Barely had the Court issued its opinion in the Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, invalidating Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act and for all practical purposes Section 5, when the State of Texas promptly announced a new photo ID requirement. And the Court’s reasoning in this and other cases in recent years, including the freshly minted Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, 570 U.S. ____(2013), leaves little doubt that it is emboldening states to proceed on the path of the last few years, imposing ID and other limitations on access to the polls.

Campaign finance jurisprudence is intensely concerned with free speech rights, less and decreasingly with associational rights, and not at all with a more comprehensive conception of the requirements for conducting political action—“doing politics.” Why this is so is worth exploring. Something is missing here, and the gap is consequential.

So this is the question being debated about the Court opinion in the Arizona voting law pre-emption case: is it a major victory for the federal government, or just a win in this case, with the longer term effects to lie more on the side of the states’ authority to shape voting rights in federal elections? Forecasts range from sunny (The New York Times) to cloudy (Hasen) to stormy (Lederman).

Rick Hasen recently published an interesting article on the legal remedies for malicious lying in politics. Richard L. Hasen, A Constitutional Right to Lie in Campaigns and Elections, 74 Mont. L. Rev. 53 (Winter 2013) . He fears that “false and misleading speech may be increasing” in a “highly charged partisan atmosphere, in which each side cannot agree upon the basic facts,” and that the media, including the burgeoning fact-checking corps, “are not able to meaningfully curb candidates' lies and distortions.” Id. at 54. 55. Legal responses seem largely beyond reach, particularly after the Supreme Court’s decision in Alvarez v. United States, 132 S. Ct. 2537 (2012), which Hasen reads to indicate that “broad laws targeting false speech stand little chance of being upheld, regardless of topic.” Id. at 69.

The Democratic Disconnect: this is title of a report produced for the Transatlantic Academy by scholars who describe a critical breach in the relationship of citizen to government. Seyla Benhabib et al, The Democratic Disconnect (May 2013), http://www.gmfus.org/archives/the-democratic-disconnect-citizenship-and-accountability-in-the-transatlantic-community. They argue that around the world, the US included, "democracy is in trouble" as governments fail to answer to their citizens who respond with a deepening lack of trust and withdrawal from traditional channels of political engagement. Id. at 3. The urgent need is for "fairer and fuller citizen participation," a revival of civic engagement from the "bottom-up." Id. at 5, 118.