Texas Voter Suppression Law Blocked By Judge

The repugicans are already shopping around for a friendly wingnut judge to uphold their blatant voter suppression laws.

On Thursday, Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos in Texas blocked that state’s attempt to block as many people as possible from voting:

Just weeks before the mid-term elections a federal judge in Corpus Christi struck down on Thursday Texas’ contentious voter ID law, describing it as a “poll tax” and finding that it discriminated against minority voters.
Federal District Court Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos ruled that the law violates the U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act and barred the state from enforcing it in the coming November election.
“There has been a clear and disturbing pattern of discrimination in the name of combating voter fraud in Texas,” Ramos wrote in her opinion issued late Thursday.

This is the same pattern that the five wingnut Justices on the Supreme Court denied the existence of when they gutted the Voting Rights Act. Because even when repugicans have been caught repeatedly saying that Voter ID laws exist explicitly to keep people from voting, some people *coughSCALIAcough* will simply pretend the repugican cabal is just trying to protect the integrity of elections.
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (currently running for governor against Wendy Davis) has vowed to appeal the decision, no doubt hoping to find a friendlier (read as: wingnut ideologue) judge that will happily rubber stamp the so-blatant-it’s-comical attempt to keep minorities, students and the poor away from the voting booth.
This is why it’s so important to have a Democrat in the White House. Contrary to what the lazy and misinformed claim, both parties are not “the same.” There is no conceivable circumstance in which a liberal dominated Supreme Court would have gutted the Voting Rights Act to clear the way for repglican controlled states to undo half a century’s worth of civil rights gains. For frak’s sake, repugicans are even using the same arguments as last time!:

During closing arguments, the state countered that the law is constitutional, popular and essential to combat voter fraud.
However, Ramos found in her ruling that many other voting laws that were found to discriminate against minorities – like the poll tax and literacy tests – were also justified on those grounds.
“There has been a clear and disturbing pattern of discrimination in the name of combating voter fraud in Texas,” she wrote. “The only voter fraud addressed by (voter ID) is voter impersonation fraud, which the evidence demonstrates is very rare.”

The only reason repugicans are being so transparent in their push to suppress voting rights is because they know that as long as there are five right wing ideologues on the Supreme Court and hundreds of conservative extremists (many with lifetime appointments) infesting the Judicial Branch, they’ll have a free hand to do whatever they want. There’s a reason repugicans are blocking Obama’s appointments: They’re hoping that a repugican will take the White House in the next presidential election so they can pack the courts with more pro-business, anti-democracy judges.
If this story does not convince you of how critical it is to keep repugicans away from the judiciary, you’re not part of the solution; you’re a very large part of the problem.