Clearly, that doesn’t happen, or not effectively enough.More proof came this week when the excellent investigative news outlet ProPublica revealed that, in 2008, Justice Samuel Alito took a trip to Alaska on the private jet of hedge fund manager and Republican donor Paul Singer – a trip that likely would have cost more than $100,000 if arranged independently.But Alito never disclosed the trip. What’s worse – and perhaps entirely predictable – Singer’s businesses were involved in several supreme court cases over the next few years, and Alito didn’t recuse himself.He’s being blasted for it in some corners, and so is the court. Rightly so.“The billionaire who paid for private jet rides and luxury fishing trips for Samuel Alito also bankrolled the groups funding the plaintiffs in the student loan relief case,” complained Sawyer Hackett, a senior adviser to Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor and Obama cabinet member. (Two lawsuits have challenged the legality of President Biden’s $400bn student loan forgiveness plan; the supreme court is expected to rule on it within weeks.)And Hackett asked the obvious question, given that reality: “How can this court be considered legitimate?”The answer is that it can’t be, until the court gets its house in order. The Alito revelations come on top of recent ProPublica reporting about Justice Clarence Thomas’s ethical lapses – specifically his acceptance of financial favors from Texas billionaire Harlan Crow, another Republican donor. Crow made tuition payments for a member of Thomas’s family, paid for lavish trips and participated in a dubious real estate deal involving the home that the justice’s mother lived in.Sadly, these justices aren’t the only ones behaving badly: the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page agreed to publish Alito’s defensive statement, in an op-ed, about the ProPublica revelations before the investigative article had even run. (Alito wouldn’t comment on ProPublica’s reporting when he was given the opportunity before publication.) Call it a “pre-buttal”, and one that lacked even a basic level of journalistic solidarity on the part of the Journal’s opinion side. Thought experiment: what if, say, the Washington Post’s editorial board had allowed Elizabeth Holmes to pre-empt John Carreyrou’s investigation for the Wall Street Journal that exposed the fraudulent practices of her blood-testing company, Theranos (her crimes sent her to federal prison last month).What’s to be done about these persistent judicial ethics lapses?“When a potential conflict arises, the sole arbiter of whether a justice should step away from a case is the justice him or herself,” ProPublica noted.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat’s not nearly good enough.For years, good-government groups and thinktanks have been advocating for change.In 2019, the well-respected Brennan Center for Justice, in an extensive report, urged the court to voluntarily adopt a formal ethics code, rather than wait for Congress to impose one. It also called for the court to explain justices’ reasons for recusal, in order to provide more transparency, and to strengthen its informal – and all-too-weak – practices governing gifts and financial disclosures.All good and necessary ideas. And it would be ideal for the court to get to work on all of that.But since there seems little appetite to do so, it’s left up to Congress to do it for them. Checks, balances and all of that.Today’s supreme court is extremely powerful, increasingly political and decreasingly trusted. It’s never been more obvious that ethics reform needs to happen now.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      What is affirmative action designed to do – and what has it achieved?

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      The US supreme court could be poised to ban the use of affirmative action policies in college admissions as soon as Thursday. The court, which is expected to deliver its ruling either this week or next, will determine whether race-conscious admissions violate the equal-protection clause under the US constitution.Envisioned as a tool to help remedy historical discrimination and create more diverse student bodies, affirmative action policies have permitted hundreds of colleges and universities to factor in students’ racial backgrounds during the admissions process. That consideration is supplementary, and taken in tandem with other factors such as applicants’ test scores, grades and extracurricular activities.Even with race-conscious admissions, however, many selective public and private colleges and universities struggle to enroll diverse student populations that accurately reflect society. At the University of North Carolina, for example, in a state where 21% of people are Black, just 8% of the school’s undergraduates are Black.Opponents of affirmative action, such as the advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions, argue that considering race as a factor in the admissions process amounts to racial discrimination – particularly against Asian Americans. SFA has brought cases against Harvard University, the nation’s oldest private university, and UNC, the nation’s first public university, to challenge their affirmative action policies, which the group contends favors Black and Latino students. Ultimately, it hopes that race considerations will be nixed from the admissions process entirely, and replaced by race-neutral or “color-blind” policies.What is affirmative action designed to do?The concept of affirmative action originated in 1961 when President John F Kennedy issued an executive order directing government agencies to ensure that all Americans get an equal opportunity in employment. President Lyndon Johnson took it one step further in 1965, barring public and private organizations that had a federal contract from discriminating based on race, color, religion and national origin. The prohibition was added to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.In 1969, President Richard Nixon’s assistant labor secretary, Arthur Fletcher, who would eventually be known as the “father of affirmative action”, pushed for requiring employers to set “goals and timetables” to hire more Black workers. That effort, known as the Revised Philadelphia Plan, would later influence how many schools approached their own race-conscious admissions programs.The practice was challenged when Allan Bakke, a white man who was twice denied entry to the medical school at the University of California at Davis, sued the university, arguing that its policies, which included allocating seats for “qualified” students of color, discriminated against him. In 1978, the supreme court narrowly rejected the use of “racial quotas”, but noted that colleges and universities could use race as a factor in the admissions process. Justice Lewis Powell noted that achieving diversity represented a “compelling government interest”.What has affirmative action in college admissions actually achieved?After generations of near total exclusion of Black students and other students of color, colleges and universities began admitting more diverse groups in the 1960s and 70s, and soon thereafter incorporated race-consciousness into their admissions policies.Data shows that the rise of affirmative action policies in higher education has bolstered diversity on college campuses. In 1965, Black students accounted for roughly 5% of all undergraduates. And between 1965 and 2001, the percentage of Black undergraduates doubled. The number of Latino undergraduates also rose during that time. Still, the practice of factoring race into the admissions process faced repeated attacks. In 1998, during an era of conservatism, California voters approved Proposition 209, which outlawed affirmative action in any state or government agency, including its university system. Since then, eight more states have eliminated such race-conscious policies.What could happen next?The end of affirmative action at those state levels shows just how impactful the consideration of race in admissions has been: a UC Berkeley study found that after the ban in California, the number of applicants of color in the UC system “sharply shifted away from UC’s most selective Berkeley and UCLA campuses, causing a cascade of students to enroll at lower-quality public institutions and some private universities”. Specifically, the number of Black freshmen admitted to UC Berkeley dropped to 3.6% between 2006 and 2010 – almost half of its population before the ban.In an amicus brief in the Harvard case, attorneys for the University of Michigan, which had to stop considering race in admissions in 2006, argued that despite “persistent, vigorous and varied efforts” to achieve diversity, it has struggled to do so without race-consciousness. The number of Black and Native American students has “dramatically” dropped since the end of affirmative action in the state.Though students of color remain underrepresented at selective colleges and universities today, institutions argue that their presence helps shape students’ on-campus experiences. The possible removal of race consideration from college admissions would set a precedent for a less diverse school system, which stands in stark contrast to an increasingly diverse world. More

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      The supreme court made a surprising ruling for Native American rights | Nick Estes

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      A white couple in Texas felt racially discriminated against when facing barriers to adopting a Navajo child. Backed by powerful corporate interests and other non-Native families, the Brackeens brought their grievance to the US supreme court and attempted to overturn the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA. The “rights” of individuals thereby stood against the collective rights of entire nations of people who were here first in a legal system not of their own making. The Brackeens argued that the law privileges Indians as a race over others, including white families, and is, therefore, unconstitutional. The argument reeked of “reverse racism”, a bogus notion that measures taken to protect marginalized people end up harming white people.The ICWA, however, was designed to reverse a sordid history of Native family separation that benefited white families seeking to adopt Native children. More importantly, the law guarantees that federally recognized tribes have a say in their children’s futures by keeping them with Native families. Those determinations are not based on race but on the political status of tribes and the rights of their members.Indian country blew a huge sigh of relief on Thursday when the rightwing-majority court ruled against the Brackeens and upheld the ICWA. A decision otherwise would have had dire consequences for tribes. Beyond removing protections for their children, it could have changed tribes’ status, which precedes the existence of the United States and its constitution, to that of racial minorities whose remaining lands, histories and identities would, without thought, be absorbed into the American melting pot.The 7-2 decision should be celebrated as a clear sign that not only is tribal sovereignty a constitutional reality, but it is also here to stay. Sadly, the supreme court, throughout its history, has more often done harm to Native sovereignty than protected it. “Often, Native American tribes have come to his court seeking justice only to leave with bowed heads and empty hands,” admitted Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, in his concurring majority opinion. His opinion offers a rich history of Indian child removal, examining the transition from federal Indian boarding schools to state welfare systems and adoption agencies that engaged in Native family separation.Gorsuch also writes of a 19th-century court that created the foundations of federal Indian law, upon which today’s justices draw. The court made those decisions during a time of great horror for Native people – often providing legal justification for Indigenous genocide and land seizures. In the 1823 case Johnson v M’Intosh, Chief Justice John Marshall argued that the United States inherited its right to Native lands from previous European powers. “Conquest gives a title which the courts of the conqueror cannot deny,” he wrote. The right to take lands from non-Christians and non-Europeans derived from 15th-century papal bulls known as the “doctrine of discovery”.That principle of racial and civilizational superiority hasn’t gone away and today infects the minds of jurists of all stripes. As recently as 2005, the supreme court invoked the doctrine in a ruling against a land claim by the Oneida Indian Nation. Writing against tribal sovereignty, the liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned against “rekindling embers of (tribal) sovereignty that long ago grew cold”.Last March, after the tireless advocacy of Indigenous peoples, the Vatican “repudiat(ed) those concepts that fail to recognize the inherent human rights of indigenous peoples, including what has become known as the legal and political ‘doctrine of discovery’”. That rejection, however, didn’t undo the centuries of terror against Indigenous peoples and their children taken from them to be “civilized” according to Christian principles. It didn’t return the land or property the Catholic church stole from Indigenous peoples. And it didn’t overturn the fundamental premise upon which federal Indian law still rests – European conquest.In his concurring opinion in Haaland v Brackeen, Gorsuch makes a strong case defending tribal sovereignty against the overbroad powers of Congress to curtail tribal sovereignty and the overreach of states in his concurring opinion. Liberal justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor joined Gorsuch in his opinion. But they didn’t concur with his assertion that the principle that Congress has “plenary power” to divest tribes of their sovereignty conflicts with the original understanding of the constitution. Gorsuch argues that the constitution doesn’t grant the authority to limit tribal sovereignty. Yet Congress has used its powers to terminate federally recognized tribes and divest tribes of criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians.Gorsuch’s concurring opinion shows he is the most serious about engaging federal Indian law and history. How far his call for aligning Indian law with original understandings of the constitution will go is anyone’s guess. His sympathies with tribal sovereignty also show that getting good legal outcomes for tribal nations is like rolling the dice with unelected judges who hold so much sway over the survival and existence of tribal nations.But the victory in keeping ICWA and upholding tribal sovereignty doesn’t lie with Gorsuch. Leading up to this decision, tribes and activists led an effective political campaign to teach the public. Since ICWA’s passage in 1978, 14 states passed their own state versions of the law. In anticipation of ICWA being overturned, several states (including several Republican-majority state governments) recently passed protections to uphold it.The popular sentiment is on the side of tribal sovereignty. It’s now a question of what actions must be taken to ensure the collective rights of tribes are guarded against the individual and corporate desires to lay claim to Native lands, identities and children.
      Nick Estes is a member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and an assistant professer of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is a journalist, historian and the host of the Red Nation Podcast. He is the author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance More

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      Missouri student loan provider baffled by inclusion in supreme court debt relief challenge

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      Newly released emails obtained by the Student Borrower Protection Center reveal employees at a student loan service provider in Missouri expressed confusion over the state’s attorney general placing the provider at the center of a lawsuit filed to block the Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.The United States supreme court is expected to issue a ruling on a legal challenge to the president’s student debt forgiveness of up to $20,000 in the coming weeks. That challenge – filed by the Missouri attorney general and five other Republican-led states – and another challenge filed by the conservative advocacy organization, Job Creators Network, made it to the supreme court.The Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority – or Mohela – is at the center of the challenge by the GOP-led states, claiming the loan service provider would lose revenue and face negative impacts over its financial obligations to Missouri. Consumer advocates, meanwhile, have pointed out that Mohela stands to gain revenue from Biden’s cancellation plan.In court hearings on the challenges earlier this year, US supreme court justices questioned why Mohela did not bring its own legal challenges to Biden’s debt cancellation plan and how the Republican-led states could claim harm on their behalf.Emails released since establish that Mohela employees expressed similar confusion.“The [Missouri] state AG needed to claim that our borrowers were harmed for standing, so they’re making us look bad by filing this not only with [Missouri] on it, but especially bad because they filed it in [Missouri],” wrote a Mohela employee in September 2022.Another Mohela employee asked in an October 2022 email: “just out of curiosity, is MOHELA apart of the lawsuit going on to prevent the loan forgiveness? Are we the bad guys?”A fellow employee responded, “Mohela isn’t technically a part of that lawsuit, the Missouri AG is suing on their behalf. However, it’s all about the [Family Federal Education Loans] stuff, and since they changed the rules, that lawsuit should be ruled as lacking standing.”Ella Azoulay, a Student Borrower Protection Center research and policy analyst, argued the emails confirmed the “partisan hack job” of Missouri’s lawsuit to block student debt relief.The legal challenges have paused Biden’s student debt relief plan announced in August 2022. The relief plan would grant up to $20,000 in student debt relief for Pell grant recipients and up to $10,000 in student debt forgiveness for all other borrowers with annual incomes under $125,000. Nearly 26 million Americans had applied for relief under the plan by November 2022. More

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      The Shadow Docket review: how the US supreme court keeps sunlight out

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      Only a quarter of Americans have confidence in the supreme court. As the country strives to navigate a post-Roe v Wade world, the right to abortion removed, regard for the right wing of the court is scarcer still. Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Samuel Alito have negative ratings with the public. Kavanaugh and Thomas are underwater by double-digits.Being perceived as a predator – Kavanaugh – engenders disdain or worse. Taking undisclosed gifts from a Republican mega-donor and being married to an election-denier who trades on her spouse’s judgeship – Thomas – triggers demands for renewed oversight.When Ginni Thomas visited the White House “you knew your day was wrecked”, said a senior Trump aide, according to the Daily Beast. This week came news that Clarence Thomas and Alito have not yet filed their financial disclosures and have received extensions. The circus rumbles on.Against such a backdrop, Stephen Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas law school and CNN commentator, delivers The Shadow Docket.Under the subtitle “How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic”, Vladeck offers a well-researched indictment of how the supreme court has grown to rely on using procedural orders rather than rulings to make new law, escaping scrutiny while delivering major victories to the political right.The term “shadow docket” was coined in 2015, by William Baude, a University of Chicago law professor. In Vladeck’s words, it was “a catch-all for a body of the supreme court’s work that was, to that point, receiving virtually no academic or public attention”.Strictly speaking, the shadow docket is a vehicle for addressing issues that demand urgent attention, usually injunctions and orders to preserve the status quo. But it has morphed into a fraught topic. The court has adjudicated cases involving abortion, voting rights and Covid policy by means of the shadow docket. The docket also became the prime location for the elevation and reordering of religious rights, under the free exercise clause of the first amendment.Almost by definition, docket rulings are sparse. They are often unaccompanied by reasoning, Vladeck writes. “Invariably”, they lack “identification of how (or how many of) the justices voted and can be handed down at all times of day or, as has increasingly become the norm, in the middle of the night.”Vladeck knows his subject. In September 2021, he testified to the Senate judiciary committee about “Texas’s Unconstitutional Abortion Ban and the Role of the Shadow Docket”.He has also said: “What’s remarkable is that the court repeatedly acquiesced and acquiesced [to the right] … and almost always without any explanation.”On the page, he observes that few such Trumpian wins have resulted in actual binding precedents. Rather, shadow docket triumphs mainly satisfy political needs. Vladeck credits Noel Francisco, the solicitor general under Trump, and his deputy, for hatching the legal strategy that for example salvaged the Muslim travel ban and efforts to “build the wall” on the southern border without express congressional appropriation.SB-8, the Texas six-week abortion ban, provides a stark illustration of how the process continues to work. In September 2021, the supreme court did not formally opine on the constitutionality of the draconian Texas law. Instead, in an unsigned shadow docket order, a bare majority allowed the statute to slide into effect. It read:
      The application for injunctive relief or, in the alternative, to vacate stays of the district court proceedings presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the court is denied.”
      The text made no mention of Roe, the 1973 ruling then in place, safeguarding federal abortion rights. But everyone could see what was coming.John Roberts, the chief justice, a George W Bush appointee, would have stopped the Texas law from going into effect, pending a decision on the merits. The statutory rubric was “unusual” and “unprecedented”, he wrote. “The legislature has imposed a prohibition on abortions after roughly six weeks, and then essentially delegated enforcement of that prohibition to the populace at large.”Months later, Roberts voted with the three liberals to save Roe. No matter. The court struck it down.Not everyone welcomes the attention Vladeck and others have brought to the use of the shadow docket. Alito publicly twitted the media for portraying it as something “sinister”, and depicting the court as “having been captured by a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its ways”.On the other hand, Thomas’s friendship with the mega-donor Harlan Crowe should surely give any observer clear reason to pause.Elsewhere, Coney Barrett has denied that the court engages in results-oriented decision-making, urging an audience at the Reagan Library in April 2022 to “read the opinion” instead.Vladeck is unswayed: “It’s essential context to point out that, just two days later, she joined a 5-4 shadow docket ruling with no opinion for the public to read. It’s all part of the story – or, at least, it should be.”“The rise of the shadow docket … has negative effects on public perception of the court – and of the perceived legitimacy of the justices’ work,” Vladeck writes.The legitimacy of the court erodes.The Shadow Docket is comprehensive and sensitive to nuance, written for concerned audiences. Members of Congress, the bar, the press and engaged non-lawyers come to mind. Vladeck covers more than two centuries of legal history, together with the transformation of the court into a visibly co-equal branch of government.On Thursday night, news broke of 37 federal criminal counts against Donald Trump. The next election is 17 months away. The legitimacy and resilience of all US institutions stands to be tested like never before.
      The Shadow Docket is published in the US by Hachette More

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      Donald Trump attempts to cut sexual abuse damages for E Jean Carroll to $1m – as it happened

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      From 2h agoDonald Trump has asked a federal court in New York to slash the $5m penalty awarded against him in the sexual assault and defamation civil case won by writer E Jean Carroll down to just $1m – or grant him a new trial.The case went in Carroll’s favor last month when a jury decided that Trump had sexually abused and defamed her.Trump’s legal team has argued to the court that the damages awarded against him are excessive and the court should either slash them or allow a new trial.Reuters adds:
      The lawyers noted in a written submission that a Manhattan federal court jury last month rejected a rape claim made by the writer, E. Jean Carroll, concluding instead that she had been sexually abused in spring 1996 in the store’s dressing room.
      “Such abuse could have included groping of Plaintiff’s breasts through clothing, or similar conduct, which is a far cry from rape,” the lawyers wrote.
      They said the $2 million granted by the jury on a sexual abuse claim was “grossly excessive” and another $2.7 million issued for compensatory defamation damages was “based upon pure speculation.”
      The award should consist of no more than $400,000 for sex abuse, no more than $100,000 for defamation and $368,000 or less for the cost of a campaign to repair Carroll‘s reputation, the lawyers wrote.
      If a judge does not grant the suggested reduction in the award, then he should permit a new trial on damages, they said.
      Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s attorney, said in an emailed statement that the arguments by Trump’s lawyers were frivolous.
      She said the unanimous jury had concluded that Trump sexually assaulted Carroll and then defamed her “by lying about her with hatred, ill-will, or spite.”
      “This time, Trump will not be able to escape the consequences of his actions,” Kaplan said.
      Trump may still face a second defamation trial resulting from another lawsuit Carroll filed against him. That case has been delayed with appeals as the U.S. Justice Department sought to substitute the United States as the defendant in place of Trump. Government lawyers say Trump can’t be held liable for the comments he made as president.
      Hello US politics blog readers, it’s been an eventful day in US political news. We’re closing this blog now and will start afresh on Friday. We have stand alone stories on some of the biggest news of the day, links in the bullet points below.Here’s where things stand:
      Donald Trump has asked a federal court in New York to slash the $5m penalty awarded against him in the sexual assault and defamation civil case won by writer E Jean Carroll down to just $1m – or grant him a new trial.
      The White House has had to postpone a party due for this evening, where thousands of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer-plus (LGBTQ+) people were invited to a celebration and, essentially, a political defiance event. Reuters further reports that Biden said violence against LGBTQ+ people in the United States is on the rise and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric is an appeal to fear that is “unjustified” and “ugly.”
      Hardline Republicans have effectively paralyzed the chamber because they’re unhappy at speaker Kevin McCarthy over the deal with Democrats that resolved the problem with the US debt ceiling. The spat appears to have widened to envelop No 2 House Republican Steve Scalise, who appears unhappy with the speaker.
      The US supreme court ruled that Alabama discriminated against Black voters when it drew its seven congressional districts last year. The ruling in Allen v Milligan means that Alabama will have to draw its congressional map afresh to include a second majority-Black district.
      Donald Trump has asked a federal court in New York to slash the $5m penalty awarded against him in the sexual assault and defamation civil case won by writer E Jean Carroll down to just $1m – or grant him a new trial.The case went in Carroll’s favor last month when a jury decided that Trump had sexually abused and defamed her.Trump’s legal team has argued to the court that the damages awarded against him are excessive and the court should either slash them or allow a new trial.Reuters adds:
      The lawyers noted in a written submission that a Manhattan federal court jury last month rejected a rape claim made by the writer, E. Jean Carroll, concluding instead that she had been sexually abused in spring 1996 in the store’s dressing room.
      “Such abuse could have included groping of Plaintiff’s breasts through clothing, or similar conduct, which is a far cry from rape,” the lawyers wrote.
      They said the $2 million granted by the jury on a sexual abuse claim was “grossly excessive” and another $2.7 million issued for compensatory defamation damages was “based upon pure speculation.”
      The award should consist of no more than $400,000 for sex abuse, no more than $100,000 for defamation and $368,000 or less for the cost of a campaign to repair Carroll‘s reputation, the lawyers wrote.
      If a judge does not grant the suggested reduction in the award, then he should permit a new trial on damages, they said.
      Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s attorney, said in an emailed statement that the arguments by Trump’s lawyers were frivolous.
      She said the unanimous jury had concluded that Trump sexually assaulted Carroll and then defamed her “by lying about her with hatred, ill-will, or spite.”
      “This time, Trump will not be able to escape the consequences of his actions,” Kaplan said.
      Trump may still face a second defamation trial resulting from another lawsuit Carroll filed against him. That case has been delayed with appeals as the U.S. Justice Department sought to substitute the United States as the defendant in place of Trump. Government lawyers say Trump can’t be held liable for the comments he made as president.
      Here’s New York civil rights campaigner and politician Al Sharpton on the supreme court decision.
      This was an unexpected decision that hopefully means the Supreme Court’s era of disenfranchising voters is coming to an end.
      Alabama’s gerrymandering policies were quintessential, modern-day Jim Crow tactics to suppress Black voters in the state. That you had two conservative-leaning judges rule against the state all but confirms that.
      This is a major step forward in the fight to protect voting rights. Let’s not forget that we’re in this mess because the Supreme Court took a sledgehammer to the Voting Rights Act a decade ago when it ruled on Shelby v. Holder.
      States essentially got the green light to recut lines, purge voter rolls, and take any other steps to keep Black and Brown Americans from showing up at the polls. Today’s ruling only goes to show why Congress has a moral imperative to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act this year.
      We have been promised since we lost John Lewis three years ago, amid historic protests against racial injustice, and we will not wait until next year when lawmakers need our vote again. On August 26th, we will gather for the 60th Anniversary of the March on Washington to send a clear message that this legislation must pass now.”
      US attorney general Merrick Garland has issued a response to the supreme court’s decision on Alabama and also a fresh call to the US Congress to pass some of the voting rights legislation that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris campaigned on in 2020 but is growing mildew on Capitol Hill.Garland said:
      Today’s decision rejects efforts to further erode fundamental voting rights protections, and preserves the principle that in the United States, all eligible voters must be able to exercise their constitutional right to vote free from discrimination based on their race.
      The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, the right from which all other rights ultimately flow.
      Over the past two years, the Justice Department has rededicated its resources to enforcing federal voting rights protections. We will continue to use every authority we have left to defend voting rights. But that is not enough. We urge Congress to act to provide the Department with important authorities it needs to protect the voting rights of every American.”
      Here’s Janai Nelson, president and director- counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), on the Scotus decision.There is praise to go around.On Deuel Ross, racial justice attorney at the Legal Defense Fund:More reaction now to the surprise decision by the US supreme court earlier to defend the Voting Rights Act in a case involving Alabama’s electoral map.The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has released a statement thus, which includes some useful background:
      The U.S. Supreme Court today ruled in Allen v. Milligan in favor of Black voters who challenged Alabama’s 2021-enacted congressional map for violating the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for diluting Black political power, affirming the district court’s order that Alabama redraw its congressional map.
      By packing and cracking the historic Black Belt community, the map passed by the state legislature allowed Black voters an opportunity to elect candidates of their choice in only one of seven districts even though they make up 27 percent percent of the voting-age population. In its decision, the court also affirmed that under Section 2 of the VRA, race can be used in the redistricting process to provide equal opportunities to communities of color and ensure they are not packed and cracked in a way that impermissibly weakens their voting strength.
      The case was brought in November 2021 on behalf of Evan Milligan, Khadidah Stone, Letetia Jackson, Shalela Dowdy, Greater Birmingham Ministries, and the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP who are represented by the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Alabama, Hogan Lovells LLP, and Wiggins, Childs, Pantazis, Fisher & Goldfarb. It was argued before the court on Oct. 4, 2022.
      “This decision is a crucial win against the continued onslaught of attacks on voting rights,” said LDF senior counsel Deuel Ross, who argued the case before the court in October. “Alabama attempted to rewrite federal law by saying race had no place in redistricting. But because of the state’s sordid and well-documented history of racial discrimination, race must be used to remedy that past and ensure communities of color are not boxed out of the electoral process. While the Voting Rights Act and other key protections against discriminatory voting laws have been weakened in recent years and states continue to pass provisions to disenfranchise Black voters, today’s decision is a recognition of Section 2’s purpose to prevent voting discrimination and the very basic right to a fair shot.”
      Davin Rosborough, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said, “The Supreme Court rejected the Orwellian idea that it’s inappropriate to consider race in determining whether racial discrimination led to the creation of illegal maps. This ruling is a huge victory for Black Alabamians.”
      It’s been a busy morning in US politics and there will be plenty more developments on subjects ranging from Trump and E Jean Carroll to the supreme court’s surprise ruling on Alabama’s biased voting maps.Here’s where things stand:
      Donald Trump has asked for a new trial in the civil case brought by author E Jean Carroll, in which a Manhattan jury last month found the former US president liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer and awarded her $5m in damages.
      The White House has had to postpone a party due for this evening, where thousands of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer-plus (LGBTQ+) people were invited to a celebration and, essentially, a political defiance event.
      Hardline Republicans have effectively paralyzed the chamber because they’re unhappy at speaker Kevin McCarthy over the deal with Democrats that resolved the problem with the US debt ceiling. The spat appears to have widened to envelop No 2 House Republican Steve Scalise, who appears unhappy with the speaker.
      The US supreme court ruled that Alabama discriminated against Black voters when it drew its seven congressional districts last year. The ruling in Allen v Milligan means that Alabama will have to draw its congressional map afresh to include a second majority-Black district.
      Another quick reminder that British prime minister Rishi Sunak and US president Joe Biden are about to hold a press conference at the White House.It’s beginning any moment and our London colleagues are glued to it. There’s a live feed and all the developments as they happen, via the UK politics blog, here.No sooner had a New York jury found for E Jean Carroll than Donald Trump verbally attacked her during a live town hall-style interview on CNN (the broadcast which was probably the penultimate nail in the coffin for departing CNN chair Chris Licht before the crushing Atlantic article).Carroll promptly went back to court to to demand “very substantial” additional damages from Trump for the disparaging remarks, filing an amended lawsuit seeking an additional $10m in compensatory damages – and more in punitive damages.During the town hall in New Hampshire the day after the 9 May verdict, Trump further and repeatedly demeaned Carroll and her experiences.Trump said her account of a sexual assault, in the case which he is appealing, was “fake” and a “made-up story” and referred to it as “hanky-panky”. He repeated past claims that he’d never met Carroll and considered her a “whack job”.The filing by Carroll the following week claimed Trump’s statements at the televised town hall “show the depth of his malice toward Carroll, since it is hard to imagine defamatory conduct that could possibly be more motivated by hatred, ill will or spite”.Now Trump wants a new trial.Last month a New York jury found that Donald Trump sexually abused the former advice columnist, E Jean Carroll, in one of New York City’s most upscale stores, in the changing room at Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue, 27 years ago.The verdict on 9 May, for the first time, essentially legally branded a former US president as a sexual predator. It was the result of a civil not criminal case, and the only legal sanction Trump faced was financial.At the time, my colleagues Chris McGreal and Martin Pengelly noted that: In explaining a finding of sexual abuse to the jury, the judge said it had two elements: that Trump subjected Carroll to sexual contact without consent by use of force, and that it was for the purpose of sexual gratification.The jury deliberated for less than three hours. It did not find Trump raped Carroll, but did find him liable for sexual abuse.It awarded about $5m in compensatory and punitive damages: about $2m on the sexual abuse count and close to $3m for defamation, for branding her a liar.In an interview the following day, Carroll said she was “overwhelmed with joy for the women in this country”.It would be staggering if Donald Trump succeeded in getting a new civil trial in the issues brought against him by E Jean Carroll, after she sued him for defamation and sexual abuse and won hands down after a brisk jury decision.But the former US president is having a go.Donald Trump has asked for a new trial in the civil case brought by author E Jean Carroll, in which a Manhattan jury last month found the former US president liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer and awarded her $5m in damages, Reuters reports.This according to a new court filing. More on this asap.Smoke gets in your eyes. Sadly, the White House has had to postpone a party due for this evening at the White House, where thousands of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer-plus (LGBTQ+) people were invited to a celebration and, essentially, a political defiance event at the White House.The smoky air drifting south from the Canadian wildfires that’s been causing havoc on the eastern seaboard and further inland has put paid to tonight’s party.BUT in better news, it is currently rescheduled for Saturday.NBC reports that the event was/is designed as:
      A high-profile show of support at a time when the community feels under attack like never before and the White House has little recourse to beat back a flood of state-level legislation against them.
      Biden is also announcing new initiatives to protect LGBTQ+ communities from attacks, help youth with mental health resources and homelessness and counter book bans, White House officials said.
      The event is a:
      Picnic featuring food, games, face painting and photos. Queen HD the DJ was handling the music; singer Betty Who was on tap to perform.
      Karine Jean-Pierre, the first openly gay White House press secretary, said Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and their spouses are strong supporters of the LGBTQ+ community and think that having a celebration is an important way to “lift up” their accomplishments and contributions.
      She said LGBTQ+ people need to know that Biden “has their back” and “will continue to fight for them. And that’s the message that we want to make sure that gets out there.”
      FYI Harris is in the Bahamas today on business and is expected back in DC tonight. Biden’s meeting Rishi Sunak at the White House and holding a presser soon.You can follow all the latest developments on the Canadian wildfires and the smoke impact on the US in our dedicated live blog:There’s some context on the relationship between House speaker Kevin McCarthy and his chamber GOP No. 2, Steve Scalise, the House majority leader, from the Punchbowl report, prior to the hardliners’ spat now rippling out on Capitol Hill.The outlet points out that a captain having friction with his supposed wingman “is a tale as old as time in House leadership” and these two have known each other for decades.Punchbowl reports:
      The pair met as young College Republicans and their interactions have always been professional. But there’s no doubt some bad blood between the two men.
      Scalise considered running against McCarthy for Republican leader in 2019, but ultimately decided against it — something we cataloged at length in a book we wrote. And again, McCarthy tapped [Louisiana congressman Garrett] Graves and [North Carolina congressman Patrick] McHenry for the most sensitive negotiations of the last few months, leaving Scalise aside.
      Scalise said in the interview that McCarthy is still viable as speaker of the House. But the House majority leader noted repeatedly that there is “a lot of anger on a lot of sides of our conference.”
      An old article from Politico notes that McCarthy and Scalise’s “parallel rise” dates to the late 1990s. McCarthy was national chairman of the Young Republicans and Scalise was an up and coming Louisiana politician and their friendship developed from that time.British prime minister Rishi Sunak, from the Conservative Party, is in Washington DC, this week and is meeting right now with Joe Biden at the White House.The premier and the US president are due to hold a press conference at 1.30pm US east coast time. Our colleagues in London are focusing on this and will be covering it as it happens via the UK politics blog, with a live stream of the event.You can keep up with that blog here.Selma native and Alabama congresswoman Terri Sewell just hopped on the phone for a live interview with CNN on air to express her relief and delight about the supreme court decision on voting rights and the relevant district maps in her state.“This is so exciting, it’s really amazing … it’s an amazing victory for Alabama Black voters, for the Voting Rights Act, for democracy,” she said.She tweeted about a “historic victory”.Sewell said the ruling reflected the legacy of the long legacy of fighting for civil rights for Black voters in Alabama and elsewhere and she was “reeling” from the good surprise.“And to have the supreme court give us this huge win, it’s historic,” she told CNN.She noted this would have implications more widely and was a closely watched case by legislatures creating voting maps, especially in states such as North Carolina and Ohio. “Everyone is looking at this decision,” she said, adding “it will have a positive ripple effect.”She noted that the late civil rights activist, champion and congressman John Lewis “must be smiling” and that those who challenged Alabama’s discriminatory voting rights did was Lewis always encouraged people do to: “we got into some good trouble.”This is Sewell’s pinned tweet: More

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      Alabama discriminated against Black voters, US supreme court rules

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      Alabama discriminated against Black voters when it drew its seven congressional districts last year, the supreme court has ruled, a decision that is a major victory for the Voting Rights Act (VRA).The decision was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joining the court’s three liberal justices in the opinion. Writing for the majority of the court, Roberts noted the court was rejecting Alabama’s effort to get it to rewrite its longstanding interpretation of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which outlaws voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race. The decision means that section 2 of the law, one of its last remaining powerful provisions, will remain intact.“The heart of these cases is not about the law as it exists. It is about Alabama’s attempt to remake our §2 jurisprudence anew,” Roberts wrote. “We find Alabama’s new approach to §2 compelling neither in theory nor in practice. We accordingly decline to recast our §2 case law as Alabama requests.”The decision was an unexpected outcome from Roberts and the court, both of whom have significantly hollowed out the Voting Rights Act in recent years. As a young lawyer in the justice department in the 1980s, Roberts argued for narrowing the interpretation of section 2. The court has rarely sided with voting rights litigants who allege voting discrimination.The decision in the case, Allen v Milligan, means that Alabama will have to draw its congressional map to include a second majority-Black district. Black voters currently comprise a majority of the voting age population in just one district, despite making up a quarter of the state’s population.“This decision is a crucial win against the continued onslaught of attacks on voting rights,” Deuel Ross, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund who argued on behalf of the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “Alabama attempted to rewrite federal law by saying race had no place in redistricting. But because of the state’s sordid and well-documented history of racial discrimination, race must be used to remedy that past and ensure communities of color are not boxed out of the electoral process.”The ruling also is a boon to similar cases in Louisiana, Texas and Georgia, where litigants currently are suing to require the drawing of additional majority-minority districts. “This precedent also lays a foundation for fair map decisions in our other Section 2 cases,” said Marina Jenkins, the executive director of the National Redistricting Foundation, a Democratic-aligned group that is involved in those cases.Alabama could have easily drawn a second majority-Black district, the challengers in the case argued. They offered several sample maps with possible configurations of how to do so. Last year, a three-judge panel unanimously agreed with that argument and ordered the state to do so. The panel, which included two judges appointed by Donald Trump, said the question of whether the state had violated the law was “not a close one”.Notably, the majority rejected an argument from Alabama that it should only be required to draw an additional majority-Black district if the plaintiffs could prove it was required without considering race. That theory would have made it extremely difficult for plaintiffs to show discrimination had occurred in redistricting against minority voters.“This court has long recognized – and as all members of this court today agree – the text of §2 establishes an effects test, not an intent test,” Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion. “The effects test, as applied by Gingles to redistricting, requires in certain circumstances that courts account for the race of voters so as to prevent the cracking or packing – whether intentional or not – of large and geographically compact minority populations.”Joe Biden praised the court’s decision and said he and Vice-President Kamala Harris would continue to push Congress to restore the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. The US supreme court, in a 5-4 opinion authored by Roberts in 2013, gutted a key provision of the law that required states with a history of voting discrimination to get voting changes pre-cleared by the federal government before they went into effect.“The right to vote and have that vote counted is sacred and fundamental – it is the right from which all of our other rights spring. Key to that right is ensuring that voters pick their elected officials – not the other way around,” the president said in a statement. “Today’s decision confirms the basic principle that voting practices should not discriminate on account of race, but our work is not done.”Merrick Garland, the US attorney general, praised the decision in a statement.“Today’s decision rejects efforts to further erode fundamental voting rights protections, and preserves the principle that in the United States, all eligible voters must be able to exercise their constitutional right to vote free from discrimination based on their race,” he said. “The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, the right from which all other rights ultimately flow.”Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a dissenting opinion that was joined at various parts by fellow conservative justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. The supreme court has long misinterpreted section 2, he wrote, restating his prior view that it does not even apply to redistricting cases. He also wrote that the majority opinion required too much consideration of race in drawing district lines and urged a more race-neutral approach.“As applied here, the amended §2 thus falls on the wrong side of ‘the line between measures that remedy or prevent unconstitutional actions and measures that make a substantive change in the governing law’,” Thomas wrote. “It replaces the constitutional right against intentionally discriminatory districting with an amorphous race-based right to a ‘fair’ distribution of political power, a ‘right’ that cannot be implemented without requiring the very evils the constitution forbids.”Alito, writing separately in dissent, also said that the plaintiffs advocating for an additional majority-minority district “must show at the outset that such a district can be created without making race the predominant factor in its creation”.“Today’s decision unnecessarily sets the VRA on a perilous and unfortunate path,” he wrote.The supreme court intervened in February 2022 on an emergency request and allowed Alabama’s maps to go into effect for the 2022 elections. Even though Alabama’s election was not until the end of May, the court said it was too close to the election to upend the map.Alabama had argued that the lower court had wrongly decided the case by taking race too much into account. The challengers in the case should have been required to show that they could draw a second majority-Black district without considering race at all, Edmund LaCour, the state’s solicitor general, said during oral argument last year.The case was seen as a “textbook” example of the kind of discrimination in redistricting that section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was designed to prevent. The provision outlaws any voting practice that discriminates on the basis of race and litigants have frequently used it to challenge electoral maps that make it harder for minorities to elect the candidate of their choice. It was widely understood to be the most powerful remaining provision in the landmark civil rights law after the US supreme court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v Holder. That decision blocked another part of the landmark civil rights law requiring states with a history of voting discrimination to get their changes approved by the federal government. More

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      Americans want to join unions. The supreme court doesn’t like that | Moira Donegan

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      Their contract had expired, so the local teamsters, drivers of concrete-mixing barrel trucks for a firm called Glacier Northwest, in Washington state, decided to walk off the job. Like all strikes, the point of the work stoppage was to inflict financial consequences on a recalcitrant management side: to show the bosses that their employees were united in shared interest and mutual protection and that it would cost them less money to negotiate in good faith and agree to the workers’ demands than to continue to fight the union for less favorable, more exploitative conditions. When the teamsters began their strike, 16 of the barrel mixing trucks were full. They drove them back to the Glacier Northwest lot and left them there.But if you don’t mix concrete, it hardens, and becomes useless. If this happens in a barrel truck, sometimes that can cause damage to the truck, too. When Glacier Northwest realized that their teamster employees had gone on strike, non-union workers were able to remove the concrete over the course of five hours, averting damage to the trucks. But they lost the use of all the concrete that had been mixed in those 16 barrel trucks that day.This injury – the loss of 16 trucks’ worth of concrete to a regional construction supplier in the north-west – is the pretext that the US supreme court used this week to weaken the National Labor Relations Board and deal a blow to the right to strike.In the case, Glacier Northwest v International Brotherhood of Teamsters, eight of the court’s nine justices found that management could sue the union for the damage caused to their property during the strike. Only Justice Jackson dissented. In addition to encouraging companies to sue their workers over strikes and ensuring that unions will pre-emptively avoid strikes or adopt less effective tactics to protect themselves from liability, the ruling also opens a wide new avenue for union-busting litigators to evade the authority of the National Labor Relations Board – the federal body that was created by Congress specifically to handle such conflicts and enforce workers’ rights.The decision, then, furthers two of the supreme court’s major long-term projects: the erosion of labor protections, and the weakening of administrative agencies, whose expertise the court routinely ignores and whose authority the justices seem determined to usurp for themselves.It might risk reinforcing the dramatically low standards for the supreme court’s behavior to note that the majority opinion, authored by Amy Coney Barrett, did not represent the worst of all possible outcomes. Barrett included some limiting language in her writing that preserves the possibility of binding NLRB oversight in these lawsuits. She clarified that unions do have some right to time their strikes in order to maximize financial damage to management – a move that would protect, say, the right of Amazon workers to initiate work stoppages during the holiday shipping rush, as they did last year. The gestures toward a continued right to strike appear designed to secure the votes of Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, who joined the majority, and to dilute the power of Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, who wanted to gut NLRB authority over strike-related litigation entirely.But it is important to consider Glacier Northwest in context: in recent years, the court has made it easier for companies to bar their employees from bringing class-action lawsuits, made it harder for public-sector unions to collect dues and struck down a California law that allowed unions to recruit agricultural workers on farms. The new ruling, which finds that strikes are often illegal when they lead to damage to employers’ property, only furthers their long project of making it harder for workers to join a union, easier for employers to break one up, and more legally risky for workers to take the kinds of action that can actually elicit concessions from the boss.It will get worse. If they get their way – a less procedurally complicated case, a more amenable vote from Roberts, Barrett or Kavanaugh – the court’s most extreme conservatives will shape a bleak future for American labor. Their aim is to all but eliminate rights to organize and strike that are enjoyed by people in the most important, foundational and meaningful part of their public lives: the workplace.“Workers are not indentured servants, bound to continue laboring until any planned work stoppage would be as painless as possible for their master,” Jackson wrote in her dissent. But that is the labor settlement that at least three members of the extremist conservative wing hope to enact. There is only one direction that this court’s labor jurisprudence is going.The ruling comes at a moment when the American labor movement, long dormant and defeated, is experiencing something like a small resurgence, however timid and sporadic. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of unionized workers grew last year in both the public and private sectors, with the biggest increases in sectors like transportation and warehousing, arts and entertainment and durable goods manufacturing.This growth has been accompanied by highly visible, media-savvy worker organizing drives among journalists, fast-food workers and graduate student instructors, and comes on the heels of high-profile strikes by groups ranging from Oakland teachers to Hollywood writers. Since 2021, this union resurgence has been aided in no small part by the Biden NLRB, which has been unusually hospitable to labor’s claims, even for a Democratic administration.More and more workers are saying that they want to be a part of a union – and more and more of them are finding ways around the many and onerous obstacles designed to prevent them from forming one. Given the growing power of American unions, maybe the anti-worker court is right to be scared.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More