A "conservative" court may doom democracy

The Republican goal since Reagan.

The Supreme Court has sided with Alabama state officials who banned curbside voting intended to accommodate individuals with disabilities and those at risk from the COVID-19 virus.

The high court issued its order Wednesday night, without explanation, over the dissent of the court's three liberal justices.

At issue was the decision by the Alabama secretary of state to ban counties from allowing curbside voting, even for those voters with disabilities and those for whom COVID-19 is disproportionately likely to be fatal.

[...]

After a three-day trial, a federal district court ruled that the ban on curbside voting violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, and that a policy allowing but not requiring counties to implement curbside voting was a reasonable accommodation under the law.

A federal appeals court upheld the ruling, and the state appealed to the Supreme Court to block the lower court decision from going into effect. Now the high court has granted the state's request for a stay of the lower court orders.

[...]

Dissenting from the high court's action were Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.

Writing for the three, Sotomayor noted that John Merrill, the Alabama secretary of state, "does not meaningfully dispute that the plaintiffs have disabilities, that COVID-19 is disproportionately likely to be fatal to these plaintiffs, and that traditional-in-person voting will meaningfully increase their risk of exposure."

Moreover, said Sotomayor, in-person voting is considerably easier than voting by mail in Alabama. At the polls, voters with disabilities receive assistance from poll workers; they need no witnesses, notaries, or copies of their photo IDs, as Alabama law requires for absentee ballots, and they know their ballots will not arrive too late to be counted.

In addition, she noted, curbside voting has been recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the pandemic, and the Justice Department has approved it as well as a way to prevent violations of the ADA.

  NPR

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

In an interview airing Sunday on "60 Minutes," [presidential candidate Joe] Biden told O'Donnell that if elected he would put together a bipartisan group to provide recommendations within 180 days on how his administration should work to reform the U.S. court system.

"If elected, what I will do is I'll put together a national commission of bipartisan commission of scholars, constitutional scholars, Democrats, Republicans, liberal/conservative. And I will...ask them to over 180 days come back to me with recommendations as to how to reform the court system because it's getting out of whack...the way in which it’s being handled," Biden said in a video released by CBS on Thursday.

  

UPDATE:

Another Gore v. Bush bullshit ruling. We're just doing this for this particular case, so if the situation should arise where the shoe is on the other foot, we can make a different decision.

UPDATE: