The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled against Arizona’s top two legislators in their attempt to avoid having to sit for depositions in an ongoing lawsuit that claims two state voting laws are racially discriminatory.
The Hill reports that “Arizona House Speaker Ben Toma (R) and Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen (R) had filed an emergency request urging the justices to pause a lower ruling that mandates the lawmakers hand over documents and be deposed in the case.”
In their filing, Toma and Petersen argued that forcing them to sit for a deposition would violate their legislative privilege, the outlet said, but without any notable dissent, the nation’s highest court rejected that argument.
The Hill adds: “Last year, Arizona’s Republican-controlled Legislature passed voting bills that require individuals to submit documentary proof of citizenship in order to vote and change rules dictating when individuals are dropped from voter rolls. Among others, the Justice Department, the Democratic National Committee, and voting groups filed legal challenges, with some condemning the legislation as ‘voter suppression’ bills. Toma and Petersen voted for the bills but did not assume their current leadership positions until months later. Earlier this year, they intervened in the consolidated lawsuit to defend the laws.”
The two lawmakers have unsuccessfully fought the deposition in lower federal courts as well.
“Allowing discovery of these irrelevant topics implicates the separation of powers at the highest level of government, embodying a federal court’s significant intrusion into legislative affairs without legal justification,” the lawmaker’s attorney, Kevin O’Malley, wrote in his filing with the high court.
“The district court’s unprecedented ruling will chill both the atmosphere for all legislators to freely express their views during the legislative process and the ability and willingness of present and future legislative leaders to participate in litigation to defend the constitutionality of state laws,” O’Malley continued.
While the Justice Department did not file any motions with the Supreme Court, other plaintiffs did, arguing that the two lawmakers surrendered their rights to legislative privilege when they joined the suit.
“Until the legislators intervened, no party sought discovery from either of them,” argued Seth Waxman, a former U.S. solicitor general in the Clinton administration, who is representing those plaintiffs.
“But once they voluntarily joined the litigation, and then made assertions about a key disputed question of fact—whether the Arizona legislature passed the challenged laws with discriminatory intent—plaintiffs sought to test the legislators’ position in discovery, as plaintiffs had done with other defendants,” he added.
Kari Lake, a GOP candidate for governor in 2022, filed an election lawsuit, which the Arizona Supreme Court decided on late last month.
The state high court rejected Lake’s request to have the state’s highest court hear her election challenge. A court of appeals has already planned to hear the case.
About 1.3 million early voters in Maricopa County have signed off on the ballot envelopes that Lake is requesting a review of in court. Lake’s legal challenges to her defeat have been rejected twice, so she is now focusing on a public records lawsuit to examine absentee ballots, MSN reported.
As she runs for the Senate in the United States, she is known for her support of former President Donald Trump. Lake’s initial challenge centered on issues with ballot printers, but the judge ruled that she lacked sufficient evidence of malicious intent. She claims in her most recent case that the signature verification procedure was severely flawed.
Last week, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday that she and Mark Finchem, the latter of whom ran as the Republican candidate for secretary of state, did not produce any evidence to substantiate their claim that the use of vote tabulation machines violated their constitutional rights, according to a report from Alternet.
The three-judge panel noted in their 11-page opinion that Lake and Finchem “conceded that their arguments were limited to potential future hacking and not based on any past harm.”
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