Breaking: Court Blocks Texas Voter ID Law
A federal court in Washington D.C. has refused to preclear Texas’ photo voter identification law under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The opinion is here.
While many may be surprised by this decision, PJ Media has been forecasting this outcome for some time. The seeds of today’s decision were planted in 2006 when Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act. Not only did Congress extend the law, but it changed the substantive requirements to a virtually insurmountable standard for any election integrity measure such as voter ID. In other words, some blame for today’s decision lies more with the Voting Rights Act itself. In 2006, the statute was amended to impose unconstitutional and unrealistic burdens on the states. The revised standard required covered states to prove the absence of “any” discriminatory effect or purpose. Any, of course, means greater than zero.
Now Texas has paid the price, twice in one week. (The same court rejected legislative districts under Section 5 earlier this week.)
Today, the three-judge panel ruled that Texas failed to prove the absence of any discriminatory effect with Voter ID. Judge David Tatel (Clinton appointee), writing for the court, and joined by Judge Rosemary Collyer (Bush 43) and Judge Robert Wilkins (Obama), determined that Texas could not prove the absence of a discriminatory effect.
It is notable that the court declined to rule on DOJ’s efforts to paint Texas as purposefully racist in passing voter ID. Tens of thousands of your tax dollars were spent in that quest, as they are now being spent to prove that South Carolina remains an enclave of Klan-like racism in the voter-ID trial taking place this week.
The court adopted reasoning rejected by other federal courts, such as the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals: “Importantly, it costs money to obtain any of these documents. This means that EIC applicants — i.e., would-be voters — who possess none of these underlying forms of identification will have to bear out-of-pocket costs.” This is the ancillary-cost argument. Since getting ID might require you to do other things, just like voting might require you to get out of bed and to the polls, then voter ID is a burden.
The court also goes into great detail about Texas’ decision to submit the law first to the DOJ for administrative preclearance, a step I have urged should have been avoided. The court focuses on the delays in providing the DOJ data, and the confessed unreliability of that data. The court was supposed to review the case de novo, meaning fresh, but obviously decided to consider the administrative DOJ objection. This is a warning to future states: avoid DOJ getting a free shot at you.
As a Texas voter, I do not have the same civil rights as an Indiana voter to have some protections from disenfranchisement by vote fraud. What kind of Republic is this?
Because of these judges it is now a literal suicide pact.
It is time for a Governor to simply say “Nuts” to Federal Judge. Say, “Voter ID passed legislatively, and will be implemented. If a judge tries to block it, he/she will be arrested for violating Texas law”.
Um…..yea…..I don’t think states can trump federal law. It works the other way around though.
Um…not so fast.
State laws can be more restrictive than federal but not less. So voter ID law would be more restrictive in the academic sense and should be left as a state’s rights issue. The fed should have no say in it. By virtue of federal court even deciding this, is a step in the direction of dictatorship, something the founding fathers were trying to avoid.
As an American by choice who followed all the requirements to be eligible to vote: ALL voters should have ID to vote. At their own cost. I support the Texas legislature’s move. We must change the federal government’s attempts to try and control our individual rights.
“The seeds of today’s decision were planted in 2006 when Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act.”
Damned Democrats!!! Oh, wait, who controlled Congress and the White House at that time again?..
The Democrats did control the House and the Senate. George Bush was still in the White House but under a Republican President separation of powers is still you know…a thing. Thanks for playing though.
“The Democrats did control the House and the Senate. ”
In 2007. In 2006 the Republicans controlled both houses, losing both in the November elections.
Thanks for playing, though.
That is true and I stand corrected.
I was listening to two CNN reporters while I was in the doctors office barely able to contain their glee while reading the majority opinion. Even though I couldn’t see the television I could hear the emphasis as they pronounced “regressive” multiple times.
The Republican establishment is unwilling to take this head on for fear of a backlash, so the Dems control the narrative, which is complete Alice in Wonderland hogwash. To protect the integrity of one person one vote we must never ever think of verifying that people aren’t voting multiple times, they think.
Only in world of logically challenged public school flunkies could anyone assert such obvious tripe and not be laughed at is beyond me.
Reposted from another thread:
Defy the order. Period.
Make the Feds show up at polling places, with guns drawn, ordering people to put away their ID’s. Yeah. That’ll look good.
Better yet, call out the 101st Airborne and post them at polling places all over Texas and have them put paper bags – or nylon stockings – over every voter’s head. So there’s not even the slightest chance of making an “identification”. Yeah. That’s the ticket.
At least then we could be honest about who wants to “steal” the election.
That would be a good way to hand the election to Obama. The courts would rule the entire state’s returns fraudulent and Texas would not get any representatives at the College.
It would be a very strong statement of principle, though. Probably do some good down the track.
“Defy the order. Period.”
Your side lost the Civil War.
Akshully, Syphilitic Blunder, I’m from the North and think that the right side won the Civil War. And btw, we’re gonna win the next civil war too. Now go eat some maggot soup.
Somebody, somewhere, is going to have to break a big scandal on fraudulent voting to compel Congress to fix this law. They have been able to do what they have done because this whole subject is sort of “inside baseball” except to the litigants and the sates involved.
If there is the sort of systematic illegal voting I think there is, it ought to be possible to crack the rings and put some much needed publicity on the subject. As long as it’s buried in the courts nobody much cares.
Last election there was dozens of people convicted of voter fraud (in several states) and the media buried all of them.
Dozens of people out of 40+ million total votes? That’s less than .1% fraud. I think every business would be happy with less than 1 tenth of 1 percent fraud.
Not the point – they were ACORN people whose fraud actually affected the outcome of the elections.
Al Franken won his seat in the Senate on voter fraud. What more do you need?
So did Reid in the Senate.
There is far more “electoral fraud” committed after the voting is done. This is how they get the dead to “vote” in places like Chicago by using absentee ballots which are filled out and put into the “pile” by crooked officials. Voter ID will be next to useless to stop this. Doing a computer comparison of the registered voter rolls against the records of people who have died would probably be of some effect. However there are people in nursing homes who no longer have the mental ability to make a decision of who to vote for, but who do “get to vote” because someone filled out the absentee ballot and had “grandma” mark her name on it. When my mother was in the “home”, she still had valid ID (driver’s license hadn’t expired yet), but she certainly wouldn’t have been able to make a decision between political parties or candidates. So Voter ID isn’t going to “fix” the issue because the problem runs much more deeply than what people realize…
Why don’t the states just pass a new law stating that, since it’s illegal to require ID for something as important as voting, it shall no longer be legal to require ID for purchasing cigarettes, firearms, alcohol, prescription and non prescription drugs, etc.
Again, states can’t trump federal laws.
What if it rains? The poor don’t have the money for umbrellas.
Let the government pay for poor people to get the photo ID. It should be free for anyone who can not afford it. I know people who never drove a car and do not have a photo ID, are they less American? Provide the funding, then no one can argue racism. I fear for our democracy
I have a better idea-Let everyone cheat, no questions asked.
The Texas law included funding for free IDs for those who couldn’t afford them.
I don’t see what the big difficulty is in the states providing voter ID cards. I live in Kentucky and work at the polls. There are several effective ways for voters to have a voter ID. 1. Drivers licenses; employee ID cards; credit cards; known by two poll workers; etc. No one gets upset about it and it works very well for us. We rarely have any problems where I work, and everything runs very smoothly. Sometimes someone comes to the wrong polling place and we direct them to the location of the polling place where they should go. The only real problem I can remember is an elderly gentleman who wanted to vote at the poll, but had already voted earlier at the Clerk’s Office.
Anyone who cannot or will not make the minimal effort needed to get a photo ID is also not making the minimal effort needed to vote wisely. Apparently, legally they can vote. Ethically, they should not!
I find it mind-boggling that in the political areas where constitutional requirements – federal and/or state – state citizens are required to meet statutory standards, we do not require certification. I would like to know why and how this strange, nay, absurd, inconsistency came to be accepted.
Presidential candidates must meet Constitutional requirements in three areas, yet we do not require that they certify that they meet them;
Voters must meet local and federal conditions to legally cast a ballot, yet we do not require that they prove by certification at the time of voting they are in fact residents and legally have standing to vote.
“Hey, take my word for it.”
“I can’t get down to have a photo ID made, but I can get to the polling place.”
These situations are not ridiculous, they are absurd, yet we spend millions of dollars figuring out the obvious in a court of (?) law.
This is the 2012 Presidential election in a nutshell:
…Meanwhile, HillBuzz, a website founded and edited by former Hillary Clinton campaign volunteer Kevin DuJan, challenged the White House’s explanation for Love’s departure.
DuJan, an openly gay man who is now a tea party activist, has an ongoing section of his website devoted to the question “Is Barack Obama Gay?”
On Nov. 10, 2011, DuJan published the following under the title “BIZARRE: White House releases statement on breakup of Barack Obama and his boyfriend Reggie Love”:
The White House today issued a historic and unprecedented press release – where a male President of the United States has announced his breakup with a male staffer and longtime lover.
In the press release, the term ‘body man’ is used instead of ‘boyfriend,’ ‘lover’, ‘paramour’, ‘special friend’, ‘f***buddy’, or all sorts of other appropriate vocabulary. But if you’re someone who hasn’t been in a coma for the last couple of years, you know the real deal.
As WND reported, speculation about Obama’s sexuality has roiled beneath the radar of establishment media, fed, among other things, by Larry Sinclair’s sensational claims of cocaine-fueled homosexual acts with Obama in Chicago and reports of Obama’s “transgender nanny” in Indonesia.
A former radical activist from Occidental College who has recounted a 1980 encounter in which Obama affirmed revolutionary Marxist views, John Drew, told WND in an interview his strong impression at the time was that Obama and the wealthy Pakistani roommate who accompanied him were homosexual lovers. There’s Reggie Love a Gay, Black male and a Pakistani Mohammed Hasan Chandoo muslim.
This is the LGBT voter block (black and muslim, too), a shoo-in for Obama. Then there are the other 12 instances of voter fraud:
1)Electorate manipulation (Obama – immigration and welfare easing)
2)Manipulation of demography (Re-districting)
3)Disenfranchisement (2010 Census moved from Commerce Department to Executive Branch with Rahm Emmanuel in charge. In Texas, white population undercounted, Hispanic overcounted. This happened in every Hispanic heavy state.)
4)Intimidation (New Black Panthers, SEIU, AFL-CIO,et al)
5)Vote buying (“Obama Money”-Spanish ads for food stamps)
6)Misinformation (MoveOn.org, Code Pink, La Raza, Priorities, etc.)
7)Misleading or confusing ballot papers(2000 Florida elections-chads, hanging chads)
8)Ballot stuffing (W. Virginia – Lincoln co.)
9)Misrecording of votes (possibly in Barcelona, Spain?)
10)Misuse of proxy votes
11)Destruction or invalidation of ballots (absentee and overseas ballots)
12)Tampering with electronic voting machines (SEIU-Nevada 2010)
Yep, Obama’s got this one in the bag. Unless of course, White population turns out massively to overturn this gerrymandering of 2012′s Presidential election. God Bless America, she’s on life support. Amen. Take 10 friends with us to vote this Nov. 6. America is counting on We The People. Amen.
Not counting the votes of our servicemen abroad.
As a Texan born and raised in the Midwest, isn’t there some way to constitutionally challenge the Voting Rights Act. My impression, after a couple of decades living here in Texas,is Jim Crow disappeared long ago. Minorities are now a majority, a large part of the population was born in the North/West – so why is the VRA still applied to Texas?
Not only that but most people living in Texas are like you and I. We were born elsewhere and have NO connection to Texas’ history of racial based voter suppression. Both my husband and I were born in liberal Washington state. Our daughter (also a Texas voter) was born in San Francisco. Out of 25 houses on my street, only 2 people are actually Texas born.
The judicial system is nearly completely controlled by the left now. I do not give much credence to federal courts anymore. They almost always follow the Left’s playbook. In addition, O ignores them with impunity. Only the Repubs, playing by the old, outdated, constitutional rules seem to care. While this hurts in theory it will not matter (yet) in November. Even with heavy cheating (a given), Romney will get 60%+ of the Texas vote.
Okay, so can Texas call an emergency session of their state legislature and amend their voter ID law so that anyone who requires an ID can get it free? If so, no one is disenfranchised. That seems the simplest course. Obviously, Obama is so afraid of losing swing states that he wants to cheat his way to a win in TX. I can’t imagine how many illegals will be streaming across the border to vote for him. This is truly frightening. Heads up, TX. Give the ID’s away if you have to. Don’t let Obama steal your electoral votes.
The law already contains that clause. It also exempts anyone over 65 from having to show ID.
Just throwing this out for thought.
Art. 1 Sec. 1
1
PREAMBLE
Humbly invoking the blessings of Almighty God, the people of the State of
Texas, do ordain and establish this Constitution.
ARTICLE 1
BILL OF RIGHTS
That the general, great and essential principles of liberty and free government
may be recognized and established, we declare:
Sec. 1. FREEDOM AND SOVEREIGNTY OF STATE. Texas is a free and
independent State, subject only to the Constitution of the United States, and the
maintenance of our free institutions and the perpetuity of the Union depend upon
the preservation of the right of local self-government, unimpaired to all the States.
For all the 56 pages, it boils down to this:
Neither the law nor the Constitution outweighs the fact that the Left controls the Federal government, Federal bureaucracy, and the Federal judiciary. The Left does not want any security or verification in our electoral system; either the legality of candidates or the validity of either individual votes or the counting of them en masse. They have the system nicely rigged now, and they have no intention of letting the subjects change things.
The last thing to expect from the Federal courts is justice. Or even obedience to the law if such interferes with the desires of the Left.
Subotai Bahadur
Christian ..would it be possible to charge illegals voting when caught at the booth illegally voting. I understand probable cause may be a difficulty.
I really don’t see how the country will recover from the lack of rule of law. too many seem to like it this way.
Read Enrique Krauz’s history of Mexico where for a hundred years voter fraud perpetuated an elected dictatorship; few people voted because it was futile. In 1988, people demanded an end to it, and Mexico passed a voter id law requiring every eligible person to have a card with fingerprint and photo. Since that, the majority of eligible voters actually vote. Fox was the first non-dictator in Mexican history.
We are a banana republic.
In college, in elementary logic courses, one of the basic tenents of logic is that one cannot prove a negative. This seems to have escaped Congress who set up this impossible hurdle as the minimum standard.
Life’s unfair. The only way out of this for Texas is to get live GOP voters than the Dems can dig up dead ones. It’s a tough row to how but yer stuck.
I agree with the Texas claim, in a separate case, that it’s unfair to single out certain states because of something that’s now 2 generations or more ago. It’s constitutional and it’s understandable, but it’s unfair. If the provisions of the VRA are broadly unobjectionable, and I think they are, they should cover the whole country.