The next meeting of the House Elections Committee is scheduled for next Wednesday, April 15, and SB 362, the voter ID bill, is not on the agenda. However, this little gem is:
HJR 39
Author: Allen | et al.Post-ratifying Amendment XXIV to the Constitution of the United States prohibiting the denial or abridgment of the right to vote for failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.
Seriously – we still haven’t ratified it. Yet more evidence of our not-too-distant past, when Texas still stubbornly clung to its Confederate identity.
The timing is great, though – because procuring an identification document invariably involves spending some money, Republican attempts to require a photo ID in addition to one’s voter registration certificate to vote has been labeled by opponents as “the new poll tax.”
We notice Betty “Fu Manchu” Brown isn’t listed among the co-authors, so we’ll be interested to see how she votes on it.
This article appears in April 3 • 2009.