Whatever else may be said about yesterday’s court of appeals decision against Texas’s voter-ID law, it should end claims of an urgent need for Congress to resurrect the “preclearance” provision of the Voting Rights Act. Indeed, the court’s unanimous opinion (by a liberal panel) was the worst possible outcome for those advocates: It reversed the trial court’s finding that the Texas legislature acted with discriminatory intent in passing the law, yet still struck it down because of the Voting Rights Act’s “disparate impact” ban. So the claim that racist voting practices are suddenly again rampant has been undermined, and at the same time it is reaffirmed that civil-rights plaintiffs and the Department of Justice have no shortage of effective weapons in their arsenals.