THE WEEKLY REVEAL

Hello! In this issue:

• Democracy guide: A new Supreme Court term brings us new threats to our democracy.
   
• Why minor league baseball players decided to unionize.
   
• Another head-spinning development in the case of 43 missing Ayotzinapa students in Mexico.
   
• A new clip from our documentary feature film, “The Grab.”

REVEAL EXPLAINS

Your Guide to the Attack on Democracy

U.S. Supreme Court. Credit: Matt H. Wade/Wikipedia

The Supreme Court begins its new term Monday. Its last term ended with the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and this upcoming term will have more consequential issues on the docket, including decisions around tribal sovereignty, LGBTQ rights, affirmative action and more.
 
And then there’s democracy. This term, there are two important cases that, depending on how they’re decided, could lead to more rampant voter suppression and provide state legislators a way to mess with the certification of, say, the presidential election.

The potential destruction of the Voting Rights Act. Next week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Merrill v. Milligan, a case with deep implications for the future of the Voting Rights Act, the civil rights era law that combats racial discrimination and voter suppression.

The backstory: After the 2020 census, Alabama’s Republican-led Legislature drew new voting maps. Several lawsuits brought by individual Black voters and Black-led organizations in Alabama challenged the map, saying the electoral power of Black voters was diluted because they were packed into one district, even though the state is 27% Black – and the state could have feasibly drawn two majority-Black districts. An Alabama district court ruled that the state must redraw the maps. But in February, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to allow Alabama’s map to be used for this election. In Merrill v. Milligan, the Supreme Court will decide whether that decision is permanent.

Why this matters: In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down one of the key provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Section 4), ruling that racial discrimination in the voting system was no longer a big enough threat to merit strict oversight in states with a history of discrimination. That opened the door to a flood of voter suppression laws, particularly in Southern states. Now, the court could go even further. Section 2 prohibits any kind of discrimination in voting anywhere in the country and, as in the case at hand, it often typically focuses on whether racial groups’ votes are being diluted by redistricting. But as Linda Greenhouse in The Atlantic writes, “Alabama is saying, essentially, that any effort to eradicate racial discrimination is itself racial discrimination.” If the justices agree, it could gut what’s left of the Voting Rights Act.

The John Roberts factor: When the Supreme Court ruled in February to reinstate the map, Chief Justice John Roberts went against his fellow conservatives on the court and dissented, saying the lower district court followed precedent laid out in the Voting Rights Act. But he *also* made it clear that the precedent is due for a revision. For Roberts, gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is a decades-long quest that began when he was a young lawyer in the Reagan administration.

He wrote in a 1981 memo that violation claims under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “should not be made too easy to prove, since they provide a basis for the most intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes.”

The fringe legal theory that could radically reshape federal elections. The Supreme Court will also hear arguments in Moore v. Harper, a case brought by the Republican speaker of North Carolina’s House of Representatives. It challenges a decision by the North Carolina Supreme Court that struck down the General Assembly’s redistricting plan, calling it a partisan gerrymander. In his appeal, state House Speaker Tim Moore tests a legal theory that has rapidly moved from the fringes since the 2020 election, the independent state legislature theory.

The backstory: This can get a little complicated, and there are a lot of different opinions on what it could mean if the Supreme Court blesses the theory. But here are the basics: The federal government delegates election administration to the states. Until now, that’s meant that the normal state system for oversight applies: Legislatures make rules, and the state supreme courts provide a check and balance. But under the independent state legislature theory, the legislature would have total control, without interference from the courts to ensure lawmakers’ actions are constitutional. (You can read this explainer from the Brennan Center for Justice to understand the nitty-gritty details of the argument.)

Why this matters: If the Supreme Court adopts the argument, state legislatures would be free to gerrymander without any state oversight. And, if we have another contested election like we did last time, it could provide more legal firepower to the side trying to overturn the will of the voters. In 2020, Donald Trump’s allies used the theory to try to convince some state legislatures to not certify Joe Biden’s victory in their state and instead send Trump’s electors to the Electoral College. In theory, there would still be other barriers to stop a legislature from ignoring the will of the state’s voters. But as people like leading election law expert Rick Hasen of UCLA have said, a sympathetic Supreme Court or House leader might not step in to stop it.

The latest: Four Supreme Court justices have signaled their support for the theory. And the case so frightens state supreme court justices that they, through the Conference of Chief Justices, filed a rare amicus brief telling the justices that they should reject the independent state legislature theory. “That the conference is willing to take a stand here highlights how extreme and dangerous the argument of the North Carolina legislators is,” Harvard law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos told The New York Times. “That argument would undermine the authority of state courts to interpret state law – a bedrock principle of our system of federalism, and one that conservative justices historically championed, not questioned.”

🗣️  Want to suggest a story or topic explainer for our next issue? Is there a specific democracy issue you want us to curate reporting around? Have any feedback about what we've covered so far? Anything goes. Email us at [email protected].

THIS WEEK’S PODCAST

Minor League Pay

Last month, minor league baseball players unionized and Major League Baseball voluntarily agreed to recognize the union.

It was a historic change in the baseball industry, because while minor league baseball teams are a classic American tradition, their players have not been covered by some classic American laws. Players can earn less than the equivalent of minimum wage and don’t get paid overtime.

This week on Reveal, we explore how that’s even possible with The Uncertain Hour podcast team from our colleagues at Marketplace. They’re looking at how certain companies – and whole industries – maneuver around basic worker protections.

This is a rebroadcast of an episode that originally aired in March 2021. 

HEADLINES

What’s happening in the news – with a Reveal context

Alejandro Encinas Rodríguez (from left), Mexico’s undersecretary for human rights; Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador; and Omar Gómez Trejo, special prosecutor in the Ayotzinapa case, at a September 2019 press conference. Credit: GDAPHOTO/Associated Press

• He found evidence that Tomás Zerón, the head of the original investigation, was involved in falsifying evidence and forcing confessions. Zerón fled to Israel, which has refused to extradite him.
   
• A source led Gómez Trejo and his team to a ravine where human bone fragments were found. A lab matched them to Ayotzinapa student Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre. It was only the second time remains had been identified and matched with a student.
   
• He got access to a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration case file, which had intercepted texts between drug smugglers in a Guerreros Unidos criminal cell outside Chicago. The cartel has been linked to the students’ disappearance.
  
  One of the gang’s founders, Adán Casarrubias Salgado, was mentioned frequently in the texts. He was extradited to the U.S. in May on charges of conspiracy, drug trafficking and money laundering. If tried in a U.S. federal court, more information could come out about what happened to the students. The gang has a cell in Mexico that was blamed for killing the students in the government’s original 2014 investigation.

Ending on a Good Note

Credit: “The Grab” screenshot

📽️  “The Grab” heads to D.C., with a new clip now available. Our new documentary feature film, “The Grab,” will be screened Oct. 13 at the Double Exposure film festival in Washington, D.C. The screening is open to the public and tickets are available for purchase here. Stay after the film for a Q&A with Reveal’s Amanda Pike and Nate Halverson.

The film uncovers the money, influence and alarming rationale behind covert efforts to control the most vital resources on the planet. Watch a clip here.

⚖️  We briefed U.S. lawmakers on our investigation into suspected war criminals. Reveal’s Ike Sriskandarajah on Wednesday briefed the Congressional Caucus on Ethnic and Religious Freedom in Sri Lanka about his reporting on alleged war criminals living in the U.S. and detailed a new opportunity to bring accountability to the victims of Sri Lanka’s civil war atrocities.

In his testimony, Sriskandarajah presented his investigation into the 1,700 suspected war criminals and human rights abusers living in the U.S. and how suspects rarely face charges. One of the starkest examples he found was former Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a naturalized U.S. citizen who returned to Sri Lanka in 2005 to serve as the country’s secretary of defense, overseeing the end of its civil war. Rajapaksa is accused of overseeing the killings of tens of thousands of Tamil civilians during that time, among other alleged crimes.

After the war, Rajapaksa continued to visit the United States as recently as 2019, but never once was charged under a U.S. war crime statute. Rajapaksa has since given up his U.S. citizenship, but because he was a citizen when he allegedly ordered the atrocities, he would still be under U.S. jurisdiction for those alleged crimes.

That’s why “the U.S. now has the best and only opportunity to provide accountability to the victims of Sri Lankan atrocities,” Sriskandarajah told U.S. lawmakers. “No where else can. Sri Lanka itself is still ruled by the Rajapaksa’s party, and their allies have made no indication of launching their own human rights investigation.”

We’ll be sharing a recording of the briefing on our Twitter account as soon as it’s available. Follow us to make sure you don’t miss it.

In a related development, a group of lawmakers earlier this week sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken urging him to work with the United Nations to support efforts to investigate and hold accountable alleged perpetrators of war crimes during the Sri Lankan civil war, including Rajapaksa. Read the letter here.