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Somewhere among the White House’s fractured fairy tale about its reflecting pool faceplant, the ongoing whodunit masquerading as peace talks now being waged to end the war with Iran and, despite some glimmers of hope, Congress’ continued sycophancy, are some court decisions Nebraskans would do well to check in on.
One of them decided that it isn’t how sweet it is, it’s who gets to decide and how they go about it. To wit: a federal district court judge has ruled that Nebraska — who was first in the nation to do so — cannot restrict the use of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to buy sugary drinks.
The ruling essentially said Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins was out of her lane when redefining what SNAP recipients could purchase. Individuals from five states including Nebraska had brought suit.
Before you fall to your knees clutching an RDA food chart or take some other form of nutritional umbrage, your instincts are correct. And you can relax. Even a cursory glance at the ruling makes it clear that no one from judge to jurists and everyone in between was arguing for Mountain Dews and Red Bulls all around. This was a case about procedure, the point being that pilot programs such as the one Nebraska was operating still needed to follow the appropriate process. Indeed the judge wrote that the government, via Rollins, had “exceeded their statutory authority … and disregarded a mandatory procedural requirement when approving the pilot projects.”
None of which changes the facts about our aggregate health. Healthy lifestyles are good for all of us especially as the nation faces daunting obesity and diabetes rates. In doing so, however, we should remember two important ideas. Sugary drinks are unhealthy whether bought with a SNAP benefit or not, and policy making that solves one problem needs to follow the rules lest it create another.
We were also recently treated to the latest and ongoing iterations of the administration’s attempts to suppress voting through executive orders and Congressional complicity.
Nebraskans will remember that Secretary of State Bob Evnen sent voter registration records to the Justice Department, the fate of said data unknown except for the reality that it is in the hands of those bent on interfering with the state’s constitutional authority to run elections.
The feds want to create a list of registered voters, ostensibly to purge voters, a losing proposition on two fronts: First, as you know, the Constitution vests in states the responsibility for elections. Congress has some minimal oversight but the president, for obvious reasons, has no say so in our elections. (For details see American History 101, the Separation of Powers Clause and Article 1 Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution)
Second, and we repeat, aside from whole cloth whoppers emanating from Pennsylvania Avenue, podcasts and selected social media posts, no evidence, data, science, research, whatever exists that voter fraud is anything other than a minuscule mathematical event. Those in Washington who want to take over our elections may insist otherwise, but they are making things up.
A federal district judge — citing privacy concerns — ruled last week that the feds could not run voters’ personal data through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database to determine eligibility and flag non-citizens trying to vote, the incidence of which is less than vanishingly small.
Also, last week the president held hostage a popular, bipartisan housing bill unless Congress passed his SAVE Act, which, among other things, would create a federal requirement that a birth certificate must be presented when registering to vote. I don’t know where mine is either. From there voter suppression is not a long journey.
Another judge, this one in Massachusetts, put the kibosh on another executive order, this one restricting mail in voting. Her ruling called the decree “unlawful, null, and void.” That’s good news for the 11 Nebraska counties that use mail-in ballots exclusively.
While that may be a relief for those ZIP Codes, others in other states have more worries when it comes to exercising their civic duty. In a Congressional hearing on Wednesday, the Postmaster General said the post office would not deliver mail-in ballots in states that had not complied with the fed’s constitutionally suspect voter information requests.
We can only hope the Massachusetts ruling will supersede the post office’s plan to play some sort of electoral god and gatekeeper. As a nation we eventually saw the disenfranchising distemper of poll taxes and literacy tests, but who could have imagined, in a democracy, these recent assaults on our voting rights.
That said, hoping and imagining will not be enough. Someone besides the courts (we’re looking at you Congress) needs to step up, read the Constitution and then act accordingly.
