May 2012

By Linda Greenhouse, the Knight Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence, a Senior Research Scholar in Law and Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School. Greenhouse, a member of the American Constitution Society's Board of Directors, will be signing copies of her new book at the 2012 ACS National Convention.

Has there been a time recently when public understanding of the Supreme Court was so important – and so lacking?

In a Pew poll two summers ago, only 28 percent of the respondents could identify John Roberts as chief justice (a position he had then held for nearly five years) from among a list of four names. The other options, all of which some people selected, were Thurgood Marshall, who had died 17 years earlier; John Paul Stevens, who was in the news for retiring; and Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader. Just imagine what people don’t know about how the court sets its agenda or construes statutes, or about the powers of the chief justice or the debate over constitutional interpretation.

With a court of conservative activists substituting their policy judgments for those of Congress; using the First Amendment as a deregulatory tool; and proposing to unsettle long-settled understandings of affirmative action and voting rights, it’s essential that we become a nation of knowledgeable, or at least better-informed, court-watchers. That’s the big ambition of my new little book – and I use the word “little” as an accurate physical description (7 by 4.5 inches in dimension, 117 pages of text), not as false modesty.

by Jeremy Leaming

For low-taxes, weak safety nets for the most vulnerable and tattered corporate campaign finance regulations to remain the status quo, right-wing policy makers in a slew of states are feverishly working to suppress the votes of students, minorities and others typically not inclined to support regressive policies. 

Florida perhaps provides the most egregious example of attempts to enact voter suppression policy, with new onerous restrictions on voter-registration drives and early voting opportunities. The ACLU of Florida and the U.S. Department of Justice have fought the efforts of Republican Gov. Rick Scott and to alter voting practices in a state with a history of efforts to suppress minority voters. In March, ACLU of Florida Executive Director Howard Simon blasted the governor, saying he was “so intent on suppressing the right to vote that he’s even taken the extreme step of launching a challenge to the Voting Rights Act itself because that landmark of the Civil Rights Movement stands in the way of implementing his voter suppression agenda.”

The Miami Herald reported yesterday that Scott was also ordering county officials statewide to purge noncitizens from the voter rolls. A list of more than 2,600 voters to be purged was created by the state’s Division of Elections, and according to analysis by the Herald was “dominated by Democrats, independents and Hispanics. The largest numbers were from Miami-Dade home to the state’s highest foreign-born population.”

The Florida list, as the newspaper, notes was based on outdated information provided by the state’s Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. Reps. Ted Deutch (D-Boca Raton) and Alcee Hastings (D-Miramar) sent a letter earlier this week to Scott urging him to halt the purging of voters.

“Providing a list of names of questionable validity – created with absolutely no oversight – to county supervisors and asking them to purge their rolls will create chaotic results and further undermine Floridians’ confidence in the integrity of our elections.” the lawmakers’ letter states.

Deutch and Hastings at a May 29 press conference in Davie, Fla., highlighted the state’s faulty removal of Bill Internicola, a 91-year-old World War II veteran, from the voting rolls. State election officials claimed they had information that Internicola born in Brooklyn was not a citizen.