Kevin Morris

Justice Alito’s latest opinion is a very, very bad sign for voting rights A decision upholding a New York GOP congressional district could be a prelude to killing the Voting Rights Act.

Even by his standards Alito’s opinion in NY redistricting case last night was totally unhinged. If he’s writing majority opinion in Voting Rights Act case that’s very very bad news www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

The advocacy around the SAVE Act was frankly really inspiring. Ordinary people care about democracy, and working together to tell our leaders (and, especially, senators) that bringing back the VRA is something else demand is critical

It's an important question. I don't think it happens without major court reform. But there are substantive legislative options out there; in 2022, we came 1-2 votes away from convincing the Senate to go back to the talking filibuster for the bill to restore the VRA

The way Alito's concurrence was written tonight was focused on the illegality of typical remedies of using race to draw fair maps

This is actually interesting. Depending on how the decision comes down, it could still allow courts to order moving from at-large to districted plans, since that is a race-blind remedy. Now, those districts could still be gerrymandered, but...

So many cities are going to adopt at large schemes

💯. The vast majority of Section 2 claims involve local governments, like city councils, county commissions/boards of supervisors and school boards, according to my empirical study. The Dillard litigation in AL alone involved almost 200 local governmental entities. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Here's the breakdown:
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10....

Shelby County was itself about a local vote dilution scheme (annexations of white outlying areas into the town of Calera)

I don't mean to pick on this person, but I'm begging folks to recognize that Sec 2 does most of its work at the local level. While pre clearance was operative, 50% of all blocked policies were *local vote dilution schemes*. Congress matters but local politics are the ballgame here

To say nothing of the thousands of towns, school boards, and counties around the nation where voters of color would lose representation, with fewer resources and attention than in fights over Congressional maps

I'm not sure about the specifics of most individual states. But if any party is able to use the end of the VRA to draw more seats for themselves, they do so by worsening minority communities' ability to elect candidates of their choosing. That's a gutting outcome, regardless of Congressional control

Yes but his approach here makes it even more likely, imo, that he is writing the majority opinion in Callais

And in case you're blessedly not in the weeds on this, it looks like Alito is prepared to strike down all state-level Voting Rights Acts

Goddamn

One of those nights where you just feel sad. The fight will continue, but man

Any hopes for the future of the VRA, slim as they might have been, need to be revised downward

Just an unbelievably bad concurrence from Alito

Kicking around a backpacking trip in the Adirondacks this summer. Despite living in NYC for 11 years I've never made it up there. Any favorite routes or areas within the region you especially love??

(Sorry: Forgot that Justice Black dissented on the constitutionality of preclearance)

I'm thinking about writing more about this this week. There is potent language in Katzenbach, and the Court knew what it was doing by handing it down on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday

As we prepare to celebrate the 61st anniversary of Selma on Saturday, don't forget that it's also another anniversary date: the 60th of South Carolina v Katzenbach, in which SCOTUS unanimously and emphatically upheld the Voting Rights Act. It took the movement and it took the Court to make it real

Unless, like me, you find yourself halfway through The Plague

None of this is to say this research doesn't matter. It's important to keep the pipes running and things working. But it's not answering the question of the moment, and you should not frame it as such

Whenever I review a paper that starts by acknowledging that lack of trust in elections is a crisis, and then asks how much letting people look up how long the line at their polling place is before leaving home helps, I die inside a little

As always, we let the questions we ask be conditioned by what's easy to study. But what's easy to study != What matters

This goes for those trying to increase confidence in elections. Letting voters track their ballots (or whatever) pales in the face of elites saying the election is rigged!!!!!!!!!!

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After spending a lot of time in Christian nationalism land research the past few weeks, I'm awful grateful to be a member of a PCUSA church

The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to decide when the nation goes to war. President Trump’s strikes on Iran are flatly unconstitutional. There’s been no deliberation, no vote, no clear justification. This is a flagrant abuse of executive power.