John Roberts’s Latest Tribute to Roger Taney

Shorter John Roberts: poll taxes are necessary to enforce the Voting Rights Act:

Speaking very roughly, voters in Florida overwhelmingly and on a bipartisan vote approved a constitutional amendment that restored Florida felon voting rights after the completion of their sentences. (This affects, as I understand it, over 750,000 and potentially up to 1 million people.) The Florida legislature then came back and passed a law saying that reenfranchisement could not happen until these felons had paid all their outstanding fees and fines connected to their service, but Florida does not have a central list of such fees and fines. This meant that ex-felons seeking to register if they thought they had no outstanding fines would be risking committing a new felony if they guessed wrong. The trial court found this a due process violation, and that seems a very strong argument. (The argument that this Florida law also is a poll tax on the indigent seems much more uncertain.)

The court issued an injunction barring Florida from enforcing the law, and an Eleventh Circuit panel expedited consideration of the case for oral argument. Then the entire 11th Circuit took the case en banc and issued a stay of the district court’s order. This meant that Florida could enforce its law until the appeal was resolved. Given the timing of the appeal as set by the en banc court, it likely would be too late for these voters to register to vote in time for November’s elections.

The Supreme Court has now left that 11th Circuit stay order in place, once again siding against voting rights during a pandemic, and this time when the lower court had resolved this voting dispute with plenty of time before the November elections.

This is a consistent pattern at the Supreme Court. Conservatives on the Court have sided against voters now in emergency election-related litigation (on the so-called shadow docket) in every election case this season: Wisconsin, Alabama, Texas, and now Florida. Liberals have dissented in each of these cases (except perhaps Breyer in this one). I’ve argued that this is a very disturbing pattern for November. It also shows that Chief Justice Roberts is no swing voter when it comes to voting rights.

As Sotomayor’s dissent points out, if anything the Purcell rule would dictate leaving the District Court ruling, which created a fair process for released felons to recover their vote and didn’t allow the state to disenfranchise voters by refusing to tell them how much they owed, in place. The Republicans on the Roberts Court don’t care about reducing confusion; they just want as few African-Americans to vote as possible:

It’s telling that neither the 11th Circuit nor the Supreme Court wrote one word in defense of their actions, because there’s no law involved here, just “fuck you, that’s why.” This Court is an absolute disgrace.