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A Republican-backed voter ID bill, one of the most stringent in the nation, passed Wisconsin’s State Assembly last night. The bill now goes to the State Senate, where it seems assured of passage.
Wisconsin is one of a long list of states considering similar legislation this year. Though voter fraud in Wisconsin is minimal — sources say only twenty votes were cast illegally in the state’s most recent election — the law would impose new barriers to voting among students, the elderly, and the poor, all of which are traditionally Democratic constituencies. At a time of massive budget cutbacks, moreover, the legislation carries an estimated $7 million pricetag.
One last-minute change to the legislation makes its aims crystal clear — though it was originally drafted to be implemented next spring, supporters rewrote it to take effect immediately on passage … just in time, in other words, to be deployed in the upcoming special elections which will decide the fate of state legislators targeted for recall over their recent budget votes.
“The job of an actor is to play a role. The job of a cheerleader is to cheer.”
— Eugene Volokh on Doe v. Silsbee Independent School District
• • •
The Doe case, as most of my readers probably know, involves a high school cheerleader in Texas, identified in court papers as “HS,” who was kicked off her squad for refusing to cheer for her alleged rapist. She had accused the player a few months earlier, but he had remained on the school basketball team. It was school tradition for the cheerleading squad to cheer from the sidelines when players attempted foul shots, but HS refused in the case of this player — standing silently with her arms crossed. After a warning, she was removed from the squad. (The player in question pled guilty to an assault charge some time afterward.)
HS sued the school for taking her off the squad, and lost. She appealed, and lost again. Last week her final appeal was rejected.
Eugene Volokh, a constitutional lawyer I respect, thinks the courts got this one right. If this lawsuit had prevailed, he says, “cheerleaders would be free to refuse to cheer for any reason that they think sufficient.” They could refuse to cheer for teams with gay or undocumented immigrant players, or those who “belong to a reprehensible religion, or refuse to properly support our military.”
I think HS was right to refuse to cheer her attacker, and I think the school was deeply wrong in how it handled the case. (For one blogger’s assessment of just how wrong they were, read this.) Whether by dropping her assailant from the team or suspending the practice of sideline cheers or just letting her sit those particular cheers out, the school should have found a way to accommodate HS’s reasonable desire not to cheer the name of a person who had recently sexually assaulted her.
But they didn’t. And given that they didn’t, I think the courts did the only thing they could. I just don’t see a way to craft a rule that would allow HS to refuse to cheer that wouldn’t also protect a cheerleader who shouted “slut” at a single mother on an opposing team, or an actor who changed the lines of a school play to give it a particular religious message, or a football player who wrote “I HATE FAGS” on his jersey, big enough to be seen from the stands.
It’s possible, as some commenters at Volokh’s blog suggest, that HS might have had other legal remedies. It’s been suggested that she might have had — and might still have — grounds for a lawsuit on equal protection claim, or for infliction of emotional distress. I’m not in a position to evaluate those suggestions. But as a matter of First Amendment law, I think the courts got this one right.
By the way, one other element of this case is worth mentioning — that the appeals court ruled HS’s lawsuit “frivolous,” and ordered her family to pay $45,000 in legal fees to the school district. It’s my understanding that the district has the option of waiving the collection of that judgment, and I hope they do so.
Update | The ACS Blog reaches a different First Amendment conclusion than I did, and it does so by addressing a question Volokh took as a given — whether cheerleaders are “agents” of the school, and speaking on the school’s behalf when they perform as cheerleaders. Their position is that so long as a cheerleader’s symbolic protest doesn’t substantially disrupt the school’s functioning, it’s protected speech.
I’m going to have to chew on this one. It’s not obvious to me that students have a blanket First Amendment right to Sharpie messages onto their uniforms while cheering or playing sports, or to shout obnoxious comments at opposing teams while on the field. I’m attracted to the pro-speech side of the argument — as always — but I’m not sure where I come down on this particular issue.
What do y’all think?
I posted on Tuesday about three Canadian student activists who — to their surprise and everyone else’s — were elected to their nation’s parliament on Monday. Since then, reporting in the Canadian press have revealed that they are just three of six undergraduate students who won seats this week. At least half of the six are under twenty-one years old, and one, at nineteen, is the youngest Member of Parliament in Canada’s history.
All six of the students are members of Canada’s New Democratic Party, which until this year was a minor player in that country’s politics. But in polls leading up to this election the Liberals, Canada’s main center-left party, declined significantly, while the Quebec-nationalist Bloc Quebecois utterly collapsed. In the face of this party realignment many liberal Canadians, particularly in Quebec, unexpectedly cast their votes for the NDP. As a result, candidates who had been recruited as placeholders — many of whom did little or no campaigning — found themselves thrust into office.
Four of the six undergraduates who won election are students at Montreal’s McGill University:
Mylène Freeman is a past president of the McGill NDP club, graduating with a politics degree this spring. Freeman is from Ontario, but “fluently bilingual,” which is an important consideration in Quebec. She worked for the NDP in the country’s last national election in 2008, has run for Montreal city council in the past, and coordinates a program at McGill that is designed to encourage young women to volunteer in MPs offices.
Charmaine Borg, 20, is one of the co-presidents of the McGill NDP club this year, and has experience as a union organizer on campus. She was planning to study abroad in Mexico next semester, but will be moving to Ottawa instead.
Matthew Dubé, also 20, is Borg’s co-president at the McGill NDP club. He’s been keeping a low profile since the election.
Laurin Liu, who is 20 as well, is a second-year student, doing a joint degree in history and cultural studies. She spent election day volunteering in a district a few miles from her own, working to help re-elect one of the NDP’s few incumbent MPs. Liu is involved with student government and the campus radio station at McGill, and is now trying to figure out how to handle the logistics of legislating and constituent services — she doesn’t have a driver’s license or own a car.
Marie-Claude Morin is one of the two new students not enrolled at McGill, with one semester remaining until she graduates from the Université du Québec à Montréal. Like Dubé, she’s been mostly declining interviews this week.
The youngest of the six new student MPs is Pierre-Luc Dusseault, 19, who is doing a degree in applied political studies at the Université de Sherbrooke. Unlike many of his fellow winners, Dusseault stumped strenuously in his district, which is home to the university he attends. (He also reportedly made extensive use of Twitter in his campaign.) Desseault, a first-year student who co-founded the Université de Sherbrooke NDP club just months ago, calls himself a “political junkie” and had planned to spend the summer working at a local golf course if he didn’t win.
The six undergrads have been elected to four-year terms, with annual salaries of $157,000. I’m fascinated to see how their stories develop.
The students occupying a building at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities have made it through their first night, and they’ve released a list of demands:
Because we are residents of Minnesota, and because this is a public, land-grant university,
We demand the right to peacefully occupy space at our university,
We demand that the general public has reasonable access to university resources;
We demand that the university respect the rights of all workers to organize and to earn at least a living wage;
We demand tuition and fee reductions;
We demand that regents be democratically elected by the university community;
We demand that the university treat student groups fairly and equitably with respect to funding and space. We demand student groups on the 2nd floor of Coffman Union be able to keep their spaces.
In doing so, we stand in solidarity with the people of Wisconsin, and students and workers worldwide.
More soon…
Pittsburgh mayor Luke Ravenstahl is moving forward with a plan to impose a one percent tax on college tuition, and he’s citing universities’ willingness to gouge their students as justification.
“When you look at some of the fees these places charge,” Ravenstahl told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “we think it’s only fair to include a fee for the city.” Ravenstahl pointed to “charges for everything from athletic facility use to orientation to security,” the paper said.
A member of the Pittsburgh city council has introduced a proposal to charge universities a set amount for city services, but such a scheme would depend on voluntary compliance by the institutions, which is unlikely. Mayor Ravenstahl freely admits that students represent a softer target — as tax exempt institutions, universities are protected from such schemes.
studentactivism.net 
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