Ninth Circuit Sanity on Felon Disenfranchisement
Hans von Spakovsky /
Good news out of the liberal (and frequently reversed) Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — an en banc panel just upheld Washington State’s felon-disenfranchisement law and backtracked from a badly decided earlier opinion (Farrakhan v. Gregoire).
Liberals have been attacking state laws that take away the right to vote from persons convicted of felonies. They claim these laws violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) because they are “discriminatory.” Washington has had such a law in place since 1866, four years before the 15th Amendment even gave African Americans the right to vote. The felons who brought this suit claimed, in essence, that Washington’s law violated the VRA because of the statistical disparity between blacks and whites who are convicted of crimes in the state’s criminal justice system.
Of course, the 14th Amendment specifically gives states the right to abridge the right to vote “for participation in rebellion, or other crime.” Three other federal circuit courts of appeal, including the 11th, the 2nd, and the 1st, have thrown out such Voting Rights Act claims brought by liberal advocacy groups because of that constitutional authority and the legislative history of the VRA, which makes it pretty clear that it wasn’t intended to apply to such felon laws. (more…)