Austin, Texas
It amounted to the second finding of intentional discrimination in Texas election laws in as many months — a separate court in March ruled that Republicans racially gerrymandered several congressional districts when drawing voting maps in 2011, the same year the voter ID rules were passed.
Neither ruling has any immediate impact.
But the decisions are significant because it raises the possibility of Texas being stripped of the right to unilaterally change its election laws without federal approval.
Forcing Texas to once again seek federal permission — known as “preclearance” — has been a goal of Democrats and minority rights groups since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the requirement in 2013.
The latest voter ID ruling by U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos of Corpus Christi comes more than two years after she likened the ballot-box rules in Texas, known as SB 14, to a “poll tax” meant to suppress minority voters.
On Monday, she reaffirmed that conclusion after an appeals court asked her to go back and re-examine her findings.
The Texas law requires voters to show one of seven forms of identification at the ballot box. That list includes concealed handgun licenses — but not college student IDs — and Texas was forced under court order last year to weaken the law for the November elections.
New York
Monday’s announcement confirmed the book as the literary event of 2016, an Oprah Winfrey book club pick and critical favorite which last fall received the National Book Award, the first time in more than 20 years that the same work won the Pulitzer and National Book Award for fiction. Whitehead, known for such explorations of American myth and history as John Henry Days, conceived his novel with what he calls a “goofy idea:” Take the so-called Underground Railroad of history, the network of escape routes to freedom, and make it an actual train. He wove his fantasy together with a too-believable story of a young girl’s flight from a plantation.
Whitehead finished The Underground Railroad well before Donald Trump’s election but now finds parallels with the present.
“I think the book deals with white supremacy as a foundational error in the country’s history and that foundational error is being played out now in the White House,” he told The Associated Press on Monday. “When I was writing the book I wasn’t thinking about current events, but I think you have to look at it differently now.”
New York
David A. Fahrenthold won the prize for national reporting, with the judges citing stories that examined Trump’s charitable foundation and called into question whether the real estate magnate was as generous as he claimed.
Fahrenthold’s submission also included his story about Trump’s raunchy behind-the-scenes comments during a 2005 taping of Access Hollywood. The footage rocked the White House race and prompted a rare apology from the then-candidate.
In another election-related prize, Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal won the Pulitzer for commentary for columns that “connected readers to the shared virtues of Americans during one of the nation’s most divisive political campaigns.”
The judges said Fahrenthold’s reporting “created a model for transparent journalism,” a model he built partly by using Twitter to publicize his efforts and let Trump see what he was doing.
The president “can expect to see more of me on Twitter,” said Fahrenthold, now part of a team looking at Trump businesses.
American journalism’s most distinguished prizes also recognized work that shed light on international financial intrigue and held local officials accountable.
The New York Daily News and ProPublica won the Pulitzer in public service for uncovering how authorities used an obscure law, originally enacted to crack down on prostitution in Times Square in the 1970s, to evict hundreds of people, mostly poor minorities, from their homes.
— Wire reports