Redstate

Posted at 12:14pm on Apr. 28, 2008 SCOTUS approved Indiana's voter ID law

But the AP ignores the problem

By Soren Dayton

I am not a lawyer, I am a political hack. I am sure that one of our lawyers will give a very scholarly review of today's Supreme Court decision upholding Indiana's voter ID law. Here's the AP's report. And here's the part that shocked me:

There is little history in Indiana of either in-person voter fraud -- of the sort the law was designed to thwart -- or voters being inconvenienced by the law's requirements. For the overwhelming majority of voters, an Indiana driver license serves as the identification.

I refer you to the 2003 East Chicago Democratic primary, which has been in the news recently. The teaser is the closing paragraph of the first story I am going to cite:

The task force filed charges against 53 people, Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter's office reported. Of the 52 concluded cases, 45 individuals were convicted, four cases were dismissed, one person died and two people have been found not guilty at trial.

45 convictions. How did we figure this out? Read on for more details

Posted in Electoral Corruption | Indiana | Law | Supreme Court — Comments (18)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 10:15am on Apr. 28, 2008 BREAKING: Supreme Court Rejects Challenge To Indiana Voter ID Law

Victory In The Battle To Prevent Voter Fraud

By Dan McLaughlin

6-3 plurality decision just came down, split with 3 Justices rejecting the facial challenge. More to follow.

UPDATES: Opinion here. Justice Stevens, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy, found no showing of an undue burden on various voters who challenged the voter ID law on its face. Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito would have upheld the law on the broader ground that it imposed the same requirements equally on all voters. Both opinions give great weight to the state interest in ensuring that only eligible voters cast ballots. Justice Souter, joined by Justices Breyer and Ginsburg, dissented.

This is a major defeat for the Democrats' efforts to prevent states from requiring valid identification to vote. The lawsuit was brought by the Indiana Democratic Party.

Justice Scalia's separate opinion is redolent of the judicial hangover from Bush v. Gore in its emphasis on the hazards of permitting case-by-case judicial review of neutral rules established by state legislatures before an election takes place.

More below the fold.

Posted in Supreme Court | The Courts | Voter ID — Comments (21)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 2:38pm on Mar. 24, 2008 Attention DC Residents: Don't Let the Police In!

By Mark I

David Freddoso notes in The Corner that the authorities in Washington DC must be a bit nervous about the way the oral arguments in District of Columbia vs. Heller went at the Supreme Court last week. If they were confident that the District's handgun ban would survive the Constitutional challenge, why would they be implementing a new program to try and get as many guns as possible forfeited before the Court's ruling comes down in June?

A crackdown on guns is under way in the District. Police are asking residents to submit to voluntary searches in exchange for amnesty under the District's gun ban.

The program is starting in the Washington Highlands neighborhood of southeast Washington on Monday and will later expand to other neighborhoods. Officers will go door to door asking residents for permission to search their homes. (emphasis mine)

Now, we at RedState certainly don't want to advocate any lawbreaking, but I hasten to point out that the program is voluntary (see bolding). DC residents don't actually have to...you know...let the police in. Fourth Amendment and all that. No warrant = no entry.

Chances are good that by June, this "crackdown" will be a moot exercise anyhow.

Posted at 12:22pm on Mar. 19, 2008 Disassociation and the Running of the RiNOs

When Is It Unconstitutional?

By Dan McLaughlin

Yesterday's Supreme Court decision in Washington State Grange v. Washington State Republican Party is interesting on a couple of levels. Coupled with the Court's January decision in the case involving New York's system for nominating candidates to run for judicial elections, the Court seems to be signalling pretty clearly that it's not eager to get into overturning state primary election procedures - a signal the national Democrats are hopefully receiving, not that there's been any move just yet for the loser to follow the Al Gore plan.

Anyway, the short summary is that the Court ruled 7-2 to uphold a state open election system that allowed candidates from all parties to run in an initial election with their chosen party listed, without having been nominated by the party, followed by a runoff for the top two candidates; the major parties challenged the constitutionality of this procedure under a 2000 decision invalidating California's "blanket primary" under the First Amendment's right to freedom of association. The crux of the Washington case was whether the parties have a right to prevent candidates who have not been nominated by the party from using the party label on a ballot open to the general public.

Justice Thomas, writing for the Court, said no:

Posted in Justice Scalia | Law | Supreme Court — Comments (5)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 10:03pm on Mar. 16, 2008 The Supreme Court And Business Cases

By Pejman Yousefzadeh

An interesting analysis from Jeffrey Rosen on the shape and tenor of the Court's jurisprudence in cases affecting business. What is striking is the degree to which the pro-free market side has a number of people supporting it who are associated with the Democratic Party; Stephen Breyer, Walter Dellinger and Cass Sunstein are not members of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, after all. For the record, I oppose efforts on the part of the Federal Government to define punitive damage awards in state courts; as clear a violation of the principles of federalism as any that could possibly exist. But I certainly support efforts to demand a greater showing that alleged corporate wrongdoing actually led to damages--the last thing that the country needs is to have the Martin Act afflicting us on a national scale. And while I favor originalism as a method of judicial analysis over the law and economics school, the latter school is absolutely the best one to look to for inspiration in designing legislation either on the federal or the state levels.

Posted in General Business Law Jurisprudence | Law | Supreme Court — Comments (0)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 3:19pm on Feb. 1, 2008 I Have Three Words That Will Bring Every Last One Of You Back To The GOP Fold

By Dan McLaughlin

Justice John Edwards.

Posted at 1:33pm on Jan. 16, 2008 Supreme Court: Constitution Not Violated By Use Of Party Conventions To Pick Nominees

Leaving Politics To The Politicians

By Dan McLaughlin

The U.S. Supreme Court today, in a unanimous opinion by Justice Scalia in NY State Bd of Elections v. Lopez Torres, reversed a Second Circuit decision that had overturned New York's system for selecting party nominees for trial judges. The appeals court had held that the First Amendment right to political association of prospective candidates for New York Supreme Court judgeships* were violated by the system of choosing nominees through party conventions dominated by party bosses, rather than through a more directly democratic system such as a primary.

Justice Scalia's opinion starts out with a concise summary of familiar and settled (if theoretically debatable) ground: the Constitution gives a political party some First Amendment associational rights to control its own processes for choosing its nominees, but imposes some restrictions (including Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment restrictions against discrimination) on a party's candidate-selection process when the state grants the party the right to a line on the ballot. But as he explains, the problem with the conventions is not any legal restriction on who can throw their hat in the ring but rather a practical, political limit to who can win those contests - a problem for which the solution is necessarily political, not legal:

Read On...

Posted in Election Law | Justice Scalia | Law | Supreme Court — Comments (2)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 10:23am on Jan. 10, 2008 Liberals Look Like Losers in Voter ID Case

Anti-ID advocates embarrassed by one of their own

By Bluey

Yesterday's arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court case on an Indiana voter ID law couldn't have gone much worse for liberals who want to overturn the state's statute targeting vote fraud. Justices appeared inclined to reject arguments from the Indiana Democratic Party and ACLU and uphold two lower-court decisions favoring the Indiana law.

The court's swing vote, Justice Anthony Kennedy, dampened the left's hopes when he expressed skepticism about the requirements of the law. In questioning the lawyer for the state Democratic Party and ACLU, Kennedy asked, "You want us to invalidate a statute on the ground that it's a minor inconvenience to a small percentage of voters?" At a time when Americans are asked to show photo ID for routine things such as buying alcohol or getting on an airplane, it hardly seems unreasonable to do the same before voting.

But perhaps the best moment of the hour-long hearing came when Justice John Paul Stevens asked U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement whether Democrats were adversely impacted more than Republicans because of the state's photo ID requirement. Clement, who supports the Indiana law, shot back that that if "this was a cleverly designed mechanism by the Republican Party to disadvantage the Democratic Party, at least in 2006 it looks like it went pretty far awry."

Already facing an uphill battle in the courts, liberals were done in by one of their own yesterday when a woman cited by critics of the law was discovered to be a fraud herself. A story from KPC News added to an already lengthy list yet another example of how liberals cheat through the use of vote fraud.

Continued on the jump ...

Posted in Supreme Court | The Courts | Vote Fraud | Voter ID — Comments (23)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 5:53pm on Jan. 4, 2008 Supreme Court To Decide Eighth Amendment Issue [comments open]

By Dan McLaughlin

Some of you may remember my post about the cert petition in Kennedy v. Louisiana, and the question of whether the "evolving national consensus" theory of the Eighth Amendment only goes in one direction - that is, if it's true that the action of some states to ban a punishment in a particular context (here, the death penalty for child rape) transmutes that punishment into a "cruel and unusual" one for constitutional purposes where it was not before, is it also true that more states adding that punishment can make it not cruel and unusual?

Well, today the Court granted cert in Kennedy, so the Court will be faced with that question, among others.

Posted at 10:53am on Dec. 17, 2007 Mr. Justice Clinton? Don't Bet On It

"The Truth, The Whole Truth, And Nothing But...Ah, Who Are We Kidding Here?"

By Dan McLaughlin

Prof. Douglas Kmiec suggests that Hillary Clinton, if elected, could have her husband follow the footsteps of former President Taft by appointing him to the Supreme Court. Taft was, in fact, a very good Chief Justice after being a failure as President, a job for which he never had the talent or desire.

Prof. Kmiec gets right some of the obvious problems with this parallel: Clinton, unlike Taft, has no prior judicial experience and loves politics much more than the law; Clinton, unlike Taft, would presumably not be taking the Chief Justice job; and Taft, unlike Clinton, never had his law license suspended for perjury in a judicial proceeding.

What Prof. Kmiec misses is the showstopper* - even beyond losing him as a campaigner - that would prevent Hillary Clinton, especially, from considering this: confirmation hearings.

Read On...

Posted in 2008 | 2008 Presidential Campaign | Bill Clinton | Hillary Clinton | Lying Bill Clinton | Supreme Court — Comments (17)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 11:28pm on Nov. 26, 2007 JCG on the D.C. Gun Ban Case

By Alexham

Great minds think alike. My prediction is a 6-3 majority opinion, holding that Americans have an individual right to bear arms per the Second Amendment, with Souter and Kennedy joining the Court's conservatives.

Posted at 11:23am on Nov. 16, 2007 Take This Evolving National Consensus And Shove It

Geese and Ganders

By Dan McLaughlin

SCOTUSBlog notes that the State of Louisiana - in opposing a certiorari petition - is pointing to a trend of adding child rape to the list of capital crimes as a basis for finding that it's not cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment to execute a man who raped his 8-year-old stepdaughter:

The state said that the Court, if it agrees to hear the case, should focus not only on how many states treat rape of a child as a capital crime, but also on a trend toward applying the death sentence to more crimes where the victim is not killed. Five states, like Louisiana, now have capital punishment for child rape, all enacted since 1997 with the most recent, in Texas, in 2007.

Moving beyond that specific crime, the state’s brief said, 15 out of the 38 states and the federal government – 41 percent of the jurisdictions, it notes — "authorize some form of non-homicide capital punishment." That includes treason, espionage, aircraft piracy, aggravated kidnapping, and some drug trafficking crimes.

"The trend toward capitalization of non-homicide crimes, child rape in particular, is significant," the state asserted. "Six states have now enacted the death penalty for child rape after this Court [in Coker v. Georgia, 1977] held that the death penalty for rape of an adult woman was unconstitutional."

This argument puts the Court's liberals and swing vote Justice Kennedy to the test to see if they actually mean what they say.

Read On...

Posted in Death Penalty | Supreme Court | The Courts — Comments (18)/ Email this page » / Read More »