ACSBlog

by Nicole Flatow

To address increasing concern about restrictive new state voting laws, several House members are hosting a forum Monday, featuring leading legal and civil rights leaders.

The forum, “Excluded from Democracy: The Impact of Recent State Voting Law Changes,” will consider these laws’ potential to decrease voter participation and access to the ballot, especially for minority, low-income, elderly and student voters. According to a widely publicized report by the Brennan Center for Justice, laws passed in 14 states that require photo IDs, eliminate early voting and same-day registration, and impose other restrictions “could make it significantly harder for more than five million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012.”

“We are in a moment right now where we are seeing the most aggressive attempt to roll back voting rights in this country that we’ve seen in over a century,” said NAACP President and CEO Ben Jealous, who will speak at the forum Monday, in a video about the cause and impact of the state voting laws by the Brave New Foundation and the Advancement Project.

Last week, two of the House members hosting the forum, House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and House Administration Committee Ranking Member Robert Brady (D-Pa.), sent a letter signed by nearly 200 of their colleagues, calling on state officials “to oppose new state measures adopted over the last year that would make it harder for eligible voters to register or vote.”

Two other hosts of the forum, House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member John Conyers (D-Mich.) and House Judiciary Constitution Subcommittee Ranking Member Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.)called on the House Judiciary Committee to conduct hearings on the restrictive new measures.

Participants in the forum will include:

by Jeremy Leaming

As the Supreme Court justices near a decision on whether to grant review of a legal challenge to the Obama administration’s landmark health care reform law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a potentially persuasive path for addressing the matter has emerged for the high court’s conservative wing, Simon Lazarus writes for Slate.

Lazarus, public policy counsel for the National Senior Citizens Law Center, takes a closer look at this week’s opinion from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, noting that the majority opinion written by Reagan-appointee Judge Laurence H. Silberman “directly confronted the challenge to the individual mandate [the ACA’s integral provision requiring individuals to carry health care insurance starting in 2014], and rejected it outright. That’s a formidable statement from a conservative icon – and a warning shot to the justices of the Supreme Court.”

Silberman’s opinion has grabbed attention because of his conservative bona fides, but Lazarus says the real power behind it rests on the methodology used to dismantle opponents’ arguments against the law.