Tom Pennington
The Supreme Court blocked Wisconsin from implementing its new voter-ID law on Thursday, the same night that a federal judge in Texas struck down that state’s law requiring voters to produce government-issued identification before voting. U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzalez Ramos, an Obama appointee, ruled that Texas’s law amounted to an “unconstitutional poll tax” intended to discriminate against Hispanic and black citizens. She said that although she found no “smoking guns” of racist intentions in the 2011 session in which the law was passed, the law’s sponsors “were motivated, at the very least in part, because of and not merely in spite of the voter-ID law’s detrimental effects on the African-American and Hispanic electorate.” A spokesman for Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said that the state will “immediately appeal” the ruling. The Supreme Court gave no reason for its ruling, but Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas dissented, arguing that they cannot block an appeals court unless it “clearly and demonstrably erred in its application of accepted standards.”