The Outrage Factor, SCOTUS Edition

We already know that the Supreme Court is working on gutting Roe vs. Wade, bit by bit. We've recently seen that it has no interest in protecting minority workers against discrimination in pay, in the Ledbetter decision.* Now, it seems, there is little sympathy for the right to to vote. It's long been fairly obvious that the Indiana voter ID law was a solution without a problem. Obvious to everyone but the justices, I guess:

n what the court described as the “lead opinion,” which was written by Justice John Paul Stevens and joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the court acknowledged that the record of the case contained “no evidence” of the type of voter fraud the law was ostensibly devised to detect and deter, the effort by a voter to cast a ballot in another person’s name.

But Justice Stevens said that neither was there “any concrete evidence of the burden imposed on voters who now lack photo identification.” The “risk of voter fraud” was “real,” he said, and there was “no question about the legitimacy or importance of the state’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters.”

Let me see if I've got this right: there's no evidence of voter fraud as covered by the statute, but because the risk is "real" (and I have my doubts about that), even though it demonstrably puts an undue burden on poor voters, it should stand.

I thought we were supposed to pass laws to correct things that are really happening. I guess this is post-9/11 thinking (the whole world changed, you know): if somebody with a vivid imagination thinks that something might happen somewhere, someday, we need a law to prevent it.

The court seems to be swinging toward the Scalia style of judicial reasoning -- that is, assertions make the best evidence:

The three others who made up the majority, Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito Jr., said in an opinion by Justice Scalia that the law was so obviously justified as “a generally applicable, nondiscriminatory voting regulation” that there was no basis for scrutinizing the record to assess the impact on any individual voters. “This is an area where the dos and don’ts need to be known in advance of the election,” Justice Scalia said.

I've little respect for Scalia's reasoning ability. He can chop logic with the best of them, to be sure, but he has a history of asking the wrong questions. When you start with a warped assumption and follow a tight logical course of reasoning, then you wind up with garbage. He shares the far-right tendency to ignore reality, to say the least.

In that respect, read dday's post on this at Hullabaloo.

Justice Scalia's broader ruling shows exactly what Republicans want out of this:

Scalia, favoring a broader ruling in defense of voter ID laws, said, "The universally applicable requirements of Indiana's voter-identification law are eminently reasonable. The burden of acquiring, possessing and showing a free photo identification is simply not severe, because it does not 'even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.'"

But during the arguments, Scalia conceded that such laws would "inconvenience... a small number of people," and the Solicitor General for the state of Indiana actually said that "an infinitesimal portion of the electorate could even be, conceivably be, burdened by" the ID law.

You know, that's how the 14th Amendment WORKS, with equal protection for all, even that "infinitesimal portion of the electorate". And, as Amanda Terkel notes, that's a major soft-pedal of the impact:

Voter ID laws, however, affect more than an "infinitesimal" number of Americans and are more than a "minor inconvenience." According to the federal government, there are as many as 21 million voting-age Americans without driver's licenses. In Indiana, 13 percent of registered voters lack the documents needed to obtain a license, and therefore, cast a ballot. These restrictions disproportionately hit low-income, minority, handicapped, and elderly voters the hardest, leading to lower levels of voter participation.

And it's interesting to note that laws similar to Indiana's are either on the books or being considered in states with Republican majorities in their legislatures. Tell you anything?

Digby provides some background on this issue.

The Supreme Court has just legitimized the notion that "voter fraud" is a problem when, in fact, every study shows that it simply does not exist in any systematic way and that the voter disenfranchisement that results from such laws is a far more serious problem.

You will recall that "voter fraud" was at the base of the U.S. Attorney firings, the rationale for the illegitimate purge of voter roles in Florida in 2000, and at work in Ohio in 2004. It's a Republican strategy, and now the Republican Court has upheld it.

Jack Balkin has what seems to me to be a good take on the degree of denial in the Court's decision.

* For more on Ledbetter, see Digby. Digby also references this series by Echidne.

Update: Senate Republicans torpedoed the bill meant to override the Court's decision in Ledbetter.

So now the Supreme Court has become an arm of the Republican Party.