J. Christian Adams, former Justice Department Voting Section attorney and current ACRU Policy Board member, has published a new book, Crimes Against the Republic. The book will be available at no charge for downloading at PJ Media until Election Day, Nov. 4, 2014.
In one month, voters will go to the polls to elect the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate. Will the midterms be clean? Could some elections be stolen? Everyone ostensibly agrees that voters have a right to know that their decision is not being ignored. And a clear majority supports a simple way to make sure: voter ID. You would not know it if you read only the New York Times or watched only MSNBC, but the Left and President Obama are losing their fight to block the widespread introduction of voter ID cards. In courts of law and the court of public opinion, the issue is gaining traction. With few exceptions, liberal pressure groups have lost lawsuits in state after state, with courts tossing out their faux claims that ID laws are discriminatory, unconstitutional or suppress minority voting. Polls show that a large majorities including Republicans, Democrats, whites, blacks and Hispanics support voter ID as a common-sense reform. The myth that voter ID is a new Jim Crow-type effort to reduce minority voting is widely rejected for the rubbish that it is -- except by academia and the glitterati of the mainstream media. One Rasmussen poll found that 72 percent of the public believes all voters should prove their identities before being allowed to cast ballots, and also that when it comes to voter ID, "opinions have not changed much over the years."
By Edwin Meese III and J. Kenneth Blackwell Attorney General Eric Holder, who announced his resignation on Thursday, leaves a dismal legacy at the Justice Department, but one of his legal innovations was especially pernicious: the demonizing of state attempts to ensure honest elections. As a former U.S. attorney general under President Reagan, and a former Ohio secretary of state, we would like to say something that might strike some as obvious: Those who oppose photo voter-ID laws and other election-integrity reforms are intent on making it easier to commit vote fraud. That conclusion is inescapable, given the well-established evidence that voter-ID laws don't disenfranchise minorities or reduce minority voting, and in many instances enhance it, despite claims to the contrary by Mr. Holder and his allies. As more states adopt such laws, the left has railed against them with increasing fury, even invoking the specter of the Jim Crow era to describe electoral safeguards common to most nations, including in the Third World. Ascribing racial animus to people who are trying to safeguard democratic integrity is a crude yet effective political tactic that obscures the truth. But there's something even worse than name-calling: legal interference from Washington with valid laws. Attorney General Holder has sued Texas and North Carolina since the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling last year in Shelby County v. Holder. That decision invalidated Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which made inoperable Section 5, a provision requiring the Justice Department or a D.C.-based federal court panel to pre-clear all election-law changes in nine states and multiple jurisdictions. The court rightly noted that the data on which the law was based are no longer valid, and that times have changed.
The National Voter Registration Act imposed sweeping changes on the conduct of American elections. These changes included significant federal mandates on state and local election officials that restricted the ability of those officials to maintain clean and accurate voter rolls while simultaneously obliging them to maintain clean and accurate voter rolls. For most of the history of the law, enforcement actions have been directed against election officials who sought to clean voter rolls and against states for insufficiently pushing voter registration among entitlement recipients. The U.S. Department of Justice, however, has refused to enforce the requirement that election officials maintain clean and accurate voter rolls. Only recently have private parties brought litigation to make up for DOJ's failure.
The Democrats and the institutional left have a new political tool that allows them virtually to ignore moderates yet still win elections. This tool, the Catalist database, was employed in the 2012 election. That election defied conventional wisdom: Mitt Romney sought and won independent voters overwhelmingly, but still lost. If you wondered why the conventional wisdom about independents and moderates didn't seem so wise in 2012, the answer is Catalist. Beyond winning elections, Catalist also allows the Democrats to turn the policy narrative upside down and suffer no political consequence for implementing radical policies which appeal to their base. The Obama administration's lurch to the far left without consequence can be understood by understanding Catalist. Obama thrives politically by satisfying his base. Simply, Catalist is a game changer not just for politics, but for policy. It is the left's machinery for fundamentally transforming America.
In a decision that has little substantive meaning, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals lifted an injunction against Wisconsin Voter ID that a lower court imposed. This was not a decision on the merits. It merely means that the 7th Circuit will allow voter ID to go into effect for the November elections absent the injunction being reimposed by the full 7th Circuit or United States Supreme Court. The other significant part of the decision is that it is predictive. It gives an indication what the 7th Circuit will decide in the appeal of the lower court's injunction. The left has been hailing the lower court opinion as providing a new architecture for attacking voter ID under the Voting Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act does not provide an easy fit with voter ID laws, largely because of an absence of proof that they were enacted with a discriminatory intent.
By Robert Knight When I was 18, I thought I knew plenty about life and politics. I was wrong. My views had not yet been honed by the experience of trying to live on a paycheck that the government seized in order to hand much of it over to someone else. I also believed that people who created the monstrous federal bureaucracy really cared about the poor, even as their wrong-headed policies destroyed marriage and families and plunged urban centers into unimaginable violence. In short, I was easily manipulated by the welfare state's emotional appeals, just the sort of sucker that Rock the Vote (RTV) is looking for today. Before you accuse me of waging a "war on young people," I readily admit that not everyone my age at the time was naïve, nor are some young people as naïve today - just whole bunches of them. Facing astronomically high unemployment or under-employment, with the world blowing up around them, the majority of 18- to 29-year-olds still identify as liberals in survey after survey. I'd say "mug them again," but you can mug people and suffer disappointment only so many times. Instead, I remain cautiously optimistic that time and reality will steer them toward more conservative views, as it did me and many other former useful idiots. Getting a job and getting married boosts the whole process. Having kids is another huge reality check. Rock the Vote is gearing up for a repeat of 2008, when millions of teens and twenty-somethings were recruited as shock troops for the Obama campaign. By 2012, RTV claimed that it had registered 5 million new voters under 30. Founded in 1992 as a "non-partisan" creation, with funding from George Soros and other lefty sugar daddies, RTV has fresh-faced new leadership, such as its president, Ashley Spillane, a veteran of the Atlas Project, whose mission is "to arm the progressive community with historical elections data, sophisticated analysis and real time updates for all 50 states." RTV also sports a lengthy roster of celebrities such as Lady Gaga and Sheryl Crow.
The left trumpeted a voter ID decision in Wisconsin as if it were the end of the issue. Let's see what they do with this one. A federal court on Aug. 8 smacked down the Holder Justice Department and refused to enjoin (block) North Carolina's voter ID law, curtailment of costly early voting and end of fraud-infested same day registration. This means the state's voter ID law will be in place for the midterm congressional (and Senate) elections in November. The Justice Department had actually argued that even if black voters turned out at higher rates under voter ID (which they do), because blacks have to take the bus more and their life is generally harder, then voter ID and curtailing early voting violates the Voting Rights Act. The opinion lays waste to the theories of those opposing North Carolina's election integrity laws, including the Justice Department.
You know you've hit a sore spot when the Left starts screeching. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow's producer, Steve Benen, just took a whack at the 's new booklet, The Truth About Jim Crow, which National Review Online writer John Fund wrote about in a recent column. Benen cites a critique from the Atlanta Journal Constitution blogger Jay Bookman: "Jay Bookman took a closer look at the pamphlet Fund's piece was promoting, highlighting some of its more glaring errors of fact and judgment." And what errors of fact would those be, Steve? Bookman did not point out a single factual error. Instead, regarding TTAJC's three main points, that Jim Crow was "dehumanizing, deadly and Democratic," he painfully admitted the paper's accuracy: "that is true as far as it goes." Apparently, Benen believes if you can't find a factual error yourself, it's okay to claim falsely that somebody else did.
Even as the nation celebrates the passage of the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, some liberals are using the occasion to bash Republicans as inheriting the legacy of Jim Crow -- ignoring the fact that a higher percentage of Republicans in Congress voted for the Civil Rights Act than did Democrats. President Obama recently accused the GOP of waging an all-out assault on voting rights. Speaking to a group founded by Al Sharpton, that non-paragon of racial healing, Obama claimed: "The stark simple truth is this: the right to vote is threatened today. . . . This recent effort to restrict the vote has not been led by both parties. It's been led by the Republican party." Leaving aside the fact that clear majorities of both African Americans and Hispanics support voter integrity measures such as showing voter ID at the polls, Obama is using incendiary rhetoric in an area where reasonable people can disagree. The , a conservative group that has filed suit in favor of voter-integrity measures, has had enough of such tactics. Its leaders include former attorney general Ed Meese and former Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell. ACRU has just published a booklet on the real history of Jim Crow. Available for free at thetruthaboutjimcrow.org, it sets the record straight on a hidden racial past that many Democrats would rather see swept under the carpet.