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Scott in Houston wrote:Can someone point to the new law or elaborate?

Is the law about the covering or display of the plate, or the presence of one all together?
Is there still a requirement for a front plate?

The new laws have not yet been posted on the state website (they generally take until mid January), so I cannot say exactly what the law reads yet. News accounts recently in the Austin area have been reporting that the legislature made a mistake and left out the penalty clause of the registration law when they rewrote that section of the law. I think, but am not sure they are talking about HB 2357. It is a very long rewrite of several chapters of the Transportation Code that I have not tracked through yet, and I can see how it would be easy to miss adding a clause somewhere in this. All of my comments have been based on news reports, so I probably should have refrained from commenting until I know for sure. But commenting on the legislature making a mistake is just to hard to resist, and it is usually a good bet that they have messed at least one thing up in each law they pass.

It is my understanding that the penalty clause got left out of the rewrite of the section of the law that deals with license plates. This may or may not affect the section on altered or fictitious plates (that is where it mentions license plate covers).

But if we accept that the removal of the penalty for not displaying your CHL when asked by a peace officer means that there is no real violation, then we have to accept that the removal of the penalty for not properly displaying license plates means there is no violation there also. I really can't wait to see how the AG rules on this. The claim that the penalty is implied is, IMHO, ridiculous.