Big Month For NCAA, From The Court To The Courthouse | Georgia Can Thank SCOTUS For New Voting Restrictions

March 29, 2021

This Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments over whether the NCAA violates antitrust laws by being so stingy with what schools can provide to their student-athletes. Kurt Streeter with The New York Times reports on the story of one former college superstar who left college sports entirely after the NCAA backtracked on an earlier commitment to loosen its restrictions on athletes earning money from their fame. HUNTER WOODHALL became the first double amputee to earn an NCAA Division I scholarship and Streeter writes, “Hunter Woodhall’s story of perseverance would make great television. But the NCAA can’t lean on Woodhall. Why? In January, frustrated with the organization’s inability to change with the times, he quit running collegiate track and turned professional. He had worked himself into a position where he no longer needed college sports the way they needed him.”

Georgia passed its new voter restrictions into law late last week — something made much easier thanks to the Supreme Court and the road it has paved in recent years making it easier for states to restrict access to voting. Joan Biskupic with CNN writes, “In another world, before the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision written by CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS, Georgia would have had to obtain federal approval for new election practices to ensure they did not harm Blacks and other minority voters. And at another time, before the Roberts Court enhanced state latitude in a series of rulings, legislators might have hedged before enacting policies from new voter identification requirements, to a prohibition on third-party collection of ballots to a rule against non-poll workers providing food or water to voters waiting in lines. But the conservative court has increasingly granted states leeway over how they run elections.”

In The Washington Post, CEO of Driscoll’s the berry company MILES REITER and former California GOVERNOR JERRY BROWN penned an op-ed regarding a historic California law that for 46 years has allowed labor organizers access to private farms to meet with workers. That law was before justices last week when they heard arguments in favor of gutting it, but Reiter and Brown say not so fast. “We know that law — the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act — well. Forty-six years ago, one of us was signing it as governor of California and the other was a strawberry farmer along the Central Coast of California. We came from different perspectives then but share a common view now: The law has fulfilled its promise to bring about labor peace by giving voice to California’s farmworkers. That law, and the self-determination it brings, should not be weakened or undermined.”