The Associated Press notes that the Old Confederacy is prepared to take full partisan Republican advantage of their newfound freedom to discriminate.
After the high court announced its momentous ruling Tuesday, officials in Texas and Mississippi pledged to immediately implement laws requiring voters to show photo identification before getting a ballot. North Carolina Republicans promised they would quickly try to adopt a similar law. Florida now appears free to set its early voting hours however Gov. Rick Scott and the GOP Legislature please. And Georgia’s most populous county likely will use county commission districts that Republican state legislators drew over the objections of local Democrats.
Texas is ready to implement a redistricting plan that a federal court has already deemed discriminatory.
The Supreme Court decision striking down elements of the Voting Rights Act could lead to the Legislature implementing a 2011 redistricting plan that was deemed by federal judges to be discriminatory to Texas minority voters.
Soon after Tuesday’s decision, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said that the state’s voter identification plan would immediately take effect, requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls. “Redistricting maps passed by the Legislature may also take effect without approval from the federal government,” he said.
But Jonathan Tobin thinks we are living in the past.
I am going to tear apart his argument in a separate post.
If there’s one silver lining in all this, it’s that these teabeggers are inevitably going to overreach. There’s talk of starting up various freedom rides and other actions to oppose this. By the looks of it they will have plenty of examples to choose from for their protests.
A combination of action against voter suppression and rebellion against the war on women (Wendy in Texas last night could be a turning point in that, too) will solidify the coalition – a hefty percentage of white women and people of color – to a level that could challenge GOP gerrymandering.
Meanwhile, older white republican men continue to pass away.
I honestly think Texas might flip within the next 5 years.
There will be white men joining the fight too. And don’t forget the Latinos. Basically anyone who isn’t racist.
As far as protests, yes, but it’s also about getting people to the polls. I believe there’s good evidence that the surge in voter suppression laws last year made black people all the more determined to vote, so we need to build on that. Looking ahead to 2014, there’s plenty of time to help people over the hurdles the Neo-Confederate bastards are going to put up. If they’re going to impose new poll taxes, for instance, I for one will gladly chip in to help people pay them.
Photo IDs are not ipso facto discriminatory. They are problematic if 1) you need to pay for them rather than the state paying when you are indigent 2) the requirement is announced shortly before an election and 3) they are difficult to obtain. If these states announce TODAY that they will require in 2014, I have fewer concerns. Yes, Real ID makes it difficult at times.
In SD, you need a photo ID. So people have them. I use my driver’s license. Not everyone has a driver’s license, but probably 90% do.
In all instances, the goal of requiring photo ID for voting is to restrict voting by certain demographics. There is no actual need for them, none. So even if the state Repub regime makes getting them “easier” (nothing is easier than not requiring them), the [Repub] goal of photo ID is ALWAYS vote suppression, no exceptions.
They are enacted by Repub regimes because the data is very clear that demographics that tend to vote Dem tend to have larger numbers without photo ID. It’s a numbers game cynically played by Repubs. And just how easy is it to get the IDs in depopulated and low service SD?
I think SD was a covered jurisdiction because of its discrimination against Native Americans. No longer.
No, SD was not a covered jurisdiction. Certain counties were. My county, Minnehaha, was not. The reason for coverage was not reliance on photo IDs.
You make a lot of flat assertions, but there is no evidence at all that anything you have said is anything more than spleen.
Other than the fact that parts of SD were covered jurisdictions, all spleen! And who said they were covered because of photo ID requirements? As for evidence, you need to use the google.
Was photo ID voting passed in SD under a Repub regime? QED.
“And just how easy is it to get the IDs in depopulated and low service SD?”
We get them from the prairie dogs. They won the franchise to dispense all driver’s licenses. It was a closed competition.
Honestly, sometimes I wonder. SD is a state that is not hugely populated, yes, and which has many miles between towns, yes. But you can get a driver’s license at 14 here. And that’s when a lot of people get them. We also have either the highest or second highest rate of dead kids due to highway accidents.
When I went to get my driver’s license, the wait was about 2 minutes, and I did not make an appointment. I always vote early. In Sioux Falls, you can vote in any precinct location, since they use a central database. The Sioux Falls School District is giving all students tablet computers next year. Sioux Falls has 5 public pools, and we are building a new public pool. While it’s not a wonderful place to live, it has some advantages.
It’s a wonderful city, no sarcasm. It’s also the biggest metropolis of SD and may not be fully representative.
Sioux Falls is light years from Rosebud or Pine Ridge in terms of socioeconomic issues, transportation, isolation, etc, etc. SD has been in a cold war with the Indian tribes for many years, to the point that it is essentially two states.
Count on it, this ruling will be used to further suppress the native american vote in SD.
I am certainly going to be watching. The most telling change might be in early voting. The indians must all travel for 50-60 miles to vote. The early voting provisions are very important to get a good turnout. If early voting (which is pretty good in SD – about 1 month) is changed, THAT would be a direct attack on indian voting, and no Dem is elected to anything in SD without 85-95% turnout in Rosebud, Pine Ridge, or the other reservations.
Was the law in Rhode Island enacted by the GOP? I honestly don’t know.
Also you can get an ID by bringing for free by bringing one of a list of documents like a utility bill and it’s free so it seems to be one of the less terrible laws.
See, look at Rhode Island, a Democratic state that adopted a voter ID law:
http://news.providencejournal.com/breaking-news/2013/06/providence-ri–voters-who-have-no.html
Rhode Island voters who have no photo IDs would be able to continue to show a government-issued ID when they go to the polls, according to a bill approved by the House Judiciary Committee Tuesday night.
That’s what it looks like when a state adopts voter ID laws for reasons that, while unwise, are not aimed at voter suppression and partisan advantage.
Compare this to Texas, where the law was written so that gun permits would count as acceptable ID, but IDs issued by state universities and IDs issued for food stamp recipients would not.
If I had a scintilla of faith that any of these jurisdictions were adopting voter ID laws for reasons other than vote suppression, and felt like I could trust them to implement such a requirement in a manner that didn’t impose a burden, I wouldn’t be so opposed to them.
But when some theoretical voter ID law could be implemented that way, the reality is that these jurisdictions are implementing them as a tool for partisan voter suppression, and making the ID requirement burdensome is the point.
Well, except that they’re totally unnecessary.
The rate of voter fraud is infintessimally small. The rate of people getting caught wtihout a valid ID on election day – for a myriad of reasons – is drastically higher.
Imagine you have a cancer screening test that has a 2% chance of causing cancer, but which is designed to screen for a kind of cancer that does not exist. Would you get the test?
In no analysis does voter ID make sense. It’s entirely about keeping “those people” from voting, whoever “those people” happen to be at the moment.
That’s why I said “wouldn’t be so opposed.”
If these laws were merely useless, wasted energy addressing a non-problem, I’d still be opposed, but they wouldn’t make my blood boil the way a deliberate voter-suppression campaign does.
As a lifetime Georgia resident and a voter and driver for almost 50 years, in 2012 a new GOP passed law mandated that in order to renew my DL I had to show up at the DMV (where previously renewals could be done online). To prove that I was who I was I had to bring a certified birth certificate, a marriage license, or a divorce document, or other legal papers to trace the evolution to the name that my license was to be renewed under. Plus one more document that proved that I lived where I lived.
This 2012 bill was signed into law by the GOP governor who said that all Georgians would now have id that couldn’t be stolen! While this is obviously applicable to all, who did the legislature and the governor think would have the most difficulty in meeting these requirements? I’ve never understood how they got away with this, because in order to vote one had to have photo ID, either a DL or one supplied by the DMV. Therefore the bar to voting was raised way past simply showing up and getting a photo id.
Those restrictions would seem to make it difficult for rural older rural white ladies who have been married multiple times.
But I bet that in rural counties, there is the “we can vouch for them” practice when those ladies come to register.
Differential administration of the law is how voter suppression worked in the past and likely what is going on here.
Why not push to extend the same Federal attention the South enjoyed to all states. Don’t the people of Pennsylvania deserve protection from voter suppression?
Seems like a simple fix.
The ruling ruled that out, too. They can’t extend it nationally.
They could actually, but it would need to be authorized by Congress. Now, since I no longer believe in the tooth fairy, I do not believe that this congress will do anything with a map. The VRA is effectively dead.
No they can’t. The opinion ruled out the old formula, and they also ruled out extending it to every area nationally:
And, secondly, beware the bait-and-switch. Even in the unlikely event that Congress can pass a new version of Section 4, it will be enormously difficult to meet the arbitrary standards that a Supreme Court consistently hostile to federal intervention to protect basic rights has laid out. If a new Section 4 covers too few jurisdictions, it can be held to illegally discriminate against some states (as the Court did today.) If Congress creates a national preclearance requirement, however, it is virtually certain that the Republican-appointed majority of the Court would hold that this remedy was not “congruent and proportional,” as it held when Congress tried to protect victims of gender-based violence under its authority to enforce the 14th Amendment. It is nearly impossible to satisfy the demands of a Court that takes equality between the states much more seriously than the equal rights of American citizens.
Remember that the Repub party has no interest in “fixing” the very vote suppression that they are engaging in across the nation, and now certainly across the New Confederacy.
There is no fix that is possible with our worthless dysfunctional Do-Nothing Repub Congress. That was a crucial element in this scheme by Roberts’ Repubs.
It remains unclear exactly how a photo ID requirement became “commonsense” when the incidence of voter fraud is so low.
Because most people are ignorant of history.
Yup, it’s something like 5,000 out of 130,000,000 IIRC.
I thought it was less than 100, either way it’s a solution looking for a problem.
AFAIK, it was about 100 in the State of Ohio (recent report I read on TPM) so took 100×50 to get the rough estimate of 5,000 nationally.
“Voter fraud” is the strawman. As photo ID seems so innocuous to most Americans, they didn’t bother to consider that the “problem” didn’t exist and therefore, didn’t object to the “solution.”
Well, Uncle Clarence is definitely keepin’ his conservative white overseers happy. What a strange character. How in the world will history account for him and explain him?
America’s conservative white males have certainly thrown a huge monkey wrench into the American voting system with this intellectually dishonest decision. I’m sure that the lower federal courts are not going to be happy with all the voting rights litigation that Roberts Repubs have spawned with this baseless purely partisan decision. Yet another reason why Obama’s nominees must be seated en masse.
Of course, many local election changes across the Confederacy will be too small to challenge, and the federal courts are mostly controlled by Repubs, so the odds will be against plaintiffs and civil rights groups when challenging the New Confederacy’s minority vote suppression tactics—but there is no alternative but to try. All statewide redistricting and registration changes will have to be litigated across the entire New Confederacy by the DOJ and NAACP, with special emphasis on Tex-ass, FL, NC and AZ. Texas should be perpetually in federal court. This is an election lawyer full employment act.
The first big political question is whether the Dem party and its leaders will move beyond tepid finger wagging and expressing “disappointment” to actual fiery denunciation and connecting the dots of the “conservative” Repubs vote suppression strategy. The first step is to start correctly identifying exactly who issued this decision—not the “supreme court” but the “five conservative Repubs on the court” or the “five conservative males on the court”. Roberts and his conservative majority have to be ID as being part and parcel of the “conservative” movement and the Repub party–which they are.
The “conservative” movement and its supreme court majority are openly destroying the nation’s democracy. Time to up the rhetorical ante. Roberts Repubs are gambling that Dems are too weak and craven to attack them and will hide behind the robes they have dragged through the loathsome sewage.
The days of “respecting” the Supreme Court are over, eclipsed by the nakedly partisan rulings of five “conservative” male activists masquerading as “justices”. They need to be denounced 24/7 and their unrestrained judicial partisanship and corrupt arrogation of power needs to become a Dem theme for the next decade. That’s a what a real political opposition would do when faced with such an all-out assault on the nation’s principles solely to aid a single political party and movement.