Heidi Heitkamp's Campaign Might Be Sunk by the Latest Injustice Visited on Native Americans
Senator Heidi Heitkamp's vote against the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court just became braver, and her path to re-election may just have ended in a bottomless ravine, thanks to that very same body on which Kavanaugh now sits.
In 2012, Heitkamp won her election by 3,000 votes. Crucial to that margin were the Native American voters in North Dakota. Naturally, when it came to those voters this time around, the Roberts Supreme Court, having declared the Day of Jubilee for black folks, declined to involve itself with the suppression of votes cast by certain people out on the prairies. FromFortune:
The law requires that North Dakota residents provide identification that includes a residential street address in order to vote. But the state is home to thousands of Native Americans and others who do not have standard addresses, which the challengers argued would effectively disenfranchise them. A federal district court in North Dakota agreed with them in April, blocking the Secretary of State from enforcing the new requirements and thereby allowing voters to cast ballots in the primaries. But last month, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals put the district court’s order on hold.
It's pretty obvious that the law was designed to suppress the votes of Native Americans who generally vote Democratic. (You may have missed that in all the "Democratic activists say that the law..." formulations that greeted the world's most obvious legally sanctified ratfcking.) Once again, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg insisted in a dissent that we all live in the real world.
The risk of voter confusion appears severe here because the injunction against requiring residential-address identification was in force during the primary election and because the Secretary of State’s website announced for months the ID requirements as they existed under that injunction...Reasonable voters may well assume that the IDs allowing them to vote in the primary election would remain valid in the general election.
And, boy howdy, are they ever in for a surprise.
Massacres. Forced relocation. Worthless treaties. And now, again, disenfranchisement. It never stops.
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