Court rejects challenge to Miss. campaign finance law
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court won't hear an appeal challenging the constitutionality of a Mississippi campaign finance law that requires reporting by people or groups spending at least $200 to support or oppose a ballot measure.
The justices on Monday left in place an appeals court ruling that upheld the law over claims it is too burdensome.
Five Mississippi residents sued in 2011, arguing that the law limited their free speech and association rights. They were backing an initiative that voters ultimately approved to limit the government's use of eminent domain to take private land. The group purchased posters, bought advertising in a local newspaper and distributed flyers to voters.
A federal judge ruled the $200 reporting threshold was too burdensome for smaller groups. But a federal appeals panel reversed that decision.
Justices turn down class-action appeals by Wells Fargo, Wal-Mart
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court is turning down appeals by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. of multimillion-dollar class-action judgments.
The high court orders Monday follow last month's decision upholding a $5.8 million judgment against Tyson Foods Inc.
The appeals turned away by the justices raise similar issues relating to the use of statistical evidence in class actions.
Wells Fargo was appealing a $203 million judgment for charging customers too much in overdraft fees relating to debit-card purchases.
Wal-Mart was objecting to a judgment of more than $151 million in favor of employees who were forced to work through lunch breaks at Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores in Pennsylvania.
Court sides with sex offender in dispute over registry
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Monday that a convicted sex offender did not have to update his status on the federal sex offender registry after moving to a foreign country.
The justices sided with Lester Nichols, a Kansas man who moved to the Philippines in 2012 after his release from prison without telling authorities.
Nichols was arrested in Manila and brought back to the United States, where he was convicted of failing to update his sex-offender registration. A federal appeals court upheld his conviction, but the Supreme Court reversed that.
Writing for the court, Justice Samuel Alito said a straightforward reading of the 2006 Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act does not require registry updates after a sex offender moves out of the United States.
The justices took up the case to resolve an unusual split between appeals courts that had reached different outcomes in the cases of two men who lived within a few miles of each other - one in Kansas City, Kansas, the other in Kansas City, Missouri.
The federal appeals court in Denver upheld Nichols' conviction, but the federal appeals court in St. Louis said a convicted sex offender from Missouri did not have to register after he also moved to the Philippines.
Alito said the high court's ruling on Monday does not allow sex offenders to escape any punishment for leaving the country without notice. Congress recently criminalized the failure of sex offenders to provide information about "travel in foreign commerce." Alito said the new law would apply to Nichols' conduct and noted that Nichols' actions also violated state law in Kansas.
"We are thus reassured that our holding today is not likely to create loopholes and deficiencies," in the federal legislation designed to keep track of sex offenders, Alito said.
The case is Nichols v. United States, 15-5238.
Justices bolster political influence of U.S. Latinos
By Mark Sherman
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court unanimously endorsed election maps that bolster the growing political influence of America's Latinos on Monday, ruling that states can count everyone, not just eligible voters, in drawing voting districts.
The decision rejected a challenge from Texas voters that also could have diluted the voting power of urban Democrats, to the benefit of rural Republicans.
The case offered a test of the principle of "one person, one vote," the requirement laid out by the Supreme Court in 1964 that political districts be roughly equal in population. The issue here, though, was what population to consider: everyone or just eligible voters.
All 50 states use total population as their basis for drawing district lines, but the challengers said the rural state Senate districts in which they lived had vastly more eligible voters than urban districts, making their votes count for less, in violation of the Constitution.
In Texas, and other states with large immigrant populations, urban districts include many more people who are too young, not yet citizens, in the country illegally or otherwise ineligible to vote. All of them, recorded by the census, count for the purpose of drawing political districts.
Civil rights groups said forcing states to change their method of constructing districts would have damaged Latino political influence.
"Jurisdictions, we hold, may design state and local legislative districts with equal total populations; they are not obliged to equalize voter populations," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, summarizing her opinion for the court.
Ginsburg said that "history, our decisions and settled practice in all 50 states and countless local jurisdictions point in the same direction." She also declared that "representatives serve all residents, not just those eligible or registered to vote" and that nonvoters have an important stake in many policy debates.
The court stopped short of saying that states must use total population. And it also did not rule on whether states are free to use a different measure, as Texas had asked.
Ginsburg said the court was not resolving whether states may base maps on voter population.
Richard Hasen, an expert in election law at the University of California at Irvine Law School, said, "A contrary ruling would have shifted power to Republican, rural districts, and away from Democratic, urban areas."
Edward Blum, whose Project on Fair Representation backed the lawsuit, said he was disappointed in the outcome but predicted that "the issue of voter equality in the United States is not going to go away."
Though the justices were unanimous in upholding Texas' use of total population, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito declined to join Ginsburg's opinion.
Thomas said the Constitution gives the states the freedom to draw political lines based on different population counts. Referring to the 1964 case of Reynolds v. Sims, he said the high court "has never provided a sound basis for the one-person, one-vote principle."
Alito objected to Ginsburg's reliance on the Constitution's prescription for using the once-a-decade census to divvy up seats in the House of Representatives among the states. Alito said the history of congressional representation was the product of political compromise. "It is impossible to draw any clear constitutional command from this complex history," he said.
Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the court avoided "the elephant in the voting booth. The court failed to fill the gaping hole in its voting-rights jurisprudence: the question whether the venerable 'one-person, one-vote' principle requires equalizing people or voters ... when crafting representational districts."
When the justices heard arguments in the case in December, they seemed open to some of the challengers' arguments, but they also recognized the practical concerns that might result from forcing states to abandon the way they have drawn electoral districts for more than a half century.
The unanimous result came just a week after they split 4-4 in a high-profile case involving labor unions and appeared to be searching for a way to avoid a tie in a dispute over the Obama health care law's contraception mandate.
The current case is Evenwel v. Abbott, 14-940.
Published: Wed, Apr 06, 2016
