A Big Little Victory

The news about the assault on voting rights and democratic institutions has been bad for so damn long that any good news on the subject is welcome.  And the Supreme Court delivered a small but important victory in the Moore v. Harper case out of North Carolina that proposed what reactionaries call the "independent state legislature theory," a theory that is the legal equivalent of supply-side economics.

North Carolina House Speaker Timothy Moore, a Republican, filed suit claiming that the state legislature, in redrawing U.S. House districts, had the right to decide the rules for electing federal officers in any way, shape or form that they wanted to - without oversight from the state Supreme Court.  The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, that Moore's theory violated the system of checks and balances and declared that state judiciary has every right to counteract the state legislature to curb excessive partisan gerrymandering.  Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined by conservative justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett and the entire liberal wing - Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.  This decision not only allows the judiciary to intervene in state redistricting cases involving U.S. House of Representatives; it also negates a more sinister idea, that states can reject the majority popular vote for one slate of presidential electors and instead allow the slate voted down by the people to cast ballots in the Electoral College.  It was an idea that Trump tried to get Democratic electors rejected in states that Joe Biden carried in the 2020 presidential election.  

Chief Justice Roberts (above) seems to have forged a consistent view regarding voting from a conservative standpoint.  He opposes the Voting Rights Act as it was written in 1965 because he sincerely believes that making racial preferences for voting based on past racial discrimination treats voters of a particular race as part of a group and not as individuals and that the rights of the individual must always come before the rights of a collective group based on skin color or ethnicity.  It's not a stupid idea; it's just wrong.  But while rejecting group rights in favor of the individual, the chief justice also believes that the only way individual rights can be preserved is through the checks and balances that Timothy Moore so blatantly ignored. 

Because of his ideological consistency, Roberts saved the principle of free elections from an extremist minority hell-bent on overturning the will of the people.  Alas, that minority, besides Justice Neil Gorsuch, also includes noted billionaires' bitches Samuel Alito (who, as a former resident of my hometown, continues to make my hometown a laughingstock) and Clarence Thomas.