The Petitions of the Week column highlights some of the cert petitions recently filed in the Supreme Court. A list of all petitions we’re watching is available here.
In 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution generally permits states to strip people convicted of felonies of their right to vote. Widespread at the time, that practice has since fallen out of favor in many states
, although a minority still disenfranchise people who commit serious, non-election-related crimes. This week, we highlight petitions asking the court to consider, among other things, whether a provision of Mississippi’s constitution that permanently bars anyone convicted of a laundry list of nonviolent felonies from voting violates the federal Constitution.
Felony disenfranchisement has a long, and often racist, history. Section 241 of Mississippi’s constitution is no exception. The provision, which permanently bars anyone convicted of a listed felony from voting, was amended in 1890 to remove crimes more often committed by white residents and add those more commonly committed by Black residents. Supporters of the amendment stated openly that their goal was to keep Black men away from the ballot box.
Two years ago, the court rejected an earlier challenge to the provision. A group of Black state residents who had permanently lost their right to vote after being convicted of felonies listed in the provision argued that the 1890 amendment’s intent to discriminate against Black people, coupled with the provision’s continued emphasis today on crimes that disproportionately disenfranchise Black Mississippi residents, violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, which prohibits the government from treating people differently without a good reason.
Meanwhile, a second group of Black Mississippi residents who permanently lost their right to vote brought another challenge to the provision. In addition to claiming that it violates the 14th Amendment, they also argued that permanently stripping people of their right to vote violates the Eighth Amendment’s bar on cruel and unusual punishment.
A federal district court in Mississippi rejected the challenge. But a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reversed that decision, in part. Although it too rebuffed the 14th Amendment claim, the court of appeals agreed that the provision violates the Eighth Amendment, concluding it both disproportionately harms Black residents and defies society’s “evolving standards of decency.”
The full 5th Circuit, however, overruled that decision. The Supreme Court’s 1974 opinion green-lighting felony disenfranchisement had ruled that the text of the 14th Amendment — which strips congressional seats from states where the right to vote is “denied … except for participation in rebellion, or other crime” — generally permits states to bar people convicted of crimes from voting. It would make little sense, the 5th Circuit concluded, for the 14th Amendment to permit felony disenfranchisement only for the Eighth Amendment to prohibit it. But in any event, the court of appeals ruled that Mississippi’s permanent voting ban does not meet the high threshold to violate the latter.
In Hopkins v. Watson
, the challengers ask the justices to grant review and reverse the full 5th Circuit’s ruling. They argue that the text of the 14th Amendment does not permit states, like Mississippi, to permanently bar people convicted of felonies from the ballot box: It applies to states where voting is “denied … or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime,” they emphasize, and “abridged” means only a temporary loss. The challengers therefore ask the justices to “revisit” the court’s 1974 ruling, and clarify that permanent felony disenfranchisement is not only inconsistent with the 14th Amendment, but amounts to cruel and unusual punishment proscribed by the Eighth Amendment.
A list of this week’s featured petitions is below:
United States Postal Service v. Konan
24-351 Issue: Whether a plaintiff’s claim that she and her tenants did not receive mail because U.S. Postal Service employees intentionally did not deliver it to a designated address arises out of “the loss” or “miscarriage” of letters or postal matter under the Federal Tort Claims Act
.
Berk v. Choy
24-440 Issue: Whether a state law providing that a complaint must be dismissed unless it is accompanied by an expert affidavit may be applied in federal court.
Peterson v. Doe
24-449 Issue: Whether Arizona’s Save Women’s Sports Act
, which preserves the traditional practice of excluding biological males from girls’ and women’s sports teams and competitions, violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
Konan v. United States Postal Service
24-495 Issues: (1) Whether federal employees can be liable under the Ku Klux Klan Act
; and (2) whether or under what circumstances the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine — which holds that employees of the same entity cannot be liable for conspiracy — applies to the act.
Hopkins v. Watson
24-560 Issues: (1) Whether Section 241 of the Mississippi Constitution’s lifetime disenfranchisement of individuals who have completed their sentences for past felony convictions violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment; and (2) whether Section 2 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution’s “affirmative sanction” for and safe harbor from strict scrutiny review applies only to laws that temporarily abridge the right to vote based on “participation in rebellion, or other crime,” and not to laws like Section 241 that permanently deny the right to vote to individuals who have completed their sentences for past felony convictions.
“Sorry, for Kemi Badenoch, does not seem to be the hardest word,” said The Times
. Last week, the Tory leader used her first major speech in opposition to deliver a characteristically punchy “mea culpa” for her party’s failures in government. The Conservatives were wrong to leave the EU without a plan for growth, Badenoch said, and to make empty promises on immigration and net zero.
“The candour is refreshing,” said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian
. It usually takes years for losing parties to “face up to why they actually lost”. But it’s also a sign that Badenoch is “rattled”. And no wonder: the Tories are now in third place in several polls, behind Labour and Reform UK
. Admitting past mistakes will allow her to go on the attack against Nigel Farage
, who is “promising the earth” on immigration. But it also raises the question: what exactly will her party be selling, “if not the same old magic beans”?
“The answer is… hard to discern,” said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman
. You’ll notice Badenoch didn’t apologise for her own record in government – she seems physically incapable of admitting personal blame. She talked only of “valiant” personal successes, such as when she repealed several EU laws as business secretary. And while she gave a long list of “what was wrong with the country: low productivity
, high taxes… broken public services
” – Badenoch offered nothing “in the way of solutions”. She has vowed not to set out detailed policies until 2027, so that the party can take the time to “reflect”. In other words: she “still has no ideas”.
“Time is not a luxury Badenoch has,” said Sam Lister in the Daily Express
. While the Conservatives waste years taking the party back to “first principles”, Reform is out there “filling the vacuum”. Right now, Farage’s party “has by far the clearest policy positions on things vast numbers of voters care about”, said James Frayne in The Daily Telegraph
: cutting migration, getting tough on crime, taking on “woke”. If Badenoch carries on with a policy void for much longer, her party will go “from being a disappointment to an irrelevance”, and Reform will “effectively replace the Conservatives
as the official opposition”.
President Donald Trump called MSNBC and CNN the “enemy of the people” in a Truth Social post knocking Rachel Maddow.
Trump called the networks struggling with ratings a “good thing” because they are the “enemy of the people.”
“Wow! Rachel Maddow has horrible ratings. She’ll be off the air very soon. MSNBC IS CLOSE TO DEATH. CNN HAS REACHED THE BOTTOM. This is a good thing. They are the Enemy of the people!” he wrote.
Maddow recently returned to hosting her show five nights a week at MSNBC after a period of just hosting once a night a week. Fox News continues to pull a majority of the cable news-viewing public. According to end-of-year data
, both MSNBC and CNN have seen more than 50% of their audience tune out since Trump’s election victory. Viewership, however, typically dives for cable news following an election cycle and the recent drop is on par with 2016. MSNBC has seen a recent uptick, scoring their highest rating this week since the election with an 82% higher rating than December’s average.
CNN is on the heels of knocking
off 6% of its workforce (in a restructuring effort), and MSNBC will be spun off, along with other cable channels, by Comcast
.
Trump recently put MSNBC into his sights in another Truth Social post where he questioned whether they should have the “right”
to broadcast.
“MSDNC is even worse than CNN. They shouldn’t even have a right to broadcast — Only in America!” he wrote this week.
Israeli forces injured at least 17 people in the country’s south, Lebanese officials said. Both Hezbollah and Israel had agreed to withdraw their forces from the area as of Sunday.
The Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh announced that he was retiring from filmmaking
in 2013. By 2017, he had returned to work, releasing the delightful heist caper Logan Lucky
, and in the years since, new Soderbergh films have become as seemingly inevitable as death or taxes. The director has made nine films in the past eight years, encompassing satirical comedies (The Laundromat, High Flying Bird
), crime thrillers (No Sudden Move, Kimi
), and strange society spoofs (Magic Mike’s Last Dance
, Let Them All Talk). What they tend to have in common is the sense that the director made them on a whim: not sloppily, but airily, with Soderbergh always looking for an intriguing way to flesh out a basic tale.
“Airy but intriguing” is the best way to describe his newest film, Presence, too. It’s a haunted-house movie that avoids most of the genre’s obvious tropes. But Soderbergh’s rapid pace of production (usually by involving small casts and featuring limited plotlines, or sometimes shooting on iPhones) has become both an advantage and a hindrance—it enables him to tell such a wide swath of stories, but all of them feel novella-size. Presence, like much of the director’s recent work, is less an entrée than a charming apéritif,albeit with a couple of smart twists worth ruminating on.
The filmis deceptively straightforward: A family of four moves into a new home, and each member wrestles with some personal demon while also encountering whatever’s haunting the place. The clever conceit? We see the events from the perspective of the ghost—or whatever it is that’s watching everybody. Soderbergh and the screenwriter David Koepp—a fellow Hollywood mainstay—don’t tip their hands much about what, exactly, is going on until the film’s final moments. The fixed perspective makes Soderbergh’s camera a character of its own; it spies and swivels around every room, offering a clear perspective but keeping the being’s motivations unknown. It’s a simple visual notion, and yet somewhat unlike anything I’d ever seen before on the big screen.
Presence begins in an empty suburban home, the ghost peeking in on the real-estate agent Cece (played by Julia Fox) as she shows an interested family around; soon enough, they’re unpacking boxes, though they all seem out of sorts. There’s the tightly wound mom, Rebekah (Lucy Liu); the depressed dad, Chris (Chris Sullivan), who’s distracted by some unspecified transgression in his past; and two teenage kids: Tyler (Eddy Maday) and Chloe (Callina Liang), both of whom are mourning the recent, tragic loss of a friend. Information comes in dribs and drabs, because the viewers’ sole means of receiving it are through the eyes of this mysterious force. At first, the specter is primarily a static viewer, but eventually, it begins to zip through the house—as does the camera. But only occasionally does the being intentionally provoke a reaction from the tenants it’s peeping on, such as rumbling a table to startle someone; otherwise, it continues to lurk in the corners.
Watching the cinematic action through the eyes of a monster has obviously been done before in movies. The point-of-view shot is usually kept to a bravura scene or two—such as the famous opening sequence
of Halloween,and some of the director Brian De Palma’s memorable set pieces. The unseen “star” of Presence, however,is much more low-key than what’s shown in those slasher-film bits of flamboyance; at first, it seems almost afraid to show off any weird poltergeist powers before inching toward what’s happening around it. But the ghost eventually comes to intervene in the family’s life in odd ways and reveals, little by little, why it’s cooped up in the house.
The actual plotting is perfunctory stuff, though Koepp reliably communicates the character dynamics with a few crucial lines of dialogue. Rebekah can’t figure out how to console Chloe; Chloe, in turn, is drawn to one of Tyler’s friends, a classic bad boy named Ryan (West Mulholland)—the kind of romantic mistake many a teen might make, but with a slightly sinister edge. If the story played out more conventionally, it’d probably come off as pretty dull. But the magic of Presence is its feeling of constraint. Viewers can still see everything that’s going on from the first-person angle, allowing them to spot the warning signs that this family might disintegrate into further misery. Locking the audience into the perspective of a noncorporeal form is brilliantly limiting; ghosts are voyeurs, and as unsettling as it is to spy on this family, the far creepier feeling is that of being unable to do anything but watch. Soderbergh uses the barrier of the screen as part of the film’s story—as if to say we can look, but we can’t touch.
Although this is all psychologically disconcerting, Presence is hardly a traditional work of horror. There are no big jump scares, the atmosphere is deliberately mundane, and the mood is more melancholic than terrifying. The filmis, essentially, a domestic drama with a spooky metatextual twist. And as much as I’m enjoying Soderbergh’s postretirement era—defined by rapid-fire, slender movies—I do sometimes find myself longing for a full meal. Presence runs just 85 minutes long, but it’s a sharp jab to the ribs with a punchy, effective ending. I wonder what Soderbergh might be able to produce if he were willing to slow down and focus on what’s in front of him, instead of always itching to move onto his next experiment.
With estimates of the economic damage
running as high as $275 billion, the Los Angeles fires
are “shaping up to be one of the most expensive calamities on American soil”, said Parintha R. Sastry and Ishita Sen in The New York Times
. And it’s not all down to bad luck. This is a notoriously fire-prone area, and climate change is exacerbating the problem. Why, then, have people continued setting up home there?
One big reason is that they’ve been shielded from the true financial costs of doing so. For decades, California has imposed price controls to keep home insurance premiums artificially low. These prevented companies from, among other things, using catastrophe modelling to predict future risk; they could only assess premiums based on historical data. In response to ever more insurers fleeing the state, Californian lawmakers recently relaxed some of these controls, but insurance prices still don’t truly reflect the level of risk.
California’s insurance regime
is a mess, said The Wall Street Journal
. Unable to raise premiums to a fair level, many companies have instead capped maximum payouts, leaving some homeowners liable for hefty rebuilding costs. Luckily for them, the Federal Emergency Management Agency covers losses if homeowners are “under-insured”. The result? Taxpayers in Texas and Arkansas are subsidising the rebuilding of multimillion-dollar homes in California. The latest fires
should prompt a whole new approach to housing in the state, said Rachel Cohen on Vox
. Insurance rules must evolve, but there must also be a shift “away from fire-prone suburban sprawl and toward denser urban neighbourhoods that are naturally more fire-resistant”.
It does seem crazy that planners ever allowed development in the foothills and canyons outside LA, said Robin Abcarian in the Los Angeles Times
. With the wet winters to grow vegetation, the hot summers to dry it, and the “devilish winds” to stoke flames, the area is “a veritable gift to the fire gods”. Arguments about whether to rebuild after fires, and about who should pay for it, have been going on in the state for decades. Mike Davis’s 1995 polemic, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn”, is as relevant as ever. Yet nothing really changes. “Within five years, I predict, most of the Palisades, Malibu and Altadena will be rebuilt. Memories will fade, insurance rates will rise, life will go on – until the next fire.”
