The Twenty-Sixth Amendment and the Real Rigging of Georgia’s Election

VIKRAM DAVID AMAR

Illinois law dean Vikram David Amar explains why Georgia’s law allowing persons 75 years and older to get absentee ballots for all elections in an election cycle with a single request, while requiring younger voters to request absentee ballots separately for each election, is a clear violation of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment. Dean Amar acknowledges that timing may prevent this age discrimination from being redressed in 2020, but he calls upon legislatures and courts to understand the meaning of this amendment and prevent such invidious disparate treatment of voters in future years.

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COVID Comes to Federal Death Row—It Is Time to Stop the Madness

AUSTIN SARAT

Austin Sarat—Associate Provost and Associate Dean of the Faculty and William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence & Political Science at Amherst College—explains the enhanced risk of COVID-19 infection in the federal death row in Terre Haute, not only among inmates but among those necessary to carry out executions. Professor Sarat calls upon the Trump administration and other officials to focus on saving, rather than taking, lives inside and outside prison.

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National Lifeline Association v. Federal Communications Commission

Docket: 20-1006

Opinion Date: December 22, 2020

Judge: Harry Thomas Edwards

Areas of Law: Communications Law, Government & Administrative Law

The FCC’s Lifeline program offers low-income consumers discounts on telephone and broadband Internet access services. Qualified consumers receive service from eligible telecommunications carriers (ETCs), which receive a monthly federal support payment for each Lifeline subscriber. The FCC allows wireless resellers to provide Lifeline services. Many subscribers pay the ETC a recurring, discounted monthly fee. Some reseller ETCs offer prepaid wireless plans for which ETCs receive monthly Lifeline payments. ETCs must initiate the de-enrollment of Lifeline subscribers on prepaid plans who have not used their Lifeline service within the preceding 30 days; such subscribers are notified and enter a 15-day “cure period,” during which, ETCs must continue to provide Lifeline service. A group composed primarily of Lifeline service providers filed a Petition for Declaratory Ruling requesting that the FCC permit Lifeline ETCs to seek reimbursement for all Lifeline subscribers served on the first day of the month, including those receiving free-to-the-end-user Lifeline service who are in the 15-day cure period. The petition cited 47 C.F.R. 54.407(a), which states that ETCs will receive payments for each actual qualifying low-income customer the ETC serves directly as of the first of the month. The FCC denied the petition, citing section 54.407(c)(2), which states that for prepaid Lifeline plans, an ETC “shall only continue to receive [support payments] for . . . subscribers who have used the service within the last 30 days, or who have cured their nonusage.” The D.C. Circuit upheld the FCC’s determination. A statutory argument – that the FCC’s interpretation of its rules violated 47 U.S.C. 214(e) – is foreclosed because it was not raised with the FCC. The FCC position is compelled by the unambiguous terms of the rules.