The Supreme Court declines to upend American election law
IN THE RUN-UP to the 2020 presidential election—and in its fraught denouement—supporters of Donald Trump turned to a novel theory to boost their candidate’s chances of staying in the White House. Citing the “independent state legislature” theory, they sought to block state-court rulings in Pennsylvania and elsewhere that made voting easier during the covid-19 pandemic by, for instance, extending deadlines for mail-in ballots. And after election day, legal advisers drew on the notion in cooking up a radical scheme to replace electors in states won by Joe Biden with “alternative” slates for Mr Trump.
On June 27th, in Moore v Harper, the Supreme Court threw cold water on the theory behind these moves: the idea that state legislatures have near-absolute authority, unchecked by state courts, to set the terms of federal elections. As part of an end-of-term rush for the court—several big cases remained to be decided by June 30th, including the fate of affirmative action in university admissions and Mr Biden’s student-debt-relief plan—John Roberts, the chief justice, wrote for the three liberal justices (Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor) and two of Mr Trump’s picks (Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh). Clarence Thomas wrote a dissent that was joined in part by Samuel Alito and in full by Neil Gorsuch.
Moore began in North Carolina. In 2021 the state’s Republican-dominated legislature drew an electoral map giving Republicans the upper hand in ten of the state’s 14 seats in the House of Representatives. Given the state’s near-even split between Republicans and Democrats, North Carolina’s Supreme Court found this aggressive gerrymander inconsistent with a guarantee in North Carolina’s constitution that all elections “shall be free”. It ordered experts to redraw the district lines. In 2022, using a fairer map, Republicans and Democrats won seven seats apiece….
2023-06-27 16:43:18
Source from www.economist.com
rnrn