There is an ongoing federal lawsuit in Alabama, brought by the NAACP and others, over restrictive voter ID laws in the state that the plaintiffs claim are voter suppression measures disproportionately targeting black and Latino citizens.   Here is a short description of the lawsuit from the Alabama Public Radio website (in other news, did you know W.C. Handy is known worldwide as the Father of the Blues?)

Here are legal papers from the lawsuit itself, plaintiffs responding to the Alabama Secretary of State’s motion to have the case dismissed for lack of triable issues of fact.

Trial was set for September 11, 2017, according to the APR piece, but it seems the trial is now set for February, 2018.  Oh well.  Here is a recent op-ed by a guy who heads a church group fighting the Alabama voter suppression measures.  He does not even mention Alabama’s closure of more than thirty DMV offices where many voters could have secured the newly required photo IDs.   Nor the closure of some voting sites in majority black and hispanic precincts.  

Fortunately we live in a land of law, (he said sardonically).   Here is one shining example of the Supreme law of the land in the land of law we live in:

When a man has emerged from slavery, and by the aid of beneficent legislation has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen, or a man, are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected.

(from the Civil Rights Cases, 1883)

You may have to wait ninety years or so for your taste of justice, as these special favorites of the law had to, starting 18 years after the end of the Civil War, but doesn’t that just make it taste sweeter? 

(Rhetorical question, no answer required.)

In a closely contested election, the more votes of your opponent you can cause not to be cast, the better your chance of a narrow victory you can call a mandate.   It’s tempting to say, looking at some of the in-your-face racist bullshit that puts on the finery of American law in our great post-racial society, that this country is doomed.  Think about it, though.  We are probably no more doomed than the rest of the world that the powerful psychopaths at the helm are so heedless about destroying. 

They’re doing a hell of a job, Brownie, hell of a job.