Arizona Green Party Suing Some Write-In Candidates Who Won Primaries to Kick Them Off the Ballot While Trying to Keep Other Write-in Primary Winners

In response to being sued by the Arizona Green Party, which I joined in 2008, I wrote the following comment on the fine blog Random Musings:

I would like to know how the AZGP distinguishes between two write-in candidates, both of whom won congressional primaries with a handful of votes.

According to the state canvass, Leonard Clark won the CD-3 primary with five write-in votes and I won the CD-6 primary with six write-in votes.

Yet I'm among the large number of defendants in the suit filed by the Arizona Green Party but Mr. Clark is not:

Arizona Green Party et al v. Bennett et al

Plaintiffs: Arizona Green Party and Claudia Ellquist

Defendants: Ken Bennett , LeNora Johnson, Jim Claw, R John Lee, Tom White, Jr., Ryan Blackman, Richard Grayson, Christopher Campbell, Anthony Goshorn, Matthew Shusta, Clint Clement, Andrew Blischak, Michelle Lochmann, Thomas Meadows, Theodore Gomez, Benjamin Pearcy, Christine Rhodes, Patrick Call, Ann English, Richard Searle, Candace Owens, Elizabeth Archuleta, Lena Fowler, Mandy Metzger, Matt Ryan, Carl Taylor, Sadie Dalton, Shirley Dawson, Tommie Martin, Michael Pastor, Wendy John, Chip Davis, Greg Ferguson, Russell McCloud, Kathryn Prochaska, Marco Reyes, Carol Springer, Robyn Stallworth-Pouquette, Lenore Stuart, Thomas Thurman, Ana Wayman-Trujillo, Shelly Baker, Fulton Brock, John Drum, David Gomez, Mark Herrington, Holly Irwin, Drew John, Andrew Kunasek, Richard Lunt, Berta Manuz, James Palmer, Sandy Pierce, Helen Purcell, Hector Ruedas, Don Stapley, Mary Rose Wilcox, Max Wilson, Jerry Brownlow, J R DeSpain, Buster Johnson, Laurette Justman, Carol Meier, Jonathan Nez, Tom Sockwell, David Tenney, Jesse Thompson, Gary Watson, Sharon Bronson, Raymond Carroll, Ann Day, Laura Dean-Lytle, Richard Elias, F Ann Rodriguez, Ramon Valadez, Bryan Martyn, Pete Rios, Suzanne Sainz, David Snider, John Maynard, Jr., Rudy Molera and Manuel Ruiz

I fail to see how Mr. Clark and I are situated differently except that after an August 22 AZGP meeting - at which I was asked to vote on the endorsement of other candidates, including Mr. Clark, whom I supported - Mr. Clark was "endorsed" by the party but I was not.

If the AZGP were trying to kick off the ballot [by maintaining the write-in statute treating it differently from other parties violates equal protection] all the write-in candidates, it would be one thing, but the party is attempting to keep on the ballot write-in candidates they "endorsed."

This itself seems to violate equal protection. Parties cannot pick and choose which of their primary winners they will allow on the ballot, right?

Linda Greenhouse: Arizona a "Police State," Calls on Everyone to Identify as Illegal Alien

Linda Greenhouse, the retired New York Times Supreme Court reporter - when I taught U.S. constitutional history and political & civil rights courses at Nova Southeastern University, I used to tell my college students to read her reporting on the the justices' opinions - has an op-ed column today on Arizona's immigration law that ends with the suggestion that everyone in Arizona identify as an illegal alien, as in our campaign's T-shirts. Excerpts:

I’m glad I’ve already seen the Grand Canyon.

Because I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.

What would Arizona’s revered libertarian icon, Barry Goldwater, say about a law that requires the police to demand proof of legal residency from any person with whom they have made “any lawful contact” and about whom they have “reasonable suspicion” that “the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States?” Wasn’t the system of internal passports one of the most distasteful features of life in the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa? . . .

I’ll offer a reflection on how, a generation ago, another of the country’s periodic anti-immigrant spasms was handled by the Supreme Court. In 1975, Texas passed a law to deprive undocumented immigrant children of a free public education. Many thousands of children — a good number of whom were on the road to eventual citizenship under immigration laws that were notably less harsh back then — faced being thrown out of school and deprived of a future.

The law was challenged in federal court, with the Carter administration supporting the plaintiffs. By the time the case, Plyler v. Doe, reached the Supreme Court, Ronald Reagan was president, and there was a major debate within his administration over whether to change sides. Rex E. Lee, the admirable solicitor general, refused to do so.

In June 1982, by a vote of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court struck down the Texas law. Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote for the majority that the constitutional guarantee of equal protection prohibited the state from imposing “a lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children not accountable for their disabling status.” Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., a Nixon appointee and the swing justice of his day, provided the fifth vote. The law “threatens the creation of an underclass of future citizens and residents,” he wrote.

I have no doubt that but for that ruling, public school systems all over the country would be checking papers and tossing away their undocumented students like so much playground litter. Blocked from that approach, local governments now try others. The city of Hazleton, Pa., passed a law that made it a crime for a landlord to rent an apartment to an undocumented immigrant. A federal district judge struck down the law on the ground that immigration is the business of the federal government, not of Hazleton, Pa.

Indeed, federal pre-emption would appear to be the most promising route for attacking the Arizona law. Supreme Court precedents make clear that immigration is a federal matter and that the Constitution does not authorize the states to conduct their own foreign policies.

My confidence about the law’s fate in the court’s hands is not boundless, however. In 1982, hours after the court decided the Texas case, a young assistant to Attorney General William French Smith analyzed the decision and complained in a memo: “This is a case in which our supposed litigation program to encourage judicial restraint did not get off the ground, and should have.” That memo’s author was John G. Roberts Jr.

So what to do in the meantime? Here’s a modest proposal. Everyone remembers the wartime Danish king who drove through Copenhagen wearing a Star of David in support of his Jewish subjects. It’s an apocryphal story, actually, but an inspiring one. Let the good people of Arizona — and anyone passing through — walk the streets of Tucson and Phoenix wearing buttons that say: I Could Be Illegal.