Former Attorney General Ed Meese filed an amicus brief in Manhattan Monday morning supporting the lawsuit against MLB for moving the All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver.
The Job Creators Network (JCN), a conservative group representing small businesses, filed a lawsuit against MLB and their Players Union in hopes of forcing the league to return the game to Atlanta or compensate the Atlanta businesses impacted by the league’s decision to leave due to Georgia’s voter reform laws.
According to Fox Business Network’s Charles Gasparino, the lawsuit alleges “…that MLB’s decision has injured Atlanta’s small business community.” The lawsuit also names the “Major League Baseball Players Association – the union which represents some 1,200 players – and which the Job Creators Network contends played a role in the decision to move the game out of Atlanta to Denver.”
The league announced its decision to relocate the All-Star Game from Atlanta within 48 hours of President Biden saying that he would “strongly support” MLB moving the game out of Atlanta over Georgia’s election law and said that “today’s professional athletes are acting incredibly responsibly” in leagues like the NBA, during an interview with ESPN.
“MLB robbed the small businesses of Atlanta – many of them minority-owned – of $100 million. We want the game back where it belongs,” JCN President Alfredo Ortiz told FOX Business. “This was a knee-jerk, hypocritical and illegal reaction to misinformation about Georgia’s new voting law which includes voter ID.”
In the amicus brief, filed through the non-profit American Constitutional Rights Union (ACRU), Meese argues that Major League Baseball moved their All-Star Game from Atlanta after Georgia enacted the “Election Integrity Act of 2021 (SB 202) in March 2021 in the aftermath of 2020 election controversies.” Specifically, the brief claims that MLB pulled the game because the league claimed SB 202 “violated voting rights.”
However, as the brief claims, SB 202 does not violate voting rights.
According to the brief:
SB 202’s provisions requiring voter ID and establishing procedural safeguards are consistent with voting rights. “Free and honest elections are the very foundation of our republican form of government.” Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 564 n.41 (1964) (internal quotation marks omitted). A “State’s important regulatory interests are generally sufficient to justify reasonable, nondiscriminatory restrictions” on a voter’s right to cast a ballot. Anderson v. Celebrezze, 460 U.S. 780, 788 (1983). Georgia is acting pursuant to its regulatory interests, identifying election features and procedures that the 2020 election showed to be insufficient, and augmenting the state’s election framework to remedy those aspects of the Peach State’s election process. Georgia’s statutory measures are designed to instill confidence in the results of its elections. The Supreme Court in 2008 upheld the constitutionality of voter ID laws in Crawford v. Marion Cty. Election Bd., 553 U.S. 181, 204 (2008). “The electoral system cannot inspire confidence if no safeguards exist to deter or detect fraud or to confirm the
identity of voters.” Id. at 194 (plurality opinion of Stevens, J.) (quoting the report of the Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform).
Former Cincinnati Mayor Ken Blackwell, who is also part-owner of the Cincinnati Reds, said that a court order for MLB to return the All-Star Game to Atlanta would be a “win-win for everyone.”
Blackwell told Breitbart News:
The plaintiffs in this lawsuit are asking for the All-Star Game to be returned to to Atlanta, and that’s what I would want to to to see. Logistically, it might be tough, but so what? I would like to see them to make that correction. Let the fans see a great game. Let Atlanta businesses and workers just reap the economic rewards of tens of millions dollars from the game, and let Major League Baseball show the country that we’re not going to jump through the hoops of the radical left in their never-ending race to the bottom to see who is the most woke. What we need to do is just focus, as a league, on playing a sport that Americans love and running a successful business in the process, that would be a win-win for everyone, and that’s what I want, a win for everyone.
JCN President Alfredo Ortiz has pointed to data suggesting that MLB’s decision to pull the All-Star Game from Atlanta could cost local businesses upwards of $100 million.
The case is Job Creators Network v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, No. 1:21-cv-4818 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.