SUPREME CORT - Specialty License Plates and Voter ID Laws

"How the First Amendment affects your specialty license plate" PBS NewsHour 3/23/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Does the state of Texas have the right to issue specialty license plates featuring a Confederate flag?  Marcia Coyle of The National Law Journal fills in Gwen Ifill on the case being argued at the Supreme Court, as well as a decision to not take up a Wisconsin voter ID case.

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  It was a busy day at the Supreme Court.  The justices decided not to take up a voter I.D. case out of Wisconsin, and they heard arguments over the right to issue license plates in Texas that feature a Confederate Flag.

NewsHour contributor Marcia Coyle of The National Law Journal was there again and joins me now.

Let’s start by talking about this Wisconsin case.  In 2011, it was a big deal, this idea that voters had to present photo I.D.s at the polls.  And this was considered by Democrats to be voter suppression and by Republicans a chance to beat back voter fraud.

So now this gets to the Supreme Court, and they decided to end it?

MARCIA COYLE, The National Law Journal:  Not really.

They decided not to hear the Wisconsin case, so that leaves in place the lower court decision upholding Wisconsin’s law.  But the court said nothing about the merits of the challenge to Wisconsin’s law.  And, Gwen, right now, there are a number of other cases pending and moving up the pipeline that challenge other states’ voter I.D. laws, and, in particular, Texas and North Carolina.

Texas, there was a full-blown trial and the judge in that case found intentional racial discrimination by the state of Texas, unlike in Wisconsin.  That case is now on appeal in the Fifth Circuit, and it is expected whoever loses will take it to the Supreme Court.  So as of today, we really don’t know how the justices think about some of these laws.

GWEN IFILL:  But we know that, originally, this was put on hold not because of the merits of the case, but because it was too close to an election.

MARCIA COYLE:  Exactly.  There’s a court doctrine.  The court doesn’t like to see changes to election law shortly before elections.

The Wisconsin law was going to go in effect right before midterm elections.  Now, today, the ACLU and other groups that have challenged Wisconsin’s law immediately went to the lower court to ask again that it be put on hold temporarily, because there is an April 6, I believe, election.  And, again, they haven’t had time to implement the changes.

GWEN IFILL:  Right.  OK.

Well, let’s move on to the arguments of the case today, because it seems like we never get away from a debate, periodically, politically, legally, about the Confederate Flag, this time on a license plate.