Pondering the Supreme Court’s Future by Linda Greenhouse
'Anyone interested in the future of the Supreme Court might ponder a three-sentence order the court issued on the last day of August. It announced the court’s denial of North Carolina’s emergency request to reinstate the voter ID and two other provisions of its election law that a federal appeals court struck down this summer as intentionally discriminatory.
Had Justice Antonin Scalia been alive and voting, the state’s motion would undoubtedly have been granted, giving North Carolina a green light to conduct the Nov. 8 election under a law that the appeals court found to have been devised “with almost surgical precision” for the purpose of suppressing the African-American vote.
That would have been an astonishing outcome, raising to a new and dangerous level the intentional blindness with which the court, in the Shelby County case three years ago, disabled a major provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. So in thinking about the new Supreme Court term about to get underway, I want to unpack the Aug. 31 order, which got too little attention outside North Carolina, and consider other ways in which Justice Scalia’s absence might shape at least the early months of the new term.'>>>
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/opinion/pondering-the-supreme-courts-future.html?
