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**JULY 1, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

The Constitution, Says the Court, Favors Republicans

It was the legendary columnist Finley Peter Dunne who first wrote-back
in 1901-that the Supreme Court followed election returns. Today's
Court is a little more ambitious than that: It sees its mission as

**deciding** election returns-in Republicans' favor.

In today's decision

upholding an Arizona law that forbids the counting of votes cast in the
wrong precinct and the collecting of ballots, the six Republican
operatives on the Court effectively struck down Section 2 of the
landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, which forbade state laws that made it
disproportionately hard for racial minorities to vote. Eight years ago,
the Court's Republican majority struck down the act's
provisions-in Section 5-that had enabled the federal government to
review formerly Jim Crow states' election practices before they went
into effect, and reject them if in fact they were discriminatory.

Today's decision, penned by Samuel Alito, cited states' interest in
preventing voter fraud as justification for the Arizona laws (and, by
anticipatory extension, justification for the swarm of voter suppression
laws now being enacted by Republican legislatures across the land).
"Fraud can affect the outcome of a close election, and fraudulent
votes dilute the right of citizens to cast ballots that carry
appropriate weight," Alito wrote. "Fraud can also undermine public
confidence in the fairness of elections and the perceived legitimacy of
the announced outcome."

Problem is, over the past half-century, there have been more instances
of verifiable UFO landings on the National Mall than instances of
verifiable voter fraud. The fact that Republicans have worked
assiduously to document such fraud and turned up zilch has not deterred
the party one iota from citing it as a national problem. The Big Lie of
Voter Fraud persists because demographic changes in the nation's
racial composition, abetted by the increasing liberalism of the young,
have convinced Republicans that they can only cling to power through
voter suppression, for which some justification, however fictitious, has
had to be found.

In a sense, today's decision in

**Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee**and the Court's
eight-year-old decision in

**Shelby County v. Holder**take the Republican justices' ruling in

**Bush v. Gore**-which bestowed the presidency on George W. Bush-and
endeavor to raise its consequence to a general principle: Confronted
with an election case, the law favors Republicans.

Just in case you had any doubts ...

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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