Right the First Time - Judge Richard Posner’s mistaken change of heart on voter ID

The Left’s well-oiled propaganda machine is in overdrive again. Partisan law professors and the liberal media are trumpeting Judge Richard Posner’s “admission” that he regrets the majority opinion he wrote upholding Indiana’s voter-ID law.

Posner wrote the opinion in 2007 for the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. It was affirmed the following year in a Supreme Court opinion penned by liberal justice John Paul Stevens.

What has the Left atingle now, however, is Posner’s new book, Reflections on Judging, in which he writes:

I plead guilty to having written the majority opinion (affirmed by the Supreme Court) upholding Indiana’s requirement that prospective voters prove their identity with a photo ID — a law now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than fraud prevention.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, Posner said that he now thinks that the dissenting judge in his case was right and that “if the lawyers had provided us with a lot of information about the abuse of voter identification laws, this case would have been decided differently.”

Richard Posner is a well-known jurist and a prolific author. The question, however, is whether he made a mistake back in 2007 or whether he is making one now.

I vote for the latter. Posner apparently has been reading the press releases of voter-ID opponents like the Brennan Center and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and mistaken them for “widely regarded” evidence that voter-ID laws are abusive.

In the Huffington Post interview, Posner said that the Seventh Circuit “did not have enough information.” This, he maintains, illustrates a basic problem: that as “judges and lawyers, we don’t know enough about the subject matters that we regulate.” 

Via: NRO
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