Critique: Pulling Your Card, Texas

After reading Courtney Robertson’s post on her blog, Courtney Robertson / TX Justice, I definitely felt more informed about how Attorney General Eric Holder and the Justice Department are working to preserve voting rights. In her post, Courtney provides quality background on several important elements and key stakeholders affected by the initiative.  First, she briefly described how the Justice Department’s initiative will affect Texas by forcing the state to get federal approval before making redistricting changes.  Then, she proceeded to describe Attorney General Holder’s goal for the plan to decrease discriminatory practices such as Texas’ frequent redistricting and gerrymandering.  While this information was helpful, it would have provided better context to include the fact that the initiative hopes to prevent problems such as the 2003 redistricting crisis from occurring in the future.

One key aspect in the beginning of the post that really stood out was the succinct, relevant quotes from both Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and Governor Rick Perry.  By including their critical views that the Obama Administration is trying to work around the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Act of 1965, it helped the reader quickly understand the point of contention between the federal government and the Texas government.  Also, I thought that the sentence about the feds pulling Governor Perry’s calling card was a good insertion of humor into the post.  It made the post seem more personal in style, and it provided an interesting way to set up the following analysis.

The analysis portion of the post examined the rationale underlying the federal government’s enforcement of federal preclearance is constitutional.  While Section 4 of the Voting Rights act of 1965 was struck down, Section 5 is still in effect.  Therefore, the federal government is not trying to work around the Supreme Court’s ruling; rather they are instead fulfilling their duty to protect the rights of Texas citizens.  This information demonstrates that Greg Abbott’s “political theater” comment about the Obama Administration was based on political allegiances rather than facts.  Another excellent point Courtney made was that because Texas recently ranked last in voter turnout, it was only a matter of time before their voting practices were examined.  While I believe this a great point, I felt that the statistic of Texas being ranked last in voter turnout may have provided more impact and served as a quality attention-getter if it was placed earlier in the post.  Since Courtney’s conclusion is based around the idea that Texans should not be surprised that voting practices are being regulated, I think it would have provided better flow to introduce this rationale earlier in the post.

Overall, I thought that Courtney’s post was a quality piece of writing and was very informative.  The succinct nature of her writing and factual background information provided excellent context for the topic and made a complicated set of government actions easy to understand.