As other commenters have pointed out, today’s decision upholding the determination that Texas violated the Voting Rights Act is a painfully contorted partial affirmance and remand to the trial court for a remedy. (The link is to the copy of the opinion provided on Rick Hasen’s blog).
The appellate court in effect has said, “Well, Texas doesn’t always charge for birth certificates now (thanks to a mildly remedial law passed in the 2015 legislative session), so we think the picture ID requirement isn’t a poll tax. And … we think the trial court relied too much on an historical record of racial discrimination in Texas. That’s just mean. So … we’re remanding the decision to see if the trial court can find any more evidence of current racial discrimination. We grudgingly admit that the Texas picture ID law is illegal, but we’ll leave it to the trial court to figure out a way to carefully invalidate only those portions of the law that are bad. Which might not be the whole law.”
It’s really a terrible decision in a lot of ways; a sort-of wishy-washy agonized small-voiced acknowledgment that Texas broke the law, mixed in with page after page of carefully-worded dismissal of the mountains of factual evidence of intentional racial discrimination that prompted the law’s development in the first place.
Gosh. All that historical stuff just leaves the Court woozy and afraid that maybe the trial court was too hard on poor old Texas.
Texas Election Law Blog 