| A reminder: At stake in the House proceedings this weekend is a proposal that will disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters, voters in the cities, voters in the country, voters along the coast, voters in Austin.
The fight over voter I.D. is this era's civil rights fight. Republicans want to diminish voting by the elderly, the poor, people of color, by women -- in other words, voters who tend to vote for Democrats.
Richard Posner, the federal appeals court judge who wrote the opinion approving an Indiana voter I.D. law admitted it: the law will diminish votes for Democrats. Posner said he just didn't care.
There is no more fundamental issue in a Democracy than the right to vote. Republicans deny they want to suppress votes. They say they want to diminish voter impersonation. There are no cases of voter impersonation. Their argument is laughable. Their intent is to return Texas to the era of poll taxes and segregation. This time, the segregated will be women, the elderly, and those who, like my daughter before this year's city election, have their license stolen two days before an election.
These last few days the fight has been carried out through procedural means. Legitimate procedural means. That can lead people to forget the moral stakes. Tactics take focus and planning, and the core issue can temporarily be lost in such an effort.
This is an issue that defines who we are. It's no less than that. Do any legislators really want to be known as members of the Legislature that returned our state to a pre-civil rights era? I don't think so.
Paul Burka asked me to tell him what the "end game" was of the Democrats' valiant effort this weekend. I asked him how Martin Luther King Jr. would have answered that question in 1960. Because the answer to that, evidenced by today's legislative fight, is that we have still not reached the end of King's historic battle. |
