Legal Links
By - I don’t mean to be stubborn, but I do have one caveat to add to the important information that Harriet Miers endorsed the
CoathangerHuman Life Amendment. Some people have argued that it’s not important because one can believe that the Constitution should be amended without wanting Roe overturned, which is true but I don’t think terribly important. Particularly for someone like Miers who doesn’t have any kind of jurisprudential theory, there is a high correlation between political and constitutional beliefs on abortions, and it’s reasonable to infer that being pro-life makes one more likely to vote to overturn Roe. I do think it’s worth nothing, though, that it’s not clear exactly what supporting the HRA means, at least for someone involved in Republican politics. The HRA is, in theory, the official policy of the national Republican Party. But focusing pro-life politics on the HRA doesn’t so much reflect the commitment of Republican elites to overturning Roe as it reflects the commitment of Republican elites to play their base of cultural reactionaries for suckers. Because the HRA has about as much chance of passing as I do of topping People‘s 25 Sexiest Men Alive list, expressing token support for the HRA is a good way for Republican politicos to express symbolic support for the pro-life movement without actually risking any significant changes in the status quo. For this reason, I’m not sure that one can infer a particularly deep pro-life commitment on the part of Miers because of this endorsement. It’s a piece of negative information that should be considered, but I still think it’s far from certain that she would vote to overturn Roe.
- In better news, I was happy to see that a Federal District judge has issued an injunction against Georgia’s new election law, arguing that it effectively constitutes a poll tax in contravention of the 24th Amendment. The importance of fighting Republican attempts to inhibit voter turnout can hardly be overstated. Earl Warren said that Baker v. Carr–the first of a series of decisions that prevented the gross malapportionment of state legislatures–was the most important decision of his tenure, and he may well have been right. Ensuring access to the ballot box is the surest way of preventing other abuses by the state. And it should be noted that the institutional rules of most other liberal democracies, which make it easier to vote than it is in the U.S., don’t lead to any appreciable increase in voter fraud, but they do greatly increase voter turnout. The point of laws like Georgia’s, of course, is precisely to inhibit turnout among poor people. (On the broader point, see eRobin too.)
- Very interesting post by Stephen Griffin about the way in which the Madisonian fragmentation of American constitutionalism tends to limit the government’s ability to perform core functions like disaster relief. The federal government has taken on more responsibilities to do things that local governments cannot since the New Deal, but as Griffin points out “the constitutional order changed in a somewhat helter-skelter unplanned fashion” while “[t]he formal structure of American federalism remained intact. And so it is still the case that when natural disasters strike, the divided power of the federal structure presents a coordination problem.” I think that’s right.