RICHMOND, Va. -- Cheryl Fleming can't wait to vote in November.
The 54-year-old, who lives in Fairfax County, Va., had her voting rights restored in April by Gov. Terry McAuliffe after losing them in 1989 for forging checks to buy drugs. She has never seen the inside of a polling booth.
"I was so excited I was screaming in the house," Fleming said of hearing that she got her voting rights back. "I've put my life back together and this was still being held against me," said Fleming, who now works as an Uber driver.
If Republican lawmakers are successful in their legal challenge to McAuliffe's executive order, Fleming and more than 200,000 ex-felons who've completed their sentences could again be stripped of the ability to vote.
At issue when the Virginia Supreme Court meets Tuesday to hear the case is whether the state's constitution allows governors to restore political rights en masse or requires them to be handled on a case-by-case basis.
Republicans say McAuliffe violated the constitution, pointing to the words "person" and "his civil rights" in the document as evidence that governors can only "remove political disabilities" individually. That's the conclusion reached by two previous administrations that studied the issue, Republicans note.
"Gov. McAuliffe is entitled to disagree with the policies of the Virginia Constitution, but he is not entitled to nullify those he dislikes," attorneys for GOP House Speaker William Howell, Senate Majority Leader Thomas Norment and other voters wrote in their lawsuit.
McAuliffe's administration and backers say there's nothing in the constitution that says -- or even implies -- that governors must restore rights on a case-by-case basis. Just because no governor has done it before doesn't mean it's not allowed, the administration says, arguing that the constitution's writers would have made it clear if they wanted that to be the case.
Republicans want the Supreme Court to prohibit election officials from registering felons and to cancel all such registrations made since McAuliffe's April 22 executive order. As of July 11, nearly 9,500 ex-felons who had their rights restored by the governor since April 22 had registered to vote, election officials said.
The governor also faces a lawsuit from the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch over his executive order, which also allows former felons to run for public office, serve on a jury and become notary publics.
McAuliffe has said he will restore all roughly 206,000 former felons' political rights individually if he has to.
Republicans have accused McAuliffe -- a friend of Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton -- of trying to add more black voters to the rolls to help his party keep the White House in November. Virginia, which is one of only four states that remove voting rights for felons for life unless a state official restores them, is a critical swing state, and a few thousand votes could affect the outcome in key races.
McAuliffe supporters say that what has been lost in the political wrangling is the positive impact the restoration of voting rights will have on black communities. Nearly 50 percent of those whose rights were restored are black, even though blacks make up just about 20 percent of Virginia's population, according to an analysis done by the governor's office.
A Section on 07/18/2016