A post on X by Jack Tomczak gives us a story and a moral:
Judge rules that federal statute banning non-citizen voting is unconstitutional. The only way to address this is to amend the US Constitution with #uscva HJR152/SJR212.
An article on FoxNews fleshes out the story:
A Biden-appointed judge is being labeled an “activist judge” by conservative critics after ruling the federal government’s application of a law barring noncitizens from voting in elections violates the Constitution in a federal criminal case.
In a 31-page ruling, U.S. District Judge David Leibowitz of the Southern District of Florida dismissed federal charges against Chelsea Cox, a woman originally from Jamaica who voted in the 2020 presidential election despite not being a U.S. citizen.
The ruling comes as the Trump administration has intensified efforts to prevent noncitizens from voting, including through federal prosecutions and attempts to verify citizenship on state voter rolls, sparking legal battles with Democratic-led states and voting-rights groups.
The ruling is a great example of a federalist strict construction of the Constitution:
Leibowitz ruled that the Constitution gives states — not Congress — the authority to determine who qualifies to vote in elections, effectively ruling that a provision of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) criminalizing noncitizen voting in federal elections is unconstitutional as applied to Cox.
“The Constitution commits to the States, and the States alone, the general power to set voter qualifications in federal elections,” Leibowitz wrote in his ruling. “This is clear from both the text of the document and the debates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787.”
One might argue, on that latter point, that the debates in the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia are not nearly as important as the debates in the state legislatures prior to ratification. But that is a quibble: the ratification conventions are more clearly federalist and state-centered than the fabled “Miracle in Philadelphia.”
So, as Paul Jacob has argued in these pages — most recently last Wednesday — the only legal way to prevent states from tallying non-citizen votes in federal elections is a constitutional amendment declaring it illegal.
