Latest news with #CitizensUnited
CNN
11-07-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Anaylsis: Clarence Thomas has long tried to undercut the Voting Rights Act. Now, he may finally have the numbers
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been imploring his colleagues for decades to gut a crucial part of the iconic Voting Rights Act that prohibits practices denying Blacks, Hispanics and other racial minorities an equal right to vote. When Thomas first laid out his objections in 1994, insisting that the act was exacerbating rather than easing 'racial tensions,' several colleagues called his position 'radical,' and only Antonin Scalia endorsed it. But as more right-wing justices have joined the court, the views of Thomas, a conservative African American, have gained traction. Now, a mysterious order from the high court in a Louisiana redistricting case suggests it is seriously reconsidering the scope of VRA safeguards against congressional and state legislative district maps that dilute minority votes. The looming battle comes as some states, notably Alabama, are resisting court orders to remedy discrimination, and President Donald Trump's Justice Department is abandoning the federal government's usual role in protecting minority voting rights. The justices' eventual action on this case and other simmering controversies, which would affect congressional maps used in the 2026 elections and beyond, could lead to a retrenchment of practices that consider race to ensure that minorities are not put at a disadvantage. The entire debate necessarily acquires a partisan dimension as Blacks and other minority voters tend to lean Democratic. The stakes in the Louisiana dispute pending at the high court rose when the justices on June 27, the last day of their regular session, revealed that they had not been able to resolve the case that had been argued in March. The justices announced it would be reargued in the upcoming session that begins in October and that they'd issue a subsequent order regarding additional ground to be covered. Rarely do the justices order a new argument in a controversy, but when they do, the move tends to expand the possible consequences, as happened in the 2010 Citizens United campaign finance dispute. After reargument, the justices overturned precedent and gave corporations and labor unions new First Amendment rights for vast spending in elections. Deepening the puzzle of what may be developing at the Supreme Court, Thomas wrote a six-page dissenting statement to the June 27 order in Louisiana v. Callais. He was ready to act now. Thomas wanted the court to rule outright that the VRA's Section 2, which requires consideration of voters' race to ensure that congressional and state legislative voting districts are drawn fairly, violates the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection. 'I am hopeful that this Court will soon realize that the conflict its Section 2 jurisprudence has sown with the Constitution is too severe to ignore,' Thomas wrote. No other justice signed onto that particular Thomas dissent, but in the past Justice Neil Gorsuch, who succeeded Scalia in 2017, has fully joined Thomas' sentiment regarding 'the disastrous misadventure of this Court's voting rights jurisprudence.' Justices Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett joined parts of Thomas' view two years ago, pressing for a 'race neutral' approach, in a controversy over Alabama's redistricting map. The four – Thomas, Gorsuch, Alito and Barrett – dissented in that 2023 case of Allen v. Milligan as Chief Justice John Roberts crafted a narrow majority to affirm Section 2's protections for racial minorities in redistricting battles. Roberts insisted the dissenters' approach would force the court to turn its back on a swath of precedent. 'Section 2 itself demands consideration of race' when correcting a discriminatory map, he wrote. The question whether additional majority-minority districts can be drawn 'involves a quintessentially race-conscious calculus.' Roberts' opinion marked a sharp turn in his own opposition to racial remedies. In a 2007 case, he wrote, 'the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.' Roberts also authored the 2013 milestone, Shelby County v. Holder, that dismantled a separate Voting Rights Act section that had required states with a history of discrimination to obtain federal approval for any electoral changes. During March oral arguments in the Louisiana case, Roberts was skeptical of the state's new map with two Black-majority districts, which were created after a lower court found the original map with a single Black-majority district likely violated Section 2. Roberts questioned whether one of the new districts was sufficiently 'compact' to meet standards; he called it 'a snake that runs from one end of the state to the other.' Gorsuch quickly echoed Roberts, and Gorsuch went further to suggest any consideration of race, to redraw a discriminatory map, would breach the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection. Justice Brett Kavanaugh questioned whether there should be a 'durational' limit on the use of Section 2, that is, that 'the authority of a state to engage in race-based redistricting must have an end point.' The pending case began when a US district court found Louisiana's original 2022 map, with a single Black-majority district, denied Black voters an equal opportunity to elect their preferred candidates. Black people make up about one-third of the state's population. The state has six congressional districts. The Louisiana legislature redrew the map to create two Black-majority districts but also to protect the state's favored incumbents, including House Speaker Mike Johnson. A group of mostly White voters subsequently filed their own lawsuit, saying that the state legislature unconstitutionally created a racial gerrymander and adopting some of Thomas' arguments. 'I would like to think that his view of the VRA is still a radical view on this court,' said Stuart Naifeh, of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, one of the lawyers who defended Louisiana's new map at the high court in March. Naifeh noted that Supreme Court precedent sets specific standards for when Section 2's redistricting remedy is required, with attention to current conditions and racial polarization in a state. Naifeh and Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguinaga emphasized that the court has said legislatures have 'breathing room' to accommodate political interests, such as the protection of incumbents, along with racial considerations. That is why the lines of some remedial districts may appear loosely drawn or, as Roberts described it, snakelike. Edward Greim, a Kansas City, Missouri, lawyer who represented those challenging the revised map declined to comment on the court's new order and Thomas' position. During the oral arguments, Greim urged the justices to consider whether the VRA remedy had run its course. 'Why are we suddenly now – as voters are becoming more integrated, why are we suddenly finding new Section 2 districts everywhere? I think that's a problem,' he said. One related issue the justices could soon take up is whether private individuals and advocacy groups can sue under the VRA's Section 2. That question has grown in salience as the Trump DOJ withdraws or switches sides in voting rights disputes. Ruling against Native American tribes in a North Dakota redistricting case, the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals broke with other lower courts and said only the Justice Department could bring such claims. Lawyers for the tribes told the 8th Circuit on Wednesday that they will appeal the case to the Supreme Court. 'There is no other circuit in the country in which private plaintiffs are unable to enforce their rights under Section 2 …' the lawyers for the two tribes said in their notice to the 8th Circuit. 'As a result, American citizens in the states of this circuit have fewer enforceable voting rights than the citizens in every other state in the country.' The appeals court'sMay ruling built on a separate groundbreaking 8th Circuit decision, in a 2023 case from Arkansas, that cited the writings of Justices Gorsuch and Thomas, characterizing the availability of a private right of action as an 'open question.' Thomas, who became a justice in 1991, has consistently clung to the VRA views he expounded in the 1994 case of Holder v. Hall. 'The statute was originally perceived as a remedial provision directed specifically at eradicating discriminatory practices that restricted blacks' ability to register and vote in the segregated South,' he wrote at the time. 'Now, the Act has grown into something entirely different. In construing the Act to cover claims of vote dilution, we have converted the Act into a device for regulating, rationing, and apportioning political power among racial and ethnic groups.' 'In short,' Thomas added, 'few devices could be better designed to exacerbate racial tensions than the consciously segregated districting system currently being constructed in the name of the Voting Rights Act.'
Bangkok Post
10-07-2025
- Politics
- Bangkok Post
US senator warns of fossil fuel coup, economic reckoning
WASHINGTON - One of the US Senate's leading climate advocates says President Donald Trump's administration no longer governs -- it "occupies" the nation on behalf of Big Oil. In an interview, Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island blamed the sweeping rollback of environmental protections on a flood of unlimited, anonymous corporate political spending, and said exposing the scale of this "fraud" is key to breaking its grip. His remarks came as the death toll from catastrophic flooding in Texas linked by scientists to climate change threatened to surge further. "This isn't even government any longer," the 69-year-old told a small group of reporters ahead of an address to Congress Wednesday -- his 300th so-called "Time to Wake Up" speech, delivered as activists reel from Trump's actions. "This is an occupying force from the fossil fuel industry that has injected itself into the key positions of responsibility," said the lawmaker. "It has the appearance of being government -- they ride around in the black cars... they have the offices, they have the titles," he said. But in reality, "they're fossil fuel flunkies... and they care not a whit for public opinion or public safety." Big Oil spent at least $445 million to help elect Trump, according to a recent analysis by Climate Power, which said its figure was likely a vast underestimate because of undisclosed donations. - Dark money takeover - In his second term, Republican Trump has pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, gutted science agencies, fired researchers and forecasters, scrapped his predecessor Joe Biden's clean energy tax cuts and rolled back powerplant and vehicle efficiency standards. Whitehouse calls it the oil, coal and gas industry's "most sordid dreams come true" and says the stage was set by the 2010 Supreme Court "Citizens United" ruling, which unleashed an era of unchecked corporate political spending. A former state attorney general who battled corporate polluters, he recalled that when he first joined the Senate, climate bipartisanship flourished: John McCain, the GOP's 2008 presidential nominee, had "a perfectly respectable climate platform," while Republican senators proposed bills. "These weren't little tiddlywinks, nibble-at-the-edges bills," he recalled, but would have genuinely changed the trajectory of climate emissions. Citizens United reversed century-old campaign finance restrictions and opened the floodgates to dark money. "They were able to come into the Republican Party and say, 'We will give you unlimited amounts of money. You will have more money in your elections than you've ever seen before.'" - The way forward - Despite the bleak landscape, Whitehouse still sees a narrow path to climate safety — and points to several potential game changers. First, he cites the possible emergence of a global carbon pricing effort, spearheaded by the European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which taxes importers based on their climate footprint. Countries like the UK, Canada, Mexico and Australia could join this movement, creating a de facto global price on carbon, enforced through trade -- without US legislation. Second, he says, Democrats can and must expose fossil fuel's stranglehold on the Republican party, a phenomenon he calls one of the "most grave incidents of political corruption and fraud that the country has ever seen," and pass a bill forcing donor transparency. Third, what was once framed as a crisis for polar bears -- and later as an opportunity for green jobs -- is today directly hitting Americans where it hurts most: their wallets. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has warned that climate change will shrink mortgage availability across swaths of the United States in the coming years as banks and insurers retreat from fire- and flood-prone regions. Risks could cascade from an insurance crunch into a broader mortgage collapse -- potentially triggering a 2008-style crash. Whitehouse predicts the fossil fuel industry's hold on Republicans won't last forever. "When it becomes clear what has been done here, then there's going to be a dramatic reset," he said. "A reckoning will come for this. There's no doubt about it -- it's just the nature of human affairs." Trump himself, he added, was merely swept along by the dominant current of the post-2010 Republican Party, with no ideological stake in the issue. As recently as 2009, he co-signed a full-page advertisement in the New York Times demanding stronger climate action from then president Barack Obama.
Int'l Business Times
09-07-2025
- Politics
- Int'l Business Times
US Senator Warns Of Fossil Fuel Coup, Economic Reckoning
One of the US Senate's leading climate advocates says President Donald Trump's administration no longer governs -- it "occupies" the nation on behalf of Big Oil. In an interview, Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island blamed the sweeping rollback of environmental protections on a flood of unlimited, anonymous corporate political spending, and said exposing the scale of this "fraud" is key to breaking its grip. His remarks came as the death toll from catastrophic flooding in Texas linked by scientists to climate change threatened to surge further. "This isn't even government any longer," the 69-year-old told a small group of reporters ahead of an address to Congress Wednesday -- his 300th so-called "Time to Wake Up" speech, delivered as activists reel from Trump's actions. "This is an occupying force from the fossil fuel industry that has injected itself into the key positions of responsibility," said the lawmaker. "It has the appearance of being government -- they ride around in the black cars... they have the offices, they have the titles," he said. But in reality, "they're fossil fuel flunkies... and they care not a whit for public opinion or public safety." Big Oil spent at least $445 million to help elect Trump, according to a recent analysis by Climate Power, which said its figure was likely a vast underestimate because of undisclosed donations. In his second term, Republican Trump has pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, gutted science agencies, fired researchers and forecasters, scrapped his predecessor Joe Biden's clean energy tax cuts and rolled back powerplant and vehicle efficiency standards. Whitehouse calls it the oil, coal and gas industry's "most sordid dreams come true" and says the stage was set by the 2010 Supreme Court "Citizens United" ruling, which unleashed an era of unchecked corporate political spending. A former state attorney general who battled corporate polluters, he recalled that when he first joined the Senate, climate bipartisanship flourished: John McCain, the GOP's 2008 presidential nominee, had "a perfectly respectable climate platform," while Republican senators proposed bills. "These weren't little tiddlywinks, nibble-at-the-edges bills," he recalled, but would have genuinely changed the trajectory of climate emissions. Citizens United reversed century-old campaign finance restrictions and opened the floodgates to dark money. "They were able to come into the Republican Party and say, 'We will give you unlimited amounts of money. You will have more money in your elections than you've ever seen before.'" Despite the bleak landscape, Whitehouse still sees a narrow path to climate safety -- and points to several potential game changers. First, he cites the possible emergence of a global carbon pricing effort, spearheaded by the European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which taxes importers based on their climate footprint. Countries like the UK, Canada, Mexico and Australia could join this movement, creating a de facto global price on carbon, enforced through trade -- without US legislation. Second, he says, Democrats can and must expose fossil fuel's stranglehold on the Republican party, a phenomenon he calls one of the "most grave incidents of political corruption and fraud that the country has ever seen," and pass a bill forcing donor transparency. Third, what was once framed as a crisis for polar bears -- and later as an opportunity for green jobs -- is today directly hitting Americans where it hurts most: their wallets. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has warned that climate change will shrink mortgage availability across swaths of the United States in the coming years as banks and insurers retreat from fire- and flood-prone regions. Risks could cascade from an insurance crunch into a broader mortgage collapse -- potentially triggering a 2008-style crash. Whitehouse predicts the fossil fuel industry's hold on Republicans won't last forever. "When it becomes clear what has been done here, then there's going to be a dramatic reset," he said. "A reckoning will come for this. There's no doubt about it -- it's just the nature of human affairs." Trump himself, he added, was merely swept along by the dominant current of the post-2010 Republican Party, with no ideological stake in the issue. As recently as 2009, he co-signed a full-page advertisement in the New York Times demanding stronger climate action from then president Barack Obama. US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat from Rhode Island, speaks during an interview on Capitol Hill on July 8, 2025 in Washington, DC AFP
Wall Street Journal
09-07-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Planned Parenthood Is People, My Friend
Planned Parenthood won a preliminary injunction Monday halting the One Big Beautiful Bill Act's provision aimed at depriving the self-described 'sexual and reproductive health care' outfit of federal money. Its lawsuit reminded me of Mitt Romney. In August 2011, the future Republican presidential nominee drew mockery for saying, 'Corporations are people, my friend.' Mr. Romney was making a point about economics. After he said he didn't want to raise taxes on people, an Iowa State Fair heckler shouted: 'Corporations!' Mr. Romney explained: 'Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people.' The Obama campaign used the remark 'to paint Romney as a heartless corporate predator,' as the Harvard Business Review put it. It didn't help that Mr. Romney's comment echoed Charlton Heston's famous last words in the 1973 film 'Soylent Green' about his discovery that the processed food was made of human remains. The comment came at a time when the Democratic left was outraged about legal corporate personhood—specifically Citizens United v. FEC (2010), a Supreme Court decision that affirmed corporations' right to engage in political speech. In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens denounced 'the conceit that corporations must be treated identically to natural persons'—legalese for individual human beings—'in the political sphere.' Which brings us back to Planned Parenthood Federation of America Inc. v. Kennedy. The corporate plaintiffs fully embrace that 'conceit.' They allege that the defunding measure violates their freedom of speech by punishing their advocacy of 'access to sexual and reproductive health care, including the right to safe and legal abortion.' They also claim violations of their rights to free association under the First Amendment and equal protection under the Fifth Amendment.
The Guardian
01-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Supreme court to hear case that could further erode campaign spending limits
The US supreme court agreed on Monday to hear a case that could further erode restrictions on money in politics, in a challenge that comes in part from Vice-President JD Vance. The National Republican Senatorial Committee, National Republican Congressional Committee, Vance and Steve Chabot, a former Republican congressman from Ohio, are challenging limits set on how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates. The case was filed when Vance was a senatorial candidate, in 2022. The court's landmark Citizens United ruling in 2010 threw away limits on outside spending on elections, allowing corporations and unions to inject unlimited money into elections as a matter of free speech. The current challenge from Republicans makes a similar argument, claiming that limits on how much spending can be coordinated with a campaign impede their first amendment rights. It also comes at a time where unfettered outside spending has become a norm in US politics. The case is challenging limits to what is called 'coordinated' spending between a party and the campaign, while independent expenditures, those often made by political action committees, have been unlimited since Citizens United. The limits themselves vary depending on population and which office a candidate is seeking. On the low end, a candidate for the US House of Representatives in a state with multiple representatives would be limited to $63,600, while a Senatecandidate in a state with a large voting age population would be nearly $4m. The US court of appeals for the sixth circuit upheld the limits based on a prior supreme court ruling in 2001 on coordinated spending, but the plaintiffs have argued this 2001 decision is outdated given other more recent campaign finance decisions. The Trump administration filed a brief in the case that aligned with Republicans, and the justice department called on the supreme court to consider the case. Democratic groups have asked to intervene to defend the existing limits. The case will be heard in the court's next term, which starts in October. ScotusBlog, the much-watched website written by lawyers and legal scholars, says the case 'may be the first potential blockbuster of October term 2025'.
