Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
The D.C. District Court has set a trial in Texas’ voter ID suit for July 9-13.
Texas Redistricting blog, http://txredistricting.org/, reports Court sets July 9 trial date in Texas voter ID case:
[T]he court also directed that issues related to the constitutionality of section 5 of the Voting Rights Act be bifurcated from the main trial and said that those issues would “not be addressed unless the Court denies judicial preclearance of Senate Bill [14].”
Since that means that hearings on constitutional issues would take place only after a ruling on the preclearance claims (by definition some time after the July 13 end of trial), that would seem to make it less likely that the constitutional issues could be teed up in time to get them to the Supreme Court before the November elections.
The court’s scheduling order can be found here.
A pretrial hearing is scheduled for Tuesday, April 3, for oral argument on the State of Texas’ request to block the depositions of 12 Republican legislators who were involved with the voter ID bill, including State Sen. Dan Patrick and state representatives Debbie Riddle and Leo Berman as well as Speaker Joe Straus. Court in voter ID case sets oral argument for 4/3 on request to block legislators’ deposition.
Texas seeks to bar discovery of written communications between members of the Legislature, communications between legislators and their staffs, and communications between legislators and their constituents, regarding the bill. DOJ and intervenors say State of Texas’ claims of legislative privilege in voter ID case baseless:
The parties in the Texas redistricting cases exhaustively briefed and argued the issue of legislative privilege, so the emergence anew of a privilege dispute in the voter ID case seems more than a little distinctly deja vue to many observers.
And in responses filed this afternoon, both the Justice Department and intervenors in the voter ID case threw sharp barbs at the State of Texas’ request that the D.C. district court block the depositions of 12 Republican legislators who were closely involved with the voter ID bill.
DOJ officials called the state’s claim of privilege “novel” and, quoting from Judge Collyer’s opinion in the preclearance case, said “’[t]here is no state legislative privilege identified in the Federal Rules of Evidence and the D.C. Circuit has never recognized one.’”
Instead, DOJ argued - as it did in the redistricting cases - that the state was confusing “legislative immunity” with “legislative privilege” and that it was well-established that “[i]ndividuals who are immune from suit may nonetheless be compelled to testify.”
DOJ lawyers also said that - whatever privilege existed - it was at best qualified and had to yield in voting rights cases to the need to obtain evidence of discriminatory intent that likely was not readily obtainable from merely reviewing the public record.
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The state has until Monday, April 2, to file a reply brief.
DOJ’s response can be found here.
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