We begin today's roundup with The New York Times and its take on Republican voter suppression efforts:
On Monday, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected one of the more extreme attempts — a lawsuit from Texas that aimed to reverse longstanding practice and require that only eligible voters be counted in the drawing of state legislative districts. […]
In Evenwel v. Abbott, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the court, which voted 8 to 0, dismissed the plaintiffs’ argument. “As the Framers of the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment comprehended, representatives serve all residents, not just those eligible or registered to vote,” Justice Ginsburg wrote. “By ensuring that each representative is subject to requests and suggestions from the same number of constituents, total population apportionment promotes equitable and effective representation.”
Ari Berman at The Nation has more:
This is a major victory for voting rights, and a huge crisis averted. If states had been able to use current voting-age population instead of total population as the metric for drawing districts, as I previously reported, a staggering 55 percent of Latinos—those who are under 18 or non-citizens—would not have been counted, as well as 45 percent of Asian Americans and 30 percent of African Americans.
Yet this is still in many ways a bittersweet victory, given that the 2016 election is the first in 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. We’re seeing the clear impact of that decision this year, with five-hour lines in Arizona, voters turned away from the polls by North Carolina’s voter-ID law, and 300,000 registered voters who could be disenfranchised in Wisconsin tomorrow.
Over at The Atlantic, Garrett Epps analyzes the case:
The opinion drew no dissents. Justice Clarence Thomas concurred because, he argued, there is no federal rule about apportionment—states should be free to go back to the old pre-Warren Court representational hijinks. Justice Samuel Alito also concurred, but his separate opinion seeks to undermine the majority’s arguments in favor of population. Ginsburg’s citations to the thought of the Framers, and the debates over the Fourteenth Amendment, are irrelevant, Alito suggested, because “the fight over apportionment was about naked power, not some lofty ideal about the nature of representation.”
This is about as cogent as writing, “the majority describes Ben & Jerry’s product as ‘ice cream,’ when in reality it is nothing more than a sugary frozen concoction blending iced dairy products with various fruits and candies.”
Apportionment is always about power—but seldom more nakedly than in Evenwel.
Turning to the Republican presidential primary, Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg writes about a contested convention and Rule 40:
It’s very likely that delegates for Trump and Cruz will make up the majority of the Rules Committee and, at least initially, of the convention. So they could strengthen Rule 40(b), and attempt to prevent any newly qualified candidate from being nominated on a later ballot.
I’m skeptical, however, that any such rule would hold in practice. If the convention truly deadlocks -- if neither Trump nor Cruz can reach 1,237 -- and the delegates decide to turn to a new candidate, then I’m confident that they would simply do so, rules or not. Ultimately, a majority of the delegates backed by the convention chairman can do whatever they want.
On a final note, Newsweek's Michael Tomasky writes about the Panama Papers and Republican efforts to stop tax evasion laws:
So the first impulse is to discuss these Panama Papers in terms of the big crooks like Valdimir Putin. But let’s hope they get some traction on the presidential campaign trail and put the issue of tax havens at the center of the debate. [...] after Barack Obama came in and the Democrats had control of both houses of Congress, Democrats—notably Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, but others too—sought to move legislation to address tax evasion.
And… they did! You probably didn’t hear about it at the time, because the effort didn’t generate nearly as many headlines as the Democratic effort to reform the financial system, address climate change, or pass a health care reform law. But note: The Democrats used their brief two-year period of total control of both the White House and Congress to address head-on about a half-dozen problems, and tax evasion was one of them.
The bill was called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA; how they managed not to tag that final “T” on there at the end is beyond me, someone was really asleep at the wheel. But anyway it passed. In the Senate, it actually enjoyed a modicum of bipartisan support, as 11 GOP senators voted for it (as opposed to 28 who opposed; Democrats backed it 55-1). But in the House, not a single Republican voted for the bill, as Nancy Pelosi let 38 nervous blue-dogs go and join all 174 Republicans.