Rick Hasen’s post on the VRA quotes Senator Cornyn as follows:

He said he also shares concerns about another element of the law regarding language assistance. Jurisdictions with high numbers of people whose native language isn’t English must print bilingual ballots. Some must also provide translators.
“In order to be an American citizen you have to learn English. Why would we continue to publish ballots in a language other than English?”’ That’s a pretty compelling argument,” Cornyn said.

Senator Cornyn is just plain wrong. Not to mention ignorant.
First, anyone born in the U.S. is a citizen regardless of whether he or she ever learns to read English. Perhaps he might remember that the precise question in Katzenbach v. Morgan was the constitutionality of the provision in section 4 of the original ’65 Act suspending literacy tests nationwide for individuals who’d been educated in American-flag schools where the language of instruction isn’t English.
Second, suggesting there’s a problem with having translators ignores the fact that one place they’ve been used extensively is on Indian reservations to translate ballots into unwritten Indian languages for voters who can’t read English (or can’t read it well enough to cast a ballot effectively). What an outrage it would be to diesenfranchise Native Americans for not being sufficiently “American.”
I would wager Senator Cornyn’s ignorance comes from an anti-immigrant focus. Here, though, he’s wrong for yet a third reason: the level of English proficiency required to become a U.S. citizen is significantly lower than the level of English proficiency a citizen might need to fill out his or her ballot. At the Earl Warren Institute voting rights conference in D.C. this past spring, Ana Henderson talked about an empirical analysis comparing the reading level necessary for the two tasks. Given how indecipherable I sometimes find the official California voter information pamphlet’s explanation of ballot initiatives even though I graduated from law school, I don’t doubt this for a moment: if we only let people become citizens if they could read and understand ballot materials, we could just get rid of the naturalization process altogether.
I suppose this is just another example of Cornyn shooting from the hip — just like his outrageous comments last year rationalizing violent attacks on judges as somehow connected to judicial “activism” (by which I doubt he means decisions like Boerne, Garrett, and Kimel) — but it’s a nasty sign of the times.
–Pam Karlan