04.23.07
Voter IDiocy Passes The House
Here’s the vote:
76 Yeas, 68 Nays, 3 Present, not voting
Yeas - Anderson; Aycock; Berman; Bohac; Bonnen; Branch; Brown, B.; Brown, F.; Callegari; Chisum; Christian; Cook, B.; Corte; Crabb; Creighton; Crownover; Darby; Davis, J.; Delisi; Driver; Eissler; Elkins; Flynn; Gattis; Geren; Haggerty; Hamilton; Hancock; Hardcastle; Harless; Harper-Brown; Hartnett; Hilderbran; Hill; Howard, C.; Hughes; Isett; Jackson; Keffer; King, P.; King, S.; Kolkhorst; Krusee; Kuempel; Latham; Laubenberg; Macias; Madden; McCall; Miller; Morrison; Mowery; Murphy; O’Day; Orr; Otto; Parker; Patrick; Paxton; Phillips; Pitts; Riddle; Smith, T.; Smith, W.; Smithee; Solomons; Straus; Swinford; Talton; Taylor; Truitt; Van Arsdale; West; Woolley; Zedler; Zerwas
Nays - Allen; Alonzo; Anchia; Bailey; Bolton; Burnam; Castro; Chavez; Cohen; Coleman; Cook, R.; Davis, Y.; Deshotel; Dukes; Dunnam; Dutton; Eiland; Escobar; Farabee; Farias; Farrar; Frost; Gallego; Garcia; Giddings; Gonzales; Gonzalez Toureilles; Guillen; Heflin; Hernandez; Herrero; Hochberg; Hodge; Homer; Hopson; Howard, D.; Jones; King, T.; Leibowitz; Lucio; Mallory Caraway; Martinez; Martinez Fischer; McClendon; McReynolds; Menendez; Merritt; Miles; Naishtat; Noriega; Oliveira; Olivo; Ortiz; Pickett; Pierson; Puente; Quintanilla; Raymond; Ritter; Rodriguez; Rose; Strama; Thompson; Turner; Vaught; Veasey; Villarreal; Vo
Present, not voting - Mr. Speaker(C); England; Goolsby
Absent, Excused - Flores; Moreno; Peña
Those in bold are, of course, Williamson County’s own and the only two Republicans that voted against this racist, barbaric and antidemocratic piece of legislation. (I take back what I said about Republicans in that earlier post, exception the two that voted against this horrible bill).
Gardner Selby has a great postmortem over at Postcards on today’s voter IDiocy, Two reactions (pro and con) to Brown’s voter measure.
The pretext for this legislation, which the Republican National Committee and Karl Rove have championed, is that voter impersonation is a significant problem. That assertion is without proof.
During a six-hour debate that cut off the rest of the day’s long calendar, Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston, pointed up that the Republican assertion that dead people are voting is based on “research†done using an on-line genealogical web site.
Brown allowed the “poll tax†pig to be dressed up. She accepted an amendment exempting anyone 80 or over from the voter ID requirement, which is an exception that proves the rule. The 80-and-over amendment sounds awfully unconstitutional in that it attaches a greater significance to some voters than others and therefore violates the equal protection clause with regard to voters under age 80.
[…]
But Republicans voted down a variety of other amendments, including a substitute proposal by Rep. Mark Strama, D-Austin, which would have substituted an upgraded enforcement mechanism in cases of voter fraud for the ID requirement that would inconvenience millions of law-abiding Texans.
The real intent behind this bill showed up in this space a couple of weeks ago in a New York Times story on a report demonstrating that states that have adopted so-called “voter ID†rules have seen a two or three percentage point drop in voting, mainly among minorities and the elderly.
Those voters tend to be Democratic. It’s that simple.
The Senate’s Democrats have sufficient numbers to kill HB 218 as a stand-alone operation, though lawmakers expect an effort to attach the measure as an amendment to something else that supposedly “must passâ€. The Senate is a body that loves compromise, but on this bill there should be none.
Good job Mr. Selby, more of that please.