Just a few weeks ago, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned the nation that the court’s conservative majority was putting its “thumbs on the scale” for the Trump administration, benefiting “one litigant over all others.”
In Wisconsin this week, Justice Sotomayor was proven right.
Just hours before Tuesday’s election, Brett Kavanaugh and the conservatives shut down a lower court ruling that would have freed tens of thousands of Wisconsinites to cast ballots by mail, instead forcing them to put their or their neighbors’ lives at risk in order to vote during this pandemic.
With that order, the court threw its full weight behind Trump and state Republicans’ atrocious scheme to use the pandemic to drive down turnout in Democratic areas – and with 95% of polling sites closed in Wisconsin’s largest Democratic city, Kavanaugh and the Republicans got exactly what they wanted.
Now, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is speaking out, too, warning in her dissent that the court’s ruling “will result in massive disenfranchisement.” Democrats everywhere must mobilize IMMEDIATELY to ensure that doesn’t happen.
This outrageous Republican power-grab in Wisconsin is the clearest signal yet that Trump and GOP state legislators will stop at nothing to win this fall – even if that means exploiting the global pandemic to block millions of voters from the polls.
But now, the five conservatives on the Supreme Court have signaled that they, too, will willingly participate in Trump’s scheme.
It’s absolutely critical that we heed Justice Sotomayor and Justice Ginsburg’s warnings and fight back against these voter suppression efforts. We only have a few weeks in some cases to respond, and time is running short.
