Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Let's turn this around a bit. Does it take a major effort for black people to fly on an airplane, buy a beer, rent a home, get married, buy a cell phone, obtain cough syrup, apply for food stamps and welfare, or open a bank account? You can't go buy a T-Mobile using a bus pass. If black people are unable to handle such basic tasks perhaps the problem isn't voter ID but how their leadership is running things. Heck look at IDs you can legally use to buy booze in California, it's much, much more restrictive than the list of IDs to vote. Are most black people in California unable to drink?It seems to me that you're implicitly claiming that if blacks aren't prevented from obtaining such and such ID (or at the very least if it is not made unnaturally difficult to do so), they are not being targeted by voter ID law. I think that if a change to the law is made that specifically rescinds government recognition of photo IDs disproportionately owned by blacks it is reasonable to say that blacks were targeted unless an innocuous explanation is at hand. I am open to hearing such an explanation.
Yes, let's take a look at that opinion a bit closer then.I confess to not having read the full opinion I cited; in my mind if a law is changed so that the types of photo ID that blacks naturally tend to have (hypothetically, bus cards instead of driver's licenses) are excluded, without that innocuous explanation, that means they are being targeted for having to go to extra effort in order to vote (as opposed to people who tend to have a recognized ID unrelated to wanting to vote).
You can argue that people not willing to expend what is in the end hardly a herculean effort don't deserve our consideration. That is immaterial to whether they were targeted.
You can also argue that the factual finding that the disproportionately black owned types of photo IDs were excluded is just plain wrong. If that is true I certainly would like to know about it.
This kind of reasoning happens throughout, though it's at its most blatant here. "Yes, the restrictions are reasonable and the justifications are plausible but that doesn't prove it wasn't racist, and in our court Republicans are racist until proven innocent!"Page 58 said:In this case, despite finding that race was not a motivating factor for enactment of the challenged provisions of SL 2013-381, the district court addressed the State’s justifications for each provision at length. N.C. State Conf., 2016 WL 1650774, at *96-116, *147. The court did so, however, through a rational-basis-like lens. For example, the court found the General Assembly’s decision to eliminate same-day registration “not unreasonable,” and found “at least plausible” the reasons offered for excluding student IDs from the list of qualifying IDs. Id. at *108, *142. But, of course, a finding that legislative justifications are “plausible” and “not unreasonable” is a far cry from a finding that a particular law would have been enacted without considerations of race.
They start with the presumption that the law is racist from the first page (okay page 9 given the first 8 are boilerplate) with their initial logic chain 1: Politicians inevitably try to entrench their positions by suppressing people who don't vote for them. 2: Race has some unspecified correlation with voting habits in some districts. 3: Therefore laws they pass are racist.