Convention Report: Is today's strikedown of Texas's voter-ID law just a temporary setback in the GOP's crusade to put a lid on democracy?

Is it all that darned Isaac's fault that the R's didn't have time at their convention to celebrate their historic victories in election stealing and voter suppression?

"Texas is the largest state covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires federal approval or 'preclearance' of any voting changes in states that have a history of discrimination. Because of Texas’s discrimination history, the voter ID law signed last year by its Republican governor, Rick Perry, had to be cleared by the Justice Department."

-- from "Texas voter ID law is blocked," by Sari Horwitz
and Del Quentin Wilber, today on washingtonpost.com

by Ken

I don't know, maybe they will be talking about it in today's final session of the Republic presidential nominating convention. I mean, the decision announced today by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia turning thumbs down on Texas's voter-ID law, on the ground, as the Washington Post's Sari Horwitz and Del Quentin Wilber put it (see link above), "that the state failed to show that the law would not harm the voting rights of minorities." It's possible that those strict constitutional constructionists (you know, the ones who don't seem ever to have read anything but selected bits and out-of-context pieces of the Constitution) will be fulminating about those damned courts and their damnable overreach.

After all, Texas's attorney general, Gregg Abbott, who I'm guessing has been to law school and everything has already announced: "Today’s decision is wrong on the law and improperly prevents Texas from implementing the same type of ballot integrity safeguards that are employed by Georgia and Indiana -- and were upheld by the Supreme Court."

But in general the R's don't seem to have been surprisingly modest at this year's convention in celebrating one of their great triumphs of recent years: their nationwide campaign of election-stealing, with its new legal cornerstone, voter disenfranchisement. Why, this historic accomplishment is right up there with heroic campaign to prevent any Obama administration initiatives from having any chance of succeeding, starting with the basic job of staffing the administration. Come to think of it, they haven't been celebrating that accomplishment either, somehow managing to forget it entirely when their silver-tongued orators engage in their ritual denunciation of the administration's failures. It must be old-fashioned Republican modesty.

Which is why today's Convention Report, and very likely tomorrow's Convention Follow-Up, will be concerned with a matter whose importance to the convention is underlined by its neglect: today's unanimous ruling by that panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Here are the New York Times's Charlie Savage and Manny Fernandez {"Court Blocks Texas Voter ID Law, Citing Racial Impact"):

WASHINGTON -- A federal court on Thursday struck down a Texas law that would have required voters to show government-issued photo identification before casting their ballots in November, ruling that the law would hurt turnout among minority voters and impose "strict, unforgiving burdens on the poor" by charging those voters who lack proper documentation fees to obtain election ID cards.

The three-judge panel in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia called Texas' voter-identification law the most stringent of its kind in the country, though Gov. Rick Perry and the state's attorney general vowed to appeal the decision to the United States Supreme Court. The judges' ruling came just two days after another three-judge panel in the same court found that the Texas Legislature had intentionally discriminated against minority voters in drawing up new political maps for Congressional and legislative districts, citing the same section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Known as Senate Bill 14, the state's voter-identification law requires voters who show up at the polls to identify themselves with one of five forms of ID, including a driver's license or a United States passport. Those lacking one of the five types of identification must obtain a so-called election identification certificate, a government-issued card similar to a driver's license. Prospective voters would need to travel to a state Department of Public Safety office to get an election ID card, and, although the card is free, they would have to verify their identity to obtain one, in some cases paying $22 to order a certified copy of their birth certificate.

In its unanimous 56-page ruling, the federal judges found that the fees and the cost of traveling for those voters lacking one of the five forms of ID disproportionately affected the poor and minorities. "Moreover, while a 200 to 250 mile trip to and from a D.P.S. office would be a heavy burden for any prospective voter, such a journey would be especially daunting for the working poor," the decision read. . . .

This is good news, I guess, just like that earlier decision the NYT reporters refer to, which denied "preclearance" to the redistricting maps concocted by the Texas Legislature for the purpose of under-enfranchising voters it doesn't like. And it could just be because we're so unused to hearing good news from the federal courts that I'm not inclined to celebrate. Maybe it's just grumpiness; maybe it's paranoia. But I look, for example, at that chunk of the WaPo account I put at the top of this post, and I think of the way Chief Justice "Smirkin' John" Roberts likes to work, finding cases that could be decided on narrow, even "strictly constructed" legal grounds and by adjudicating them instead as broadly as possible rewriting the law, and the Constitution, to suit his tastes better.

It's already clear that with so many states passing laws like Texas's, and with so many of those laws being challenged in the courts, and with diverse rulings that will need to be reconciled, the matter of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is going to be under scrutiny by the Roberts Five. And I'm already imagining a scenario, possibly involving yet another of those famous opinions from "Slow Anthony" Kennedy -- of the "discrmination? what discrimination?" variety -- which will belatedly figure out that the provisions of Section 5, or maybe the whole damned Voting Rights Act, were never constitutional. Or maybe that they were just barely constitutional for a while but that while has passed.

After all, in a free society, what freedom could be more important than the freedom to discriminate against people who can't protect themselves? Does anyone want to bet that we don't have five Supreme Court justices who feel that way?


MEANWHILE, BACK IN TAMPA . . .

Our first-ever incorporated presidential nominee fibbed his way through yet another public obfuscation. Howie wrote earlier today about Matt Taibbi's incredibly important new Rolling Stone piece, "Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital." It should constitute an absolute disqualification for Willard Inc. from holding any public office, and should be required reading for anyone even contemplating voting in November. I want to come back to it tomorrow. For now, if you haven't already read it, do yourself a favor.

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