The Republican National Committee is cutting ties to Strategic Allied Consulting, a voter registration firm under investigation for turning in fraudulent voter registration forms in Florida. The RNC hired the firm to do voter registration drives for $3.1 million this year.

The firm’s founder, Nathan Sproul, is a longtime Republican strategist whose reputation was tarred by widespread accusations of voter registration fraud and attempts to suppress Democratic voter turnout. George W. Bush’s campaign reportedly paid Sproul over $8 million for his work in the 2004 election. Sproul, now under new scrutiny, claims he started Strategic Allied Consulting because the RNC wanted to hide his past:

Sproul said he created Strategic Allied Consulting at the RNC’s request because the party wanted to avoid being publicly linked to the past allegations. The firm was set up at a Virginia address, and Sproul does not show up on the corporate paperwork.

“In order to be able to do the job that the state parties were hiring us to do, the [RNC] asked us to do it with a different company’s name, so as to not be a distraction from the false information put out in the Internet,” Sproul said.

The committee is now scrambling to distance itself from Sproul after Florida launched a criminal investigation into the company. Strategic Allied Consulting submitted 106 “questionable” voter registration forms to the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections, and several other counties have discovered fraudulent forms as well. The Florida GOP fired the firm on Tuesday night.

Republicans have launched relentless efforts to prevent in-person voter fraud, which is exceptionally rare, yet seem to have ignored the real threat of voter registration fraud by their own consultant. In a twist one Florida Supervisor of Elections called “ironic,” Sproul’s organization was in fact registering dead voters as Republicans, even as Republican lawmakers all over the country justified discriminatory voter purges with the threat of dead voters showing up to the polls.

The following is the first in a multi-part series on the Supreme Court term that begins this Monday. Part I of the series is here.

Ordinary workers and consumers stand on a profoundly uneven playing field when they have to bring well-moneyed corporations to court. While major companies can employ armies of lawyers to protect their interests, middle class Americans rarely have the funds to hire even a single attorney who possesses the same credentials and experience as a major law firm’s army. Indeed, an ordinary family that has just been cheated out of a few hundred or thousand dollars may quickly discover that the cost of hiring any lawyer to recover that money exceeds what they are likely to recover if they win their lawsuit.

For this reason, the law often allows multiple plaintiffs who have suffered similar injuries from the same company to unite together in order to provide a unified front against wealthy corporations. The most common example of this strength in numbers is a class action lawsuit. While few lawyers would be eager to represent a consumer who lost $1000 because of a company’s defective product, many of the best lawyers will eagerly represent a class of tens of thousands of plaintiffs who all suffered the same relatively low-dollar injury. These lawyers normally work on a contingency fee, meaning that they are paid a percentage of the class of plaintiffs’ total winnings — so the bigger the money at stake, the more equal the fight between the plaintiffs’ lawyers and the defendant’s army.

Last year, however, the Supreme Court enabled companies to force consumers to sign away their ability to bring class actions as a condition of receiving a cell phone or a credit card or potentially any other good or service. As a result, it is likely that consumer class actions will eventually become nearly nonexistent, and consumers will lose one of their most important tools in leveling the playing field between them and big business.

This term, the Supreme Court could strike a similar blow against workers. Many federal worker protection laws, including laws guaranteeing a minimum wage, overtime pay and laws preventing discrimination against women and older workers, permit something known as a “collective action” suit. These lawsuits, which are similar to class actions, allow multiple workers who have been underpaid or otherwise mistreated by their employers to join together under a single suit, thus giving them the same strength in numbers that class action plaintiffs enjoy. Yet in Genesis HealthCare Corp. v. Symczyk, the justices could give corporate America a cheap and easy escape valve every time an employer is subject to such a suit.

Collective action suits work in multiple phases. Early on, a single worker must step forward and charge the company with violating federal worker protection law. At a later stage, the law then allows other workers to be joined to the same suit to form the collective action. What happened in Symczyk is that during the intermediate phase of this lawsuit — after the single worker stepped forward but before the other workers could join the suit — the defendant offered to buy off the single worker while giving nothing to the others. Worse, the corporate defendant claims that, because they offered “complete relief” to the single worker, the law requires the worker to take it even if that will kill the collective action suits benefiting all the other workers.

So, the company in Symczyk wants to be able to pick off plaintiffs one at a time, before a collective action can fully form, and thus strip their employees of their ability to bring a collective action in the first place. If the Supreme Court gives the company this power, it will effectively destroy workers’ ability to join collectively against any company smart enough to pay off as few as one of them.

In light of the conservative justices’ recent decision against class actions, workers have every reason to be pessimistic about this outcome of this case.

The University of Texas at Austin

Few things are certain in Supreme Court litigation, but it’s unlikely that anyone will make any money betting that the University of Texas at Austin’s racially conscious admission’s policy with survive the current Supreme Court term. Most of the Court’s conservatives view racial justice issues as almost cartoonishly simple — four justices joined Chief Justice Roberts’ proclamation that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” And while Justice Kennedy’s rhetoric displays more nuance that his fellow conservatives, he’s rarely found a race conscious law he is not eager to strike down. He voted with the dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger, the last university admissions case to reach the high Court.

As one of the lower court judges that upheld Texas’ plan explained, “it would be difficult for UT to construct an admissions policy that more closely resembles the policy approved by the Supreme Court in Grutter,” absent the fact that the University of Texas also automatically grants admission to Texas high school students in the top ten percent of their class. Kennedy was the fourth vote to strike the affirmative action plan in Grutter. With the addition of Justice Alito to the Court’s conservative bloc, he is likely now the fifth vote to strike the very similar plan in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin.

Racial classifications are indeed treated as suspect under our Constitution, and for good reason. Race rarely impacts a person’s ability to contribute to society, and so laws which draw racial lines can almost always be assumed to rely on outdated prejudices rather than on sound policy justifications. A student’s race rarely says much about their ability to thrive at a selective university.

At the same time, university admissions officers routinely must choose between two students because of a distinction that says little about either student’s intelligence, drive, or worth as a person. A university may prefer a student who plays the bassoon over an equally skilled French horn player, because the college orchestra’s bassoon player is graduating and someone needs to be admitted to replace them. Similarly, an admissions office might admit one student who plays running back, and deny admission to a defensive lineman with otherwise identical credentials because the football team needs someone to play one position and not the other. The entire university is enriched when it has a full orchestra or a winning football team, and so a good admissions team will sometimes draw a line between two equally deserving students for the benefit of the school community as a whole.

The central insight of Grutter is that racial diversity functions much like an orchestra. Affirmative action is not a zero sum game that takes in equal proportion from a white student in order to give to a minority. Rather, America as a whole benefits from a more diverse student body:

[T]he Law School’s admissions policy promotes “cross-racial understanding,” helps to break down racial stereotypes, and “enables [students] to better understand persons of different races.” These benefits are “important and laudable,” because “classroom discussion is livelier, more spirited, and simply more enlightening and interesting” when the students have “the greatest possible variety of backgrounds.” . . .

These benefits are not theoretical but real, as major American businesses have made clear that the skills needed in today’s increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints. What is more, high-ranking retired officers and civilian leaders of the United States military assert that, “[b]ased on [their] decades of experience,” a “highly qualified, racially diverse officer corps … is essential to the military’s ability to fulfill its principle mission to provide national security.” . . . At present, “the military cannot achieve an officer corps that is both highly qualified and racially diverse unless the service academies and the ROTC used limited race-conscious recruiting and admissions policies.”

So the choice facing the justices is not whether the value of improving one black student’s prospects is worth reducing those of a white student. The choice facing them is whether the quality of education offered to all students should be diminished, whether our young graduates should be less competitive in the work force, and whether our military should lose what it believes to be an essential tool to train the best possible corps of leaders as officers.

If their past opinions are any guide, it is likely that five justices are prepared to pay this price.

Over at Slate, Doug Kendall breaks down just how badly President Obama’s judicial nominees have been treated due to filibusters led by one or more Senate Republicans. “The average confirmation time for uncontroversial circuit court nominees rose from 64.5 days under Reagan to 227.3 days under Obama. . . . Similarly, the average waiting time for uncontroversial district court nominees increased from 69.9 days under Reagan to 204.8 days under President Obama. And the number of district court nominees who wait more than 200 days has doubled from George W.’s time to Obama’s.” Kendall uses the Congressional Research Service’s definition of an uncontroversial nominee to reach these numbers, which is a nominee who receives “little or no opposition when votes are actually cast in the Senate Judiciary Committee and on the Senate floor.”

While the rate of judicial confirmations declined steadily since the Reagan Administration, President Obama’s judges have still been singled out for significantly worse treatment than any of his recent predecessors:

Bob Macdonald, the mayor of Lewiston, Maine, is attracting national attention after appearing in a BBC documentary and demanding that the Somali immigrants who live in his town “leave your culture at the door.” Lewiston has become a haven for Somali immigrants who have fled their war-torn and poverty stricken nation. In the BBC documentary, which aired September 11, Macdonald said:

When you come here you accept our culture and leave your culture at the door. I don’t care if you’re white, you’re black, you’re yellow. I don’t care what color you are, when you come into the country, you have to accept our culture. Don’t try to insert your culture into ours.

The comments sparked outrage among the Somali community, but when Macdonald was asked to explain them, he went even further, telling them to go back to Somalia and accusing them of “shirking [their] duties” to their country:

When anybody comes here from any country, they have to embrace our culture. Now, do they have to give up their own culture at home? No. If they want to carry on you know, the Irish St. Patrick’s Day, the French, the Italians, everybody, they all keep their culture, but we all practice a unique culture, and that is an American culture that over 200 years has been developed…Why aren’t you over there fighting for it? If you believe in it so much, why aren’t you over there shedding your blood to get it? Why are you over here shirking your duties? These people are yelling that I’m insensitive to their culture. Well if it’s so great, why aren’t they back over in Somalia? Why are they over here?

Watch it:

The mayor also writes a regular column in the Twin City Times, in which he recently called citizens who want to improve treatment of Somalis in the town “white do-gooders and their carpetbagger friends.”

Macdonald became the mayor of Lewiston after his Democratic opponent, Mark Paradis, died suddenly from pneumonia shortly before the election. After Macdonald won by just seven votes against the deceased candidate, he accused the opposing campaign of smearing him, warning, “I just won, so I don’t have to be quiet anymore. They are going to pay for this.”