The Orlando Sentinel ran an uplifting election-law story yesterday headlined, “Federal judge grudgingly rules for DeSantis in elections law challenge.” Grudgingly is one way of putting it.

In 2021, Florida passed a package of election-law reforms designed to prevent cheating. After a legal challenge in 2022, a federal Judge (an Obama appointee) ruled large parts of the new laws were unconstitutional because, to him, they were obviously targeting black folks, because the entire Florida Legislature and Governor DeSantis are obviously racists.

In 2023, a three-judge panel on the 11th Circuit overturned part of Judge Walker’s decision, but allowed other parts to stand, barring elections reforms that to you and me look like commonsense proposals completely unrelated to anybody’s race, but to race-experts are clearly, without a doubt, 100%, invidious racism masquerading as election security reforms.

So then Governor DeSantis appealed the panel’s ruling to the entire 12-judge 11th Circuit. And the whole 11th said, wait a minute, this isn’t right, and sent the case back to the start, to Judge Walker, to certify whether the suing plaintiffs had met a key evidentiary test required to invalidate any law for racism: whether plaintiffs provided real evidence in the record that the law in fact “unduly burdened” their First Amendment and equal-protection rights.

Whoops.

Judge Walker was forced to admit that, no, there was no evidence the laws in fact burdened the plaintiffs. So he closed the case, leaving the original law in place. But he was not very happy about it, and grabbed the last word, criticizing his judicial bosses on the 11th Circuit on the way out, who apparently are also racists. I’m not saying Judge Walker sees racists everywhere he looks or anything (he’s a very smart judge), but in this case, well, decide for yourself:

“As this court previously found after a lengthy, two-week bench trial, the state of Florida has, with surgical precision, repeatedly changed Florida’s election code to target whichever modality of voting Florida’s Black voters were using at the time,” Walker wrote. “That was not this court’s opinion — it is a fact established by the record in these cases. Even so, following the state of Florida’s appeal, this persistent and pernicious practice of targeting the modalities of voting most used by Florida’s Black voters has apparently received the stamp of approval in this (11th) Circuit.”

In case you were wondering, by “modalities of voting most used by Florida’s Black voters” I think Judge Walker means voting without showing a driver’s license and using mail-in voting options.

There you go.

According to Judge Walker, we are going backwards. Racism now has the official stamp of approval by the 11th Circuit Court of appeals. Cue a federal investigation by the Justice Department. But in the meantime, the package of election security laws is no longer enjoined and is fully in place, right in time for the 2024 election season.

Progress!