9th Circuit Court of Appeals to decide who gets to be president and who gets booted out

WINCHESTER, Mass.

— The ninth U.S. Circuit Court a majority of judges in the nation’s highest court says it has no intention of hearing a case that could set a new precedent over whether people have the right to choose their presidential candidate.

In a decision released Monday, the appeals court said the right for Americans to choose whom they want to support in the presidential race is not at issue, and that it would be “unwise” to make that decision until the next election cycle.

“The question of whether the right of Americans to elect a president is sufficiently limited to permit a majority to impose its own candidate on the electoral process is not in dispute,” the judges wrote.

In a separate decision Monday, a three-judge panel of the appeals panel said that although the federal government has no authority to interfere with states’ efforts to hold voters to a voter ID law, it is within the purview of the federal courts to decide whether states have violated the Voting Rights Act by restricting access to the ballot box. “

The right to elect the president is, of course, an individual right, and the Constitution does not require Congress to impose such conditions on the exercise of the right.”

In a separate decision Monday, a three-judge panel of the appeals panel said that although the federal government has no authority to interfere with states’ efforts to hold voters to a voter ID law, it is within the purview of the federal courts to decide whether states have violated the Voting Rights Act by restricting access to the ballot box.

The decision is subject to a hearing in January.

The court said that if states restrict access to polling places or disenfranchise people based on their voting history, “there is nothing the Court could have said in this case to compel the federal Court of Claims to intervene and determine whether those state laws violate the Voting Right Act.”

A similar lawsuit was filed by the Justice Department and a coalition of civil rights and voting rights groups.

The decision came as a group of top Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee said that they will push for a resolution of the Supreme Court case in 2018.

The Justice Department argued in a brief that the decision is a violation of the U.K.’s European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the right “to equality before the law.”

The Supreme Court is expected to rule in the next few weeks on whether the U-turn by the court is necessary to allow a lower court’s ruling in a separate case, filed by a group called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to stand.