Votes for me but not for thee (#16)
It's getting harder and harder to vote in some states — and that's not by accident.
In case you haven’t heard, voting rights in the U.S. are under attack. Not by bad faith MAGA simps intimidating election workers, but by the very legislative bodies governing the states. And the U.S. Supreme Court (or SCOTUS) has effectively legitimized these takedowns through its latest decision, which experts say has gutted what’s left of the already defanged Voting Rights Act of 1965.
It’s no secret there’s been a mass movement by Republican states to enact more voting restrictions, even before ex-President Donald Trump’s defeat in November. But among states with the worst restrictions put in place following the GOP’s defeat is Georgia, which you might recall was a key battleground for the Democrats; not only did the Peach State turn Blue for the first time in **30 years**, the elections of both Sen. Raphael Warnock and Sen. Jon Ossof also helped deliver a slim majority in the Senate for Democrats, giving them full control of the federal government’s legislative branch.
In response, in April, Georgia’s Republican-controlled state legislature enacted a number of countermeasures that weren’t even subtle about trying to disenfranchise voters. Some of these include imposing new ID requirements for absentee ballots, setting an earlier deadline for requesting those absentee ballots, and even giving the state legislature more control over how elections are run through the state’s election board.
One of the most controversial voting measures out of Georgia has been the banning of giving out food or drinks to voters in line, which was a ubiquitous sight during last year’s elections when people had to endure hours-long queues to cast their votes.
Some supporters of Georgia’s new voting laws have argued that the new laws are “friendlier” to voters than some liberal states like New York — which, I’m sorry to tell you, despite its liberal reputation actually has some of the most outdated voting laws in the country. So, not a great benchmark to use! In any case, Georgia’s new voting laws are so bad that they’ve drawn explicit criticism from the White House and have led the Department of Justice to sue the state.
But Georgia is hardly the only state suffering from Republican retaliation through voting restrictions. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan policy think tank, state lawmakers have introduced 361 bills with restrictive provisions in 47 states as of March 24.
However, it was the new voting laws out of Arizona that were the main focus of the recent SCOTUS decision that left many baffled. Among the state’s new laws is a ban on absentee ballot collections by anyone other than a relative or caregiver and a law that trashes ballots cast in the wrong precinct.
Before the SCOTUS ruling, a federal appeals court had struck down both provisions on the basis that they had an unequal impact on minority voters — particularly Black and Latino voters, notably both voting blocs that tend to favor Democrats — and that there was basically no evidence of fraud to justify the use of these provisions.
But the laws were upheld by the Supreme Court in a 6-3 vote, swung by the court’s conservative majority (which, in case you forgot, includes angry beer fan/alleged almost-rapist Brett Kavanaugh), on the argument that the laws “only” slightly disproportionately impacted minority voters and that they were still similar to those in other states. Again, that is a terrible metric to use for measuring voting fairness when many states today still have outdated voting laws.
Faulty logic aside, what’s most incredible to me is the Supreme Court’s majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, which was quite telling. It basically admitted that, sure, AZ’s new laws might have a ~slight~ outsize impact on minority voters, but that doesn’t make these laws suppressive and/or unconstitutional:
“The mere fact there is some disparity in impact does not necessarily mean that a system is not equally open or that it does not give everyone an equal opportunity to vote.”
He really put ink on paper to say that! But that’s not all. The majority opinion also noted that disparities in voting and non-compliance with voting laws among racial demographics are expected no matter what because of the existing disparities in wealth, employment, and education between demographics.
Read those paragraphs again if you must because it’s hard to believe those words escaped from the brains of the people who make up the highest court in the land, who are in charge of dispensing the utmost ruling on justice. But there you have it, folks.
Justice Elena Kagan, writing the dissent on behalf of the minority liberal Justices on the Supreme Court, didn’t mince words: “What is tragic here is that the Court has [yet again] rewritten—in order to weaken—a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses.” NPR described the SCOTUS decision as having “left close to a dead letter the law once hailed as the most effective civil rights legislation in the nation's history.”
These attacks on state voting laws by Republican lawmakers are why Democrats in Congress had pushed the For the People Act, which would’ve been a stonger successor to the defanged Voting Rights Act.
But as I wrote in a previous newsletter, that effort was derailed thanks in part to hardcore centrists like Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (AZ-D) and Sen. Joe Manchin (WV-D) — at least, for now. Vice President Kamala Harris has suggested the White House will be pushing for an updated version of the old Voting Rights Act, which had a key provision regarding federal oversight on state voting law changes in the bill nullified by the Supreme Court in 2013, triggering the slow but steady gutting of voting rights across the country since (the 2013 ruling was what Justice Kagan had meant when she stated “yet again” in her recent dissent).
In the 2013 SCOTUS ruling, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously wrote in her minority dissent: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
It looks like we’re about due for a thunderstorm.
HOW BRITNEY SUPER STANS SOUNDED THE ALARM TO HER ABUSIVE CONSERVATORSHIP
When I first read about the #FreeBritney movement last year, I’ll be honest, I waved it off as one of those maybeeee it could be true??? type of fan conspiracies. It was an intriguing theory: the world’s most popular popstar held hostage by her people, in need of “rescue” by her rabid fanbase (disclaimer: having grown up in the 90s/early aughts, the peak of Britney’s stardom, I am 100% Team Britney but do not identify as a stan!). But the part where fans were claiming that they could see ~secret messages~ left by the pop star on her bizarre Instagram — which led to the Britney’s Gram podcast created by two stans — was too much for me to take seriously.
Then, in February, Hulu dropped its Framing Britney Spears documentary, an investigative report about Britney’s conservatorship by the New York Times. Apparently, the noise that her stans had made around her fishy conservatorship was compelling enough that it raised legitimate suspicions: was Britney Spears actually being held hostage? That documentary, which shed light on the extent of the singer’s lack of autonomy under the conservatorship, turned the case from a fringe fan conspiracy into a full-blown legal scandal.
By now, with all that’s been reported, you might’ve learned a few facts about Britney’s conservatorship: that it gives her very little control over her life both personally and financially — including limited access to her $60 million fortune — and that it’s been in place for the last 13 years. But more disturbing details have come to light.
Last month, the singer spoke publicly about her conservatorship for the first time in a brutally raw open-court testimony in which she alleged, among other things, that she was threatened with a lawsuit when she said that she didn’t want to go on tour again, put on lithium against her will, and prohibited by her conservators from seeing a doctor to get off birth control.
The New Yorker just published a new investigative piece by star writers Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino, revealing more harrowing features about Britney’s conservatorship. In the piece, Farrow and Tolentino add more color to the events leading up to the conservatorship, painting a clearer picture about who played what role in the conservatorship’s eventual establishment over Britney’s life. The pop star’s conservatorship has come to represent a broken legal system, how it can render a person “disabled” in the eyes of the law, and strip them entirely of their rights.
The article is an alarming (and lengthy) account of Britney’s tortured existence for the last decade under the conservatorship which is co-led by her overbearing dad-manager, Jamie Spears. One of the things that stuck out to me was the fact that nearly everyone in Britney’s imminent circle is *on her payroll* — including her immediate family and the court-appointed individuals involved in her conservatorship.
Knowing this, it’s not hard to see how a guardianship system can turn abusive, especially when the conservatee is a pop star able to generate millions of dollars in profit (Britney has continued to rake in massive amounts of money through a Las Vegas residency, TV gigs, and multiple album sales, just to name a few of her major incomes). These people are dependent on her conservatorship, which was casually described in court documents as a “hybrid business model” (??); it was obviously beneficial to Britney’s conservators to keep her on a tight leash and keep her working through her conservatorship so they could continue to get paid. According to the New Yorker, anyone who threatened the conservatorship’s existence was hastily removed from Britney’s circle, including housekeepers and boyfriends, by those in charge.
Disability rights advocates say Britney’s experience is unfortunately too common for many conservatees who have less privilege than a world pop star. And while in theory judges are supposed to exhaust less restrictive forms of guardianship — like conditional powers of attorney or formal shared control of finances — before approving conservatorship, it’s usually not done that way, allowing legal restrictions placed on an individual to continue unfettered even when they become detrimental.
Fundamental flaws in conservatorship, reflected through Britney’s case, are why the case has become a focal point for disability rights advocates: while guardianships might have been created with the best of intentions, they are prone to abuse. Many people in similar legal situations — those who are elderly or who have profound physical disabilities or a debilitating mental illness — have been severely disempowered this way.
An estimated 1.3 million adults in the U.S. are currently under court-appointed guardianship. Britney’s conservatorship, however, is supposed to remain in effect until September based on a court decision that came out before her emotional testimony last month (her attorney, Samuel Ingham, who some say was more loyal to her father’s wishes than his client’s, filed a petition to resign today). It’s unclear what’s next for Britney but what is clear is that nobody should have their autonomy robbed from them as she has. And if Britney is ever able to break free, she will owe it to her loyal stans.
What do you think about Britney’s case? Should the courts #FreeBritney or not? Sound off in the comments or reply to this email with your thoughts!
TWEET OF THE WEEK
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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
🔥 Would you climb a mountain for internet access? In Kashmir’s Gilgit-Baltistan, many are forced to. | Rest of World
🔥 Argentina passed a federal law that requires at least 1% of jobs in the public sector to be reserved for trans people and includes an economic incentive for private companies that hire trans employees. | The Lily/Washington Post
🔥 Some Afghan youths have turned to the growing hip-hop community to cope with their mental health struggles from the war. | The Diplomat
🔥 In Turkey, a hot summer destination for European Muslims, a niche tourism business model is arising: “halal-friendly” tourism. | Newlines Magazine
🔥 Donald Trump’s estranged niece, Mary, spoke on the tax fraud case against the Trump Organization, which saw CFO Allen Weisselberg indicted on grand larceny, and said it could be Ivanka who turns on Trump first. Listen here. | The Daily Beast
🔥 A California cop went viral after he tried to “block” a protester’s video of their encounter from being posted on YouTube by playing a Taylor Swift song during their conversation, hoping to trigger copyright laws. Well, it backfired. | Variety
🔥 North America is burning and, for all the advances in infrastructure, it was never built for this kind of heat. | The Atlantic
🔥 If you think the heatwave here is terrible, remember that countries in the Global South have already borne the brunt of climate change and that has direct links to the colonial legacy of the world’s wealthier nations. | The Conversation
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TTFN~*,
Natasha