With the country’s voters so evenly split, both Republicans and Democrats are increasingly turning attention to the rules for voting, hoping to gain an edge — and their disputes will make their way to the Supreme Court in the term that begins Monday.
The term, which stretches through next June, begins without any huge case on the docket, but with appeals of a number of rules overturning states’ bans on same-sex marriage, court-watchers say there’s a good chance the justices end up hearing those cases and issuing what would likely be a landmark ruling by the time the session is done.
Another question mark will be whether the justices take up some of the Obamacare challenges still percolating in the courts, including the challenge to whether the health care law can pay subsidies in most states, based on the arcane way the law is written. Lower appeals courts have split on the question.
“It’s a very high-stakes public policy question,” said Michael Carvin, a lawyer involved in challenging the health law who has appealed to the Supreme Court to take the case.
The Obama administration filed a brief Friday urging the justices not to get involved yet, saying that one of the appeals courts that has ruled on the case is holding an en banc rehearing. Administration lawyers told the justices to wait and see what happens there — which could push the case into the next term.
The court has 39 argument days scheduled for the next year, beginning Monday with a case involving a police officer who stopped a car for having only one working taillight, and found cocaine in the vehicle. A judge later ruled that state law only required one taillight, calling the legality of the stop into question.
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Other cases already on the schedule include a dispute over whether an Arkansas prison rule prohibiting beards violates a Muslim inmate’s religious rights; a challenge by workers who say their companies should pay them for time spent in daily security screenings; and whether a U.S. citizen who married a man from Afghanistan, then saw the State Department deny her husband a visa on security grounds, had her marriage rights violated.
One common theme to recent years has been a willingness by the court of Chief Justice John Roberts to take cases involving campaign finance and elections laws, and to upend some long-held liberal legal tenets.
In last year’s Shelby County ruling, the court struck down the key Voting Rights Act test that decides which states and localities have to subject their voter laws to federal “preclearance.” And in this most recent term, the justices issued a campaign finance ruling, in the McCutcheon case, that continued to cut the binds on donors being able to contribute to political causes.
In the new term, the court has already said it will hear a case challenging whether Arizona is allowed to turn its decennial redistricting over to a citizens’ commission, or whether the Constitution, which gives state legislatures the power to set the “times, places and manner” of elections, also gives elected lawmakers exclusive power to redraw congressional lines.
A number of states have moved toward citizen commissions, hoping to sap as much politics as possible from redistricting. Were the court to reject those commissions, it could begin to push back on the trend.
Even bigger cases stem from Alabama, which produced that 2013 voting rights case. This year, the justices have already said they’ll hear a Democratic challenge to the state’s new legislative districts, drawn after the 2010 census, which saw lawmakers pack districts to keep the same high level of black voters.
The legislature said it was following the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits elections changes that would dilute minority voter strength. But Democrats have challenged the new boundaries, arguing that Republicans were concentrating black — and therefore likely Democratic — voters in just a few districts, virtually guaranteeing Democrats win those seats but making it tougher for them to win the others.
The case flips conventional wisdom, with Democratic groups and their allies arguing that Republicans had illegally adopted strict racial quotas in redrawing the districts, and in effect denied voters a chance to cast ballots in contested elections.
“Forcing state House and Senate districts back inside county boundaries, consistent with substantial population equality, can significantly restrain both partisan and racial gerrymandering and make legislators more responsive to their local constituents,” the Alabama Legislative Black Caucus said in its argument.
Alabama, in its reply, said its legislature was just following the Voting Rights Act, and said if they had diluted black voters in those districts, it would have invited a rebuke from the federal Justice Department.
Mr. Carvin, speaking at a court preview hosted by the Heritage Foundation, said both sides are touting their interest in race, but the case is more about party momentum.
“It is all about partisan advantage, it has nothing to do with racial equality,” he said at a court preview hosted by the Heritage Foundation.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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