The Supreme Court Blesses Voter Purges
“The dissents have a policy disagreement, not just with Ohio, but with Congress,” Justice Samuel Alito primly pronounced Monday in his majority opinion in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, the Ohio “voter purge” case. “But this case presents a question of statutory interpretation, not a question of policy.”
Whenever a court claims to be engaged in policy-free statutory interpretation, check your wallet. Sometimes the claim is true; but more often than not, somebody’s getting robbed.
Alito, writing for a five-justice majority, resolved a seeming conflict among provisions of federal voting law by concluding that the aggressive procedure Ohio (under the leadership of a conservative Republican secretary of state, ) adopted to purge its voter rolls of supposedly ineligible voters, does not violate federal statutes. (He was joined by the other four conservatives—Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch; Justice Thomas
