Lawmaker May Vote

It was not a hard call. But it wasn’t unanimous. The United States Supreme Court ruled 7-2 to reinstate Laurel Libby’s voting rights as a Maine state representative until her lawsuit protesting the punishment of her speech is resolved. 

The Court did not address her right to speak on legislation. So, while Libby is now being allowed to vote, she’s still not being allowed to speak on legislative questions.

Maine’s Democratic lawmakers had stripped Libby of her right to speak on and vote on legislation because they objected to a social media post in which Libby expressed disapproval of letting a boy participate in a girls’ track competition.

The boy’s name was already public knowledge, as I explained when I covered the story earlier this month. But the fact that Libby referred to him by name (first name) in her post was the hook on which her colleagues sought to hang her.

The dissent of one of the two dissenting Supreme Court justices, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, seems partly motivated by her view that “the case isn’t an emergency in need of Supreme Court intervention since there are no significant upcoming votes where Libby’s participation could change the outcome.”

An astonishing sentiment. 

We don’t know for sure what questions might come up in the last weeks of Maine’s legislature session. In any case, the purported significance of legislative matters has no bearing on the question of the justice of simply annulling, over a political disagreement, the voters’ decision about who should represent them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

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