5CA Would Do Anything For the GOP, But They Won’t Do That

It is not easy to pass a statute so egregiously discriminatory the Fifth Circuit won’t uphold it. But Texas managed to pull it off:

Texas’ law, and the similar ones being enacted by other state legislatures, are not just bad public policy — they also run afoul of federal law. While the Roberts court struck down a crucial provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, Section 2 of the Act — which forbids racially discriminatory state voting practices — remains in effect. The Fifth Circuit is a conservative, Republican-controlled court, and yet a 9-6 majority found that SB 14 violated the Voting Rights Act.

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The majority opinion, written by Judge Catharina Haynes, was straightforward and powerful. More than 500,000 eligible voters in Texas lack the required ID. Various forms of statistical analysis confirm that racial minorities were far more likely to be affected by these requirements, and various individual cases confirm these effects. As a result, a majority of the court upheld the District Court’s determination that “SB 14 has a discriminatory effect on minorities’ voting rights in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.”

The lengthy, angry dissent by arch-conservative Judge Edith Jones defended the law using reasoning that would make it virtually impossible to find any vote suppression law illegal (which of course is the point.) Jones says that because the law did not affect the 90 percent of Texas minorities that had the required ID, the fact that those without the requisite IDs were overwhelmingly people of color does not represent racial discrimination. This is a transparently illogical claim.

The four Democratic nominees on the Supreme Court are nearly certain to agree with the Fifth Circuit’s decision, meaning it will almost certainly stand. As a result, SB 14 will not be permitted to go into effect in its current form.