NEW YORK, NY – The Manhattan Institute's director of constitutional studies Ilya Shapiro comments on today's Supreme Court's decision in the case Moore v. Harper:
"Although this ruling will be hailed as a loss for conservatives, it’s very much a middle-of-the-road decision which says that state courts still have a role to play in interpreting state constitutional provisions—but they can go too far and there’s a federal-court backstop. In Chief Justice Roberts’s words, the Supreme Court 'has an obligation to ensure that state court interpretations of state law do not evade federal law.' The ruling thus reinforces the view that federal election law is ultimately policed by federal courts, so 'state courts may not transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review such that they arrogate to themselves the power vested in state legislatures to regulate federal elections.' But then the Court declines to adopt a standard for determining when state courts cross the line, or even saying whether the North Carolina court did so here. In other words, anyone looking for guidance in evaluating whether what a state supreme court does ahead of the 2024 election is constitutionally kosher will have to wait until the justices are forced to make that hard balls-and-strikes call that the chief justice referenced at his confirmation hearings.
"And by the by, the voting lineups from today’s three decisions, and the statistics for justices most often in the majority this term, belie the narrative that we have an extreme right-wing Court. That won’t change regardless how the remaining high-profile cases come down."
Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. For media inquiries, please contact press officer Nicolas Abouchedid at nabouchedid@manhattan.institute.
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