Sohn: Do federal courts give birds more protection than they offer us in voting?

AP file photo, Manuel Balce Ceneta / This June 30, 2020, photo shows the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington. The court has been routinely turning back efforts to help voters during the COVID-19 pandemic.
AP file photo, Manuel Balce Ceneta / This June 30, 2020, photo shows the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington. The court has been routinely turning back efforts to help voters during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Go figure. Last week a federal judge in New York invalidated rule changes by the Trump administration that allowed individuals and corporations to kill scores of birds as long as they could prove they did not intentionally set out to do so.

In a scorching ruling that cited Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird," U.S. District Judge Valerie E. Caproni ripped the administration's interpretation of "takings" and "killings" of birds under the century-old Migratory Bird Treaty Act as applying only if the animals are specifically targeted.

But in Washington, at about the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court for about the sixth time since April again put on hold a lower court judge's order that relaxed election procedures because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Here's our "go figure" concern: Federal courts are protecting birds (which we don't disagree with), but not protecting our voting rights - even just temporarily - in the midst of the worst pandemic in 100 years.

Something is wrong with this picture.

This past Tuesday, the Supreme Court's action involved a case in Oregon and the result will keep a referendum on partisan gerrymandering off the November ballot there. Citing the coronavirus pandemic, a lower court federal trial judge had lowered the number of signatures required and extended the deadline for gathering them. The high court, providing no reasoning, blocked that move. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor noted their dissent.

The Washington Post reports that the action was pretty much in line with similar cases from Alabama, Idaho, Wisconsin and elsewhere in which the court has put on hold judicial orders that provided pandemic-related relief over the objections of state election officials.

"The court has said it disfavors judicial action that comes too close to an election, and defers to local control," The Post wrote.

In July the high court handed down two other brief, unsigned orders. The practical impact of both was that voters in Alabama and Texas would find it harder to cast a ballot during the pandemic.

In Texas, the ruling meant the state would continue to be able to apply election rules that ensure older, Republican-leaning voters have an easy time casting a ballot - while younger voters would be forced to risk infection to vote.

In Alabama, the high court overturned a lower court's block on restrictions requiring a copy of their photo ID and the signatures of either two witnesses or a notary public. If voters have to round all that up, just to request an absentee ballot, they potentially risk novel coronavirus exposures even before voting.

Also in July, the court blocked a lower court order that had eased deadlines to allow an Idaho school funding political action committee more time to gather signatures for a ballot initiative amid the coronavirus.

In April, in a cased styled "Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, the Supreme Court granted a request from the GOP, and ordered all ballots mailed after a certain date in Wisconsin's elections that month to be tossed out. In practice, that decision, too, forced thousands of voters to risk infection in order to cast an in-person ballot.

Ginsburg, joined by her liberal colleagues, wrote that the court's decision "boggles the mind" as "a voter cannot deliver ... a ballot she has not yet received. Yet tens of thousands of voters who timely requested absentee ballots" were asked "to do just that."

With the exception of the Texas vote, which had no noted dissents, the decisions in these cases fell largely along partisan lines with the court's five conservative justices voting to deny actions that would make it easier to vote, while most or all of the court's liberal judges noted their dissent.

The same schism was apparent in another voting case from Florida, one that did not involve the pandemic, when justices in mid-July preserved a last-minute order by the 11th Circuit that bars hundreds of thousands of formerly incarcerated people from voting in the Aug. 18 primary and possibly the November election, too. That case involves a 2018 constitutional referendum to expand voting rights and the GOP-controlled state government's efforts to circumvent it.

If your sensing a pattern here, you're not alone.

Sotomayor, joined by Ginsburg and Justice Elena Kagan, accused the court of a "trend of condoning disenfranchisement."

A new seventh case Thursday, even one in which the court rebuffed the GOP and allowed a consent decree in Rhode Island to let voters there cast mail in ballots without in-person witness verification, also has political overtones. The court said it agreed to a pandemic-related voter relief effort in Rhode Island, unlike "similar cases where a state defends its own law, here the state election officials support the challenged decree [relief] and no state official has expressed opposition."

Conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch noted they would have granted the stay requested by the Republican National Committee and the state Republican Party.

For the most part, the majority conservative justices have leaned on the theory that courts should be wary of intervening in elections at the last minute. The thinking has been that disturbing the status quo might lead to voter confusion that may deter voter turnout.

The trouble with that reasoning is that the pandemic itself is a deterrent, and there likely will be more, not fewer, voting rights cases before November.

Our justices - and all state officials - need to put politics aside and walk a mile in voters' shoes. They should do all they can to make it easier - not harder - to vote.

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