Arizona Conservatives and Constitutionalists are celebratory going into Independence Day 2021 because the Supreme Court of The United States has handed down a ruling which devastates Democrat’s efforts to subvert our electoral system through ballot harvesting and out-of-precinct voting. The highest court of the land decided in a 6-3 ruling along partisan lines in favor of Arizona’s new voting integrity laws with Justice Samuel Alito writing the opinion of the majority. The case was brought against the State of Arizona by attorneys for the Democratic National Committee and Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich argued for the State before SCOTUS.
Alito’s opinion was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Kagan’s dissenting opinion was joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.
The Ruling In Favor Of The Republic
Justice Alito wrote for the court,
“In these cases, we are called upon for the first time to apply §2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to regulations that govern how ballots are collected and counted. Arizona law generally makes it very easy to vote.”
“All voters may vote by mail or in-person for nearly a month before election day, but Arizona imposes two restrictions that are claimed to be unlawful. First, in some counties, voters who choose to cast a ballot in person on election day must vote in their own precincts or else their ballots will not be counted. Second, mail-in ballots cannot be collected by anyone other than an election official, a mail carrier, or a voter’s family member, household member, or caregiver. After a trial, a District Court upheld these rules, as did a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But an en banc court, by a divided vote, found them to be unlawful.
“It relied on the rules’ small disparate impacts on members of minority groups, as well as past discrimination dating back to the State’s territorial days.”
“And it overturned the District Court’s finding that the Arizona Legislature did not adopt the ballot-collection restriction for a discriminatory purpose.”
“We now hold that the en banc court misunderstood and misapplied §2 and that it exceeded its authority in rejecting the District Court’s factual finding on the issue of legislative intent.”
Justice Alito went on to establish that the Supreme Court will NOT establish a legal test for future cases involving the Voting Rights Act and “rules, like those at issue here, that specify the time, place, or manner for casting ballots.” which leaves the door open for other future challenges to other voting integrity laws as they arise. So while this is no doubt a victory for Election integrity, it is a limited one that doesn’t set a legal precedent.
The Leftist’s Dissent
Justice Elena Kagan dissented from the majority joined by Justices Breyer and Sotomayor. Kagan wrote, that the court has ruled to uphold “two election laws from Arizona that discriminate against minority voters.” Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich who brought the case before the court correctly asserted that Justice Kagan “is essentially doing the bidding of the far left that’s trying to undermine this system of checks and balances with our government” as well as states’ sovereignty,” Brnovich said according to The Epoch Times.
Justice Kagan wrote,
“What is tragic here is that the Court has (yet again) rewritten—in order to weaken—a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses. What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute designed to bring about ‘the end of discrimination in voting,’” she wrote, quoting President Lyndon Johnson, who, she said, “sent the bill to Congress, ten days after John Lewis led marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.”
Brnovich retorted, “If you accept the logic of the dissent, then almost any voting integrity measures enacted by any state would be unconstitutional or inconsistent with the Voting Rights Act. It would essentially nationalize all of our elections, which is exactly what the left is trying to do with S1 and HR1,” Brnovich referred to the so-called “For The People Act” which amounts to nothing less than a full Federal take over of Elections, a brutal affront to States’ sovereignty.
Brnovich Finds The Divide
The Arizona Attorney General added, “There was a time not that long ago when even the Democrats recognized that limits on ballot harvesting help protect the integrity of the process.” continuing that while Arizona has mail-in voting with no-excuse required “jurisdictions like New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire … don’t even allow no-excuse absentee voting. And yet the left doesn’t sue those states or go after them. They go after red states like Arizona or Georgia,”
Then Brnovich reached the absolute center of the divide in America today, summing it up very nicely,
“The far left doesn’t want to have discussions, they don’t want to have debates, what they want to do is define the terms and then demonize everyone who disagrees with them. And that, quite frankly, is the real danger in this country today.”
