'Troubling omen': Columnist highlights 'worrisome' Supreme Court move ahead of election

The Supreme Court just went out of its way to step on voting rights and overrule a pair of courts that credibly found Virginia violated federal law, a columnist wrote Wednesday in The Washington Post.

The issue concerns a move by GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin to identify and remove "non-citizens" from voter rolls in Virginia — a process that would generally be legal and required, but that cannot be conducted in the "quiet period" 90 days before an election, under the National Voter Registration Act, because it doesn't give legal voters enough time to correct the issue if they are removed in error.

The Justice Department sued over the matter, and two federal courts found the state violated the law. But in an unsigned and unexplained order, the Supreme Court's six right-wing justices temporarily lifted the lower court's orders, allowing Virginia to resume the purges for now.

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Ruth Marcus, who is also an associate editor at the Post, wrote that "Virginia’s argument boiled down to a contention that the law doesn’t mean what it actually says — that it doesn’t cover purges of noncitizens from voter rolls because they 'were never eligible to vote in the first place.' Therefore, Virginia says, they aren’t 'ineligible voters' under the terms of the law."

A federal appeals court rejected the argument, she noted, writing: "That argument violates basic principles of statutory construction by focusing on a differently worded statutory provision that is not at issue here and proposing a strained reading of the Quiet Period Provision. … That is not how courts interpret statutes."

GOP efforts to purge non-citizens from voter rolls around the country, driven by conspiracy theories from right-wing groups and promoted by former President Donald Trump, are largely for show — it's already illegal for non-citizens to vote and such instances are incredibly rare. Many citizens are accidentally caught up in these purges, however; a recent report detailed a Trump supporter in Texas who was shocked to find herself kicked off the rolls and her citizenship challenged.

The real problem, wrote Marcus, is that the Supreme Court, without explaining itself, intervened to let Virginia keep violating the law in a way the GOP favored — via an unaccountable "emergency" procedure known by critics as the "shadow docket."

"Even more worrisome is what this augurs in election cases down the road," wrote Marcus. "If the justices were willing to step in here, where intervention was so unnecessary, so unwise and so out of the ordinary, where else will they interfere in this election? Tuesday’s order is a troubling omen in troubling times."