GOP Ohio suit derailed

First, the staid and sober news report:

The Supreme Court sided Friday with Ohio’s top elections official in a dispute with the state Republican Party over voter registrations.

The justices overruled a federal appeals court that had ordered Ohio’s top elections official to do more to help counties verify voter eligibility.

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, faced a deadline of Friday to set up a system to provide local officials with names of newly registered voters whose driver’s license numbers or Social Security numbers on voter registration forms don’t match records in other government databases.

Ohio Republicans contended the information for counties would help prevent fraud. Brunner said the GOP is trying to disenfranchise voters.

In a brief unsigned opinion, the justices said they were not commenting on whether Ohio is complying with a provision of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 that lays out requirements for verifying voter eligibility.

Instead, they said they were granting Brunner’s request because it appears that the law does not allow private entities, like the Ohio GOP, to file suit to enforce the provision of the law at issue.

And now, the Democratic reaction:

Woo-hoo!

This post was really just an excuse to post the funniest political animation I’ve seen in a while. Stolen outright - but with gratitude - from Muzikal203 at dKos.

But more seriously, here’s David Kurtz from TPM with his take on the SCOTUS decision:

It didn’t address the merits of the case per se (although in some ways the court’s ruling goes straight to the merits). Rather, it found that the GOP was unlikely to prevail on the issue of whether the Help America Vote Act (the law at issue here) allows private citizens or groups to sue to enforce the law. If the law doesn’t create a so-called private right of action, the GOP has no standing to sue in the first place. Likelihood of prevailing on the merits is a key criteria for taking the extraordinary step of granting a TRO. Since the justices thought the GOP would ultimately lose on that argument, they vacated the TRO.

Now, I’ll be curious to see where the GOP goes from here. There’s not enough time to pursue this case on the merits before the election. So as a practical matter it may kill the case in Ohio entirely. But perhaps more importantly, it puts a stop to the GOP or any other private party gumming up the works over the next 18 days by filing similar cases in courts across the country.

Also, Oliver Willis visits Free Republic to sample extreme right-wing responses.

Okay. Where were we? Oh, wait. I remember.

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