Letter from Washington
The 2023 supreme court term has opened, producing understandable unease because of the bad cases on its docket. The first of such cases, predicted to be its worst, was a 2nd Amendment, "gun rights" case, US v Rahimi, and concerned the right to keep and carry firearms when subject to a domestic violence order.
Applying Clarence Thomas's bizarre test from last season's Bruen case, the Fifth Circuit found Rahimi was entitled to access his firearms as there were no comparable restrictions on gun ownership in the 18th-century.
That's quite true: there were few, if any, colonial prosecutions for domestic violence.
Rahimi has now been argued, and contrary to expectations it doesn't look good for "gun enthusiasts". The court may finally be drawing a line on "gun rights". Michael Dorf has more.
The supreme court will also be hearing a South Carolina redistricting case that could decide the majority in the next congress. The new districting is pretty clearly racist, but since the 2019 supreme court ruling (in Rucho v Common Cause) that partisan gerrymanders are non-justiciable, the Republican legislature has rebranded the districts as merely partisan.
It's an irrelevant co-incidence that the voters are black; they were actually targeted for voting Democrat…
Meanwhile, on the tenth anniversary of Shelby County v Holder, Americans should reflect on the damage caused by one of the most outrageous decisions in US supreme court history, the opinion that judicially annulled the essential section of Lyndon Johnson's landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The VRA had only recently been reconfirmed by a near-unanimous bipartisan majority of congress; its extralegal invalidation by the supreme court has never been adequately explained.
The immediate consequence of Shelby County was the introduction of state restrictions on voting that are now notorious: the decision is directly responsible for the ten years of voter disenfranchisement that have followed in Red States, and for the gerrymandered legislatures that are able to perpetuate themselves, as well as pack and crack congressional districts for the benefit of the Republican party.
Although the US constitution famously lacks an explicit right to vote, 49 state constitutions do contain this right. That's why it's important that state supreme courts remain free of partisan control.
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