Supreme Court Partly Restores Voter Proof-of-Citizenship Law
(Bloomberg) -- The US Supreme Court will let Arizona partially enforce a state law that requires residents to provide proof of US citizenship to register to vote ahead of the November election.
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The Republican National Committee had asked the justices to intervene in the battleground state for Donald Trump’s campaign after a federal district judge blocked the law. The case tested an 18-year-old Supreme Court precedent that cautions federal judges against changing voting rules too close to an election.
The order Thursday means Arizona officials will reject state registration applications that don’t meet the criteria for proving citizenship though not federal forms. The state attorney general’s office had opposed putting the law into effect now, citing concerns about injecting confusion into the 2024 election cycle.
Four justices — liberals Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson and conservative Amy Coney Barrett — would have rejected the RNC request.
Conservatives Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch would have gone further and also allowed enforcement of provisions that would bar Arizonans from voting in presidential races or by mail if they used a federally provided form to register without giving proof of citizenship.
The Supreme Court as a whole gave no explanation for its decision, as is frequently the case with emergency applications.
The case took a tangled path to the Supreme Court. A federal judge blocked the state from enforcing the law, and the RNC appealed to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, asking for an order to let the state enforce the law while the court fight continued.
A three-person panel — made up of all Trump-appointed judges — partially granted the RNC’s request, ruling that the law could be enforced for registration forms produced by the state.
The advocacy groups that brought the case then asked to have a different 9th Circuit panel review that decision. On Aug. 1, the second panel voted 2-1 to restore the district court’s original injunction fully blocking enforcement of the law.
The two judges in the majority, both appointed by former President Bill Clinton, chastised the first panel for a “manifest injustice” by upending the status quo close to the July primary and during registration for the November general election.
Judge Patrick Bumatay, who was appointed by Trump, dissented. He wrote that the majority’s reversal of the first panel was “highly irregular” and that the court should be careful to avoid such steps given “the political nature of this case.”
Much of the wrangling concerned a 2006 Supreme Court case, Purcell v. Gonzalez, that has increasingly played a key role in pre-election legal fights. Individual justices have weighed in over the years with guidance on how lower courts should account for election proximity, but the court hasn’t offered a comprehensive framework. Leading up to the 2020 election, the justices disagreed about how the so-called “Purcell principle” should apply to litigation over voting procedures during the pandemic.
In its application to the Supreme Court, the RNC argued that the 9th Circuit majority got Purcell wrong, and that it was supposed to protect state laws against federal court intrusion during an election cycle, not broadly preserve the status quo.
The US Department of Justice, which also sued over the Arizona law, weighed in before the high court to argue in favor of leaving the injunction in place for the federal registration forms.
The case is Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota, 24A164.
(Updates with breakdown of court in fourth and fifth paragraphs.)
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