Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Judges say you're not a serious American if you "haven't taken the necessary time" to get an ID and vote. Hey, who said life was easy?

The majority of state constitutions, including Wisconsin's, must say something like this about voting: "Voting is a complicated, difficult maze-like right we should all spend lots of time doing." Well, that's how our judicial branch is interpreting the law.

Conservative judges and justices majority opinions are telling us an awful lot about their warped politicized vision of this country, and the resentment they have toward thevoting public they serve. 

From the activists conservative Supreme Court to similar right wing judges nationwide, there's no real limit to the hoops Americans will have to jump through to exercise their constitutional right to vote. There's nothing to complicated or inconvenient, if you're serious about being a real patriot. 

All you have to do is get a photo ID, find a distant polling place before you get off of work, and stand in line for hours like the dog these judges believe you to be. If you "haven't taken the necessary time," they say, then you're not disenfranchised. 

An amazing leap of illogic? That's what makes the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals majority opinion so mindbogglingly bad. Judges are greasing the skids for their fellow Republicans lawmakers in the legislative branch, and they're not hiding their collusion one bit:  
WISC: The written decision by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judges Frank Easterbrook, Diane Sykes and John Tinder; "the public is interested in using laws enacted through the democratic process, until the laws' validity has been finally determined. If seven weeks is too short, then state officials need not make any change and nothing has been 'imposed' on them," the judges wrote. The three judges said they did not believe some 300,000 registered voters estimated not to have a qualifying photo ID would be disenfranchised
 "The number of registered voters without a qualifying photo ID thus appears to reflect how many persons have not taken the necessary time, rather than a number of persons who have been disenfranchised," the panel said. "We do not apply the label 'disenfranchised' to someone who has not elected to register." 
A breathtakingly arrogant backhand to us voters, who they accuse of not being willing to work a little harder to cast a constitutionally guaranteed ballot. Odd, the right to bare arms has a whole different set of standards. You'll notice the logic of the dissenting judges below no longer has a place in society these days:
In a strongly-worded dissent, Judge Ann Claire Williams writes that the panel "should not have altered the status quo in Wisconsin so soon before its elections. And that is true whatever one's view on the merits of the case." Williams said the court "brazenly" said that "more than 90 percent of Wisconsin's registered voters already have a qualifying ID" and it would have little impact on the majority of voters.

"But the right to vote is not the province of just the majority," Williams wrote. "It simply cannot be the answer to say that 90 percent of registered voters can still vote. To say that is to accept the disenfranchisement of 10 percent of a state's registered voters; for the state to take this position is shocking."

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