Posted on 10/18/2014 11:55:41 AM PDT by jazusamo
Overnight the Supreme Court refused to reverse the stay imposed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and thus allowed voter ID to be required in the mid-term election in Texas. This is procedural delay based on the idea that election rules shouldn’t change at the last second.
So voter ID gets one last hurrah in Texas.
But election integrity advocates shouldn’t celebrate too much. Texas Voter ID is doomed. After this next election, it is prohibited from being used.
Nor should much faith be placed in any appeal. The plaintiffs won on two separate theories under the Voting Rights Act, and both are fatal to the law. First, the court ruled that Texas voter ID was enacted with a discriminatory intent. That finding alone dooms the law. And here’s the bad news: the chances of that finding being overturned are next to zero. Proving discriminatory intent isn’t easy, but the court said the plaintiffs did it. That’s a fact-based determination and will not be overturned unless it is clearly erroneous. Appeals courts are deferential to lower courts on fact findings. Why? Because lower courts conduct the trial. Lower courts see the witnesses, even if they sweat and squirm. Appeals judges sitting in New Orleans can’t size up the witnesses like the lower court judge in Corpus Christi.
Second, Texas also lost on the results prong under the Voting Rights Act. The plaintiffs pushed an outlandish theory for sure, and one that might get overturned on appeal. They pressed the novel idea that any statistical disparity of the impact of voter ID dooms the law. If blacks have ID less than whites, game over. The problem is that the courts have so far rejected that idea. You can be sure the Supreme Court will also.
But so what? The intent finding stands and that means that the Texas law likely gets one last hurrah in two weeks.
What’s the solution? For Texas to pass a new ID law lickety split. A new law can be in place within a few days of the Texas legislature convening in January. Pass something identical to the law approved in South Carolina or Georgia, and it’s lights out for the foes of election integrity.
Some thinking along your line of thinking.. and good news
BIG
BUMP!
TX VoterID ping, good stuff!
ping!!!
I think it is in place AT LEAST for this years election.
And I suspect it will be upheld for future elections. Or am I wrong?
It was the lower court’s “stay” that was overturned. Final say on the law will come later.
It will be in effect for this election but Chris Adams says it won’t hold up in this piece and he’s pretty darn knowedgable.
I’ve been pinged to the 1982 agreement that Republicans would not prosecute or even address vote fraud for 20 years and thought it funky but I guess it was true.
Two previous threads
Bttt
It will be in effect for this election but Chris Adams says it won’t hold up in this piece and he’s pretty darn knowedgable.
...
His solution that you bolded looks good, too.
As mentioned in related threads, the states have never amended the Constitution to prohibit themselves from requiring that candidate voters show a valid photo ID before being allowed to vote.
Things are finally looking up!
Texas will have a photo ID law just like Tennessee and other states that value the right to vote legally. This was a last gasp effort by the libs to undermine the legal vote in the coutrys second largest state
“...Chris Adams says it won’t hold up in this piece and he’s pretty darn knowedgable.”
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OK, thanks. I guess the new legislation should be crafted in the NEXT legislative session since Texas will have replaced a number of RINOS and DemocRATS with true constitutional conservatives. I’m hoping that when the new session convenes, the first order of business will be to purge that despicable Joe Strauss and the ‘RATS he has placed in leadership positions.
Can any of you Texans tell us whether conservatives will be able to overthrow the Joe Strauss RINO/’RAT alliance running the Texas House of Representatives now? I seem to remember from the primary that a decent number of RINOs lost out to conservative challengers in Texas.
I think they need to pass a new law requiring photo ID but also addressing some of Ginsburgs’s issues, like making sure people know they can get a birth certificate from two or three dollars if it’s being used to get ID to vote. Also I’m not sure why they are not allowing photo ID from state universities. Unless they can articulate a good reason I think they should allow them. And if there is some reason they are not good ID for voting, then perhaps the problem could be solved by making sure the procedures for getting the university ID as well as the information on them to be uniform across the state.
“First, the court ruled that Texas voter ID was enacted with a discriminatory intent.” How could they have proven “intent”? I cannot think of anything more difficult to prove.
I am curious as to what “paperwork” Obola presented to Columbia to get a student ID.
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