Lazy Caturday Reads: Fake Voter Fraud and Real SCOTUS Fraud

Cat and Girl by Tara Dougans

Happy Caturday!!

There’s quite a bit happening in politics news today, even though it is kind of a long holiday weekend with a Monday in between. I’ll bet plenty of working people are taking Monday off. I’m retired now; but whenever there’s a holiday weekend, I get the same feelings I used to when I was working. It feels like a time to goof off–maybe laze around reading a good book or binge watching something on TV. It’s a time to relax in the peaceful knowledge that you’re not required to be anywhere or do anything in particular.

Here in Boston, the Fourth of July weekend means lots of folks will be headed for Cape Cod or New Hampshire, and the city will be eerily quiet in the daytime. When I first moved to Boston from Indiana, I dutifully got a Massachusetts driver’s license; but I didn’t have a car, so I didn’t have to brave the insane Boston traffic. Eventually, I decided I wanted to learn to handle Boston driving even though I was terrified. I waited until the Fourth of July weekend, and drove all over downtown on empty streets to practice and build my confidence.

Yesterday, I started getting that holiday weekend feeling again. I can’t explain it any more than I can explain how I get that back to school feeling in the fall. I guess repeated experiences have formed pathways in my brain that are triggered by certain times of the year.

I feels like there should be a dearth of political news, too, but that’s not the case. It’s another very busy news day. There’s news of another “perfect” phone call by Trump trying to overturn the 2020 election. And of course, there are plenty of reactions to the most recent Supreme Court decisions.

Another “Perfect” Phone Call?

Leigh Ann Caldwell, Josh Dawsey, and Yvonne Winget Sanchez at The Washington Post: Trump pressured Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey to overturn 2020 election.

And that wasn’t the only case SCOTUS decided on fake grounds. David Dayan at The American Prospect: Supreme Court Decides Fake Plaintiffs Are Good Plaintiffs.

Approximately 43 million Americans were made between $10,000 and $20,000 poorer today (plus interest) thanks to six Republican lawyers from Harvard and Yale. They decided that a program based on a statute intended to modify student loan balances in the event of an emergency could not modify student loan balances in the event of the COVID-19 emergency. And they did it by claiming that a plaintiff was injured by this program, when that plaintiff did not petition the Court over its injury, had no involvement in the case, and would likely not be injured by the program.

This is the upside-down world in which the Supreme Court dealt a fatal blow to the Biden administration’s student debt cancellation program. Advocates and members of Congress are now calling for a Plan B, to enact debt relief by some other means; for various reasons, I doubt that the administration will take that opportunity. But what should not be ignored is the way in which the nation’s highest court relies on dodgy theories and facts not in evidence to make the pronouncements it wants….

By Susan Visser

The plaintiffs in the two student loan cases, one of which was so preposterous that it was thrown out unanimously for lack of standing (that was the one where two borrowers said they didn’t have a chance to make public comment to get more debt relief, and that the remedy should be that nobody gets debt relief), simply didn’t like that borrowers would have some debt canceled, on ideological grounds. Nobody seriously contests this as their aim. But in American law, at least in theory, you have to have standing to sue: A party would have to be harmed by 43 million people getting debt relief, and eliminating the debt relief would have to redress this harm.

The Roberts Court, with the chief justice writing for the majority, believes they found one in the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA), a student loan servicer that stands to lose $44 million in servicing fees from debts that would be wholly canceled, according to the state of Missouri’s calculations. There’s one problem: MOHELA is not a plaintiff in the case. MOHELA in fact didn’t know about the case until hearing news reports, played no role in the case, opposed the case from being brought, and would not give the state of Missouri evidence for the case until required by state sunshine laws. We know all this from internal documents and public statements by MOHELA.

Even if MOHELA went ahead and sued, the contract they signed to accept federal student loans for servicing stipulates explicitly that the government has “sole discretion” to remove contracts from servicers, that the contractor cannot “object or protest,” and that the contractor “waives and releases all current or future claims” related to this. Perhaps this is why MOHELA did not sue in this case. Moreover, MOHELA stood to gain from debt cancellation on net, because it would get an estimated $61 million in fees to process forgiveness (more than Missouri said they would lose), and it would eliminate legal liability from botching Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) claims, and many of those loans would have been extinguished in debt cancellation.

Read the rest at the American Prospect link.

More on this standing issue and conflicts on the court from Mark Joseph Stern at Slate: John Roberts Is Already Frustrated With the Response to SCOTUS Killing Student Debt Relief.

The Supreme Court struck down Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan in a 6–3 decision on Friday that rewrites federal law to create a bespoke, extra-textual prohibition on the large-scale cancellation of student debt. Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision in Biden v. Nebraska blazed past a clearly insurmountable standing problem to scold the president for even trying to use the law according to its own plain terms in order to offer mass debt relief in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. He also chastised Justice Elena Kagan for her “disturbing” suggestion, in dissent, that the majority had gone “beyond the proper role of the judiciary.” The decision boils down to the chief justice’s obvious disdain for student debt relief—which is perhaps why he interpreted Kagan’s criticism as, in his words, a “personal” affront….

By Indira Baldano

The biggest question in the case was whether anyone could establish standing to challenge the program in the first place. After all, the federal government itself holds this debt, and no one is obviously “injured” by the government helping somebody else by erasing their debt. (In a separate case decided on Friday, the court unanimously held that two people who oppose the plan had no standing to sue.) Missouri tried to get around this problem by fixating on MOHELA, a corporation created by the state that services student loans. The Missouri attorney general asserted that MOHELA would suffer financially because of Biden’s plan—which turns out to be false—and that the state itself could represent its interests in court. A key flaw in this reasoning is that MOHELA is an independent entity from Missouri that could have sued to defend its own interests, but refused to do so, and even refused to help Missouri “represent” it in court. (State officials had to file public records requests to obtain key information because MOHELA did not want to participate in this case at all.)

Roberts didn’t care about any of that. MOHELA is “an instrumentality of Missouri,” he wrote, and Biden’s plan “will cut MOHELA’s revenues.” (Again: provably false!) So, according to Roberts and the court’s five other hard-line conservatives, the state had established standing.

This is so similar to what Gorsuch did in the fake marriage website case! The right wing justices can’t wait for legitimate cases to be brought; they have to search for fake ones, because they are desperate to return our country to the bad old days of Jim Crow and white male dominance.

Elena Kagan wasn’t having it.

Kagan pulled no punches in response. “From the first page to the last, today’s opinion departs from the demands of judicial restraint,” she wrote. “At the behest of a party that has suffered no injury, the majority decides a contested public policy issue properly belonging to the politically accountable branches and the people they represent.” She skewered the idea that Missouri and MOHELA are interchangeable, citing the Missouri Supreme Court’s own declaration that they are not. And she eviscerated the majority for “wielding the major-questions sword” to overrule “legislative judgments” that belong to the political branches.

Congress had better watch out, because the Court is working to displace them. Just wait until they get control of the power of the purse!

One more SCOTUS action from yesterday reported by Sam Levine at The Guardian: Supreme court leaves intact Mississippi law disenfranchising Black voters.

The US supreme court turned away a case on Friday challenging Mississippi’s rules around voting rights for people with felony convictions, leaving intact a policy implemented more than a century ago with the explicit goal of preventing Black people from voting.

Those convicted of any one of 23 specific felonies in Mississippi permanently lose the right to vote. The list is rooted in the state’s 1890 constitutional convention, where delegates chose disenfranchising crimes that they believed Black people were more likely to commit. “We came here to exclude the negro. Nothing short of this will answer,” the president of the convention said at the time. The crimes, which include bribery, theft, carjacking, bigamy and timber larceny, have remained largely the same since then; Mississippi voters amended it remove burglary in 1950 and added murder and rape in 1968.

By Tara Dougans

It continued to have a staggering effect in Mississippi. Sixteen per cent of the Black voting-age population remains blocked from casting a ballot, as well as 10% of the overall voting age population, according to an estimate by The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. The state is about 38% Black, but Black people make up more than half of Mississippi’s disenfranchised population.

Challengers to the law argued that the policy was unconstitutional because it bore the “discriminatory taint” from the 1890 constitution. One of the plaintiffs was Roy Harness, a social worker in his late 60s who is permanently barred from voting because he was convicted of forgery decades ago. Forgery was one of the original crimes included in the list of disenfranchising offenses.

“It makes me feel bad. I’ve served my country, nation … got a degree and [I] still can’t vote, no matter what you do to prove yourself,” Harness told the Guardian in 2022.

Once a person loses their right to vote in Mississippi it is essentially impossible to get it back. To do so, a disenfranchised person must get the legislature to approve an individualized bill on their behalf by a supermajority in both chambers and then have the governor approve the bill. There are no online instructions or applications, and lawmakers can reject or deny an application for any reason.