The census report listed the turnout rate for black men as 61.4 percent… However, once noninstitutionalized felons — people who are not in prison but lost the right to vote as punishment — are removed from the tally of eligible voters, the turnout rate among black men rises to 68 percent.
With this recalculation, black men actually have a higher turnout rate than white men or white women.
[A new study] takes a careful and comprehensive look at some 2,000 decisions from 1946 to 2011. Published last month in The Minnesota Law Review, the study ranked the 36 justices who served on the court over those 65 years by the proportion of their pro-business votes; all five of the current court’s more conservative members were in the top 10. But the study’s most striking finding was that the two justices most likely to vote in favor of business interests since 1946 are the most recent conservative additions to the court, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., both appointed by President George W. Bush.
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The arrival of Chief Justice Roberts in 2005 and Justice Alito in 2006 seem to have affected the behavior of the justices already on the court. The probability that the other three more conservative members of the court — Justices Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas — would vote for business grew to 56 percent from 52 percent. And the probability that Justices Ginsburg and Breyer would do so dropped to 32 percent from 38 percent.
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Business groups have been enthusiastic litigants in the Roberts court. Adam D. Chandler, a recent Yale Law School graduate and a Justice Department lawyer, published a new study along these lines on Scotusblog (noting that his views were not those of his employer). Looking at friend-of-the-court briefs supporting petitions seeking Supreme Court review over a roughly three-year period ended in August 2012, he found that pro-business and anti-regulatory groups accounted for more than three-quarters of the top 16 filers…
He found that the Chamber of Commerce was “the country’s pre-eminent petition pusher,” with 54 filings in the period. It also had an enviable success rate: the court grants one out of every hundred petitions; for ones supported by the chamber, it granted 32 percent.
42% of Americans are unsure whether the Affordable Care Act is still law — 23% don’t know the status of the law; 12% think it was repealed by Congress; 7% think it was overturned by the Supreme Court.
