In modern Democrat politics, anyone who supports measures to enhance voting integrity and decrease the likelihood of voter fraud should be labeled an ‘extremist.’ Hillary Clinton went as far as to say Judge Kavanaugh will bring the United States back to times of slavery. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker said if you support Judge Kavanaugh, you are ‘complicit with evil.’ As election law expert Hans von Spakovsky points out, these vicious attacks by top Democrats are totally baseless.
The latest bizarre claim laid against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is that his confirmation would “spell the end of voting rights.” This ridiculous charge has been spun up from two of Kavanaugh’s writings: a 2012 opinion upholding South Carolina’s voter ID law and a brief he filed as a private attorney in a case challenging Hawaii’s practice of preventing residents from voting based on their ancestry.
In both cases, Kavanaugh’s views were — and are — quite mainstream. More importantly, they have been affirmed.
In fact, Judge Kavanaugh’s key rulings on voting rights have all been affirmed by the Supreme Court.
In South Carolina v. Holder, Kavanaugh (joined by two other judges) held that the state’s voter ID law was not discriminatory and did not violate the Voting Rights Act.
Kavanaugh noted, South Carolina made it even easier to vote by providing a “reasonable impediment” exception to its ID requirement. This allows those without proper identification to vote anyway. All they need do is sign a simple affidavit stating the reason they have not obtained a photo ID. Do that, and they can cast a ballot immediately, no questions asked.
Hans von Spakovsky's recent piece for The Hill illustrates the sad state of our political climate. For supporting a measure that would actually make it easier to vote and increase election safety, Democrats and major left-wing organizations have labeled Judge Kavanaugh a ‘racist’ trying to take away voting rights. Thankfully, history and facts have proven Judge Kavanaugh right.
Opponents of the law claimed it would “disenfranchise tens of thousands of minority voters,” but it never happened. The law has been in place since 2013 with no problems and no effect on turnout. No disenfranchisement. No voter “suppression.
Oddly enough, none of Judge Kavanaugh’s critics has bothered to mention that, in a subsequent voter ID case, the Obama Justice Department agreed that an ID law with a “reasonable impediment” exception was not discriminatory. On Aug. 3, 2016, the parties in Veasy v. Abbott penned a “Joint Submission of Agreed Terms” in which they agreed that Texas could apply its photo ID law in the 2016 election as long as any resident who signed “a reasonable impediment declaration” would “be permitted to vote using a regular ballot.”
Judge Kavanaugh is one of the most qualified nominees for the Supreme Court in modern history. Democrats have no viable explanation for opposing his confirmation. However, they have so much animus for President Trump and the American people who voted for the president that they are willing to harm the judicial system and attempt to trash the reputation of an honorable public servant for political gain. Thankfully, it does not appear their scorched Earth tactics will work and Judge Kavanaugh will be confirmed.
A week ago Tuesday, the Department of Justice finally decided to fight against a blatantly racially discriminatory voting law in Guam, as Hans von Spakovsky described:
I have written numerous updates about the voting-rights lawsuit that Davis, a retired Air Force officer, filed back in 2011 against the territory of Guam . . . . Guam refused to allow Davis, a long-time resident of Guam, to register to vote for a plebiscite on the future of the territory because he is white and not Chamorro, the racial designation given to the natives who originally inhabited Guam.
The personnel changes made by President Trump, including Jeff Sessions as Attorney General and John Gore as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, were necessary for the Department of Justice to uphold the law and the rule of law:
After Guam lost in March, it appealed the decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. On November 28, after eight years of studied indifference, the U.S. Justice Department under Attorney General Jeff Sessions finally did the right thing: It filed an amicus brief in the Ninth Circuit supporting Arnold Davis.
DOJ’s brief, which was filed by John Gore, the acting assistant attorney general of the Civil Rights Division, argues that “Guam’s plebiscite law intentionally discriminates based on race.” It directly violates Supreme Court precedent set in Rice v. Cayetano, a 2000 decision in which the Court threw out a similar Hawaii law. DOJ points out that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments both apply to Guam; the fact that it is a territory does not deprive its residents of those constitutional protections. The brief asks the Ninth Circuit to uphold the district court’s decision. . . .
The discriminatory law had been ignored for 8 years by the Obama DOJ because the voters the law discriminated against were the wrong color:
The Obama administration refused to enforce federal law barring racial discrimination in voting, housing, employment, and education on a race-neutral basis. The Holder/Lynch Justice Department didn’t care if you were being discriminated against unless you were a member of one of its favored groups, a distinction that does not exist in our anti-discrimination laws. The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, as well as federal statutes such as the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act, protect all Americans from racial discrimination.
Because DOJ had abdicated its duty to enforce the laws, this long case to vindicate Mr. Davis' voting rights has been fought by a courageous attorney - RNLA member Christian Adams. We are grateful that the Sessions Justice Department respects the rule of law and has chosen to support Adams' litigation against this discriminatory law - at last.
Liberals, particularly the NAACP, in the past few weeks have repeated the claim that Sen. Jeff Sessions is a racist based on his 1985 prosecution of civil rights activists for absentee ballot vote fraud.
What are the facts and legal history of that case? Then-U.S. Attorney Sessions was acting pursuant to a complaint brought by African-American candidates who believed that their African-American supporters' votes were being stolen or altered to steal the election away from them. He prosecuted after a grand jury indictment, with the assistance and oversight of the Department of Justice, and evidence of the stealing of African-Americans' votes was presented at trial. He was upholding his duty as a federal prosecutor to prosecute violations of the law for which there is sufficient evidence to believe a conviction may be achieved; it was not a malicious prosecution on racist grounds:
“No federal prosecutor faced with the evidence seen by the grand jury would have failed to take the case and go forward with the prosecution,” [former head of the Election Crimes Unit inside the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section Craig] Donsanto told me. “The evidence in the case was overwhelming. I was there with the other assistant U.S. attorneys and not one dissented — everyone thought it was a solid case. I told Jeff Sessions to go forward with the case.” . . .
Donsanto is highly offended by any claims that the prosecution was racist. The federal prosecutors were “trying to protect black voters who were having their votes stolen,” he notes. Moreover, the investigation was initiated only after local black voters and candidates complained to the Justice Department. When asked about the fact that a jury found the defendants not guilty, Donsanto says that as a former federal prosecutor, he respects the jury system. . . .
In Perry County, Jeff Sessions and the other Justice Department lawyers were trying to protect black voters from having their right to vote stolen — a precious right that those voters had fought very hard to obtain during the civil rights battles of the 1950s and 1960s. Unfortunately, a jury let the defendants off despite the evidence in the case, including testimony from black residents of the county about how their ballots had been altered and changed without their permission. And that is the real tragedy of this case.
As Craig Donsanto says, this was a prosecution intended to preserve and protect the right to vote, something to which he dedicated his entire professional career. Anyone who claims this was a racist prosecution by Jeff Sessions is, according to Donsanto, “a liar and a political opportunist of the worst kind.”
Similarly, the Public Interest Legal Foundation pointed out five important ways in which former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick had distorted the facts and history of the case in his opposition letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee:
Mr. Patrick misleads readers to believe the ‘Perry County Three’ in Alabama were prosecuted by Mr. Sessions for ‘assisting’ voters. They weren’t.
Prosecuting voter fraud is not itself an act of voter intimidation.
Mr. Sessions was not a rogue prosecutor – he acted with oversight from multiple DOJ offices.
If Sessions’ advancement of the case was as faulty as Patrick alludes, why did the Court refuse to acquit the defendants from the outset?
Patrick fails to remind Congress that the defendants offered to enter guilty pleas for the misdemeanor election crimes.
Unfortunately, the facts of the case will not prevent liberals from using it as a basis to call Sen. Sessions a racist, despite all evidence to the contrary. We can only hope that the American people will see through this name-calling and learn about the actual history of the Perry County absentee ballot fraud prosecution.
If Hillary Clinton wins in November, she could remake the Supreme Court into a bastion of "liberal jurisprudence" that would last for another generation:
The unfilled vacancy of Antonin Scalia’s seat combined with a Hillary Clinton victory in November could set the Court on a new course. . . . The result would be a solid 6-3 liberal majority of a kind not seen in many decades.
The implications of such a shift are massive. The Court is not a legislative body, and it can’t simply undo all of the conservative rulings of recent decades. The doctrine of stare decisis means the Court tries not to contradict its past rulings except in rare cases. But after speaking to a number of prominent legal scholars and experts, it appears there are some notable areas where a liberal Court could make a significant difference.
Specifically, the Court could overturn or limit Citizens United and the free speech rights contained in it:
Clinton promises to "appoint Supreme Court justices who will protect Americans’ right to vote over the right of billionaires to buy elections," and has reportedly told her own donors that she will make prospective justices pledge to overturn Citizens United. . . . But most of the experts I spoke with expressed skepticism that the decision will be overturned outright. . . . That being said, the legal scholars I asked suggested that a more left-leaning Court could subtly undermine Citizens United by upholding distinct campaign finance regulations at the federal and state levels.
"My guess is that [a more liberal court] wouldn't overrule Citizens United in the short run, but that it would narrow the decision and uphold a range of possible regulations of money in the political process," Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago and specialist in free speech cases, says. "Over time, these decisions would significantly erode Citizens United."
The Court could also threaten the integrity of elections and states' ability to administer their own elections -- for example, by upholding a legislative revival of the preclearance process struck down in Shelby County v. Holder or by raising the standard of scrutiny of laws regarding voting:
For example, in Crawford v. Marion County in 2008, the Court ruled that Indiana's photo ID requirement for voters was not an undue burden, because, as Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, "the inconvenience of going to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, gathering required documents, and posing for a photograph does not qualify as a substantial burden on most voters' right to vote." . . . But [Pam] Karlan notes that the Court wouldn’t even have to totally reverse course and start applying strict scrutiny to make progress on these issues. "One of the things I’ve been thinking about is a more liberal version of the undue burden–style standards that the Court has employed," she says. "A version of that test that really takes into account socioeconomic disparities and the like could have a major impact." . . .
That’s a particularly promising avenue for the Court since it requires minimal change in the Court’s doctrines. "It’s not necessarily the legal tests themselves that are the problem," Karlan notes. "It’s the sensibilities and the understandings and the world-awareness of the people applying the tests." That’s something that changing the membership of the Court could shift substantially, even if the new Court isn’t eager to overturn precedent.
These are just a few of the ways a Supreme Court remade by liberal lawyer Hillary Clinton could threaten the rule of law and the role of the courts by enacting liberal policies by judicial fiat. Electing Donald Trump is the only way to prevent this chilling picture becoming reality.
The Democratic Party has recently taken to using cries of voter suppression as an attack against Republican elected officials, candidates, and policies. From limits on early voting to voter ID, Democrats are quick to levy the charge of voter suppression, but a professor from UC-Berkely recently held up a mirror to the country's left-wing and revealed an ugly reality.
From 2001 to 2011, Democrats have been responsible for a massive suppression of voter turnout through their opposition to consolidated election cycles. It is a well-known fact that off-year elections yield the lowest voter turnout. What many not realize is that there are other, more sporadic election cycles in the country as opposed to just odd-year voting in November. In New Jersey, for example, state elections are held in November of odd years while school district elections are held in April and fire district commissioners are elected in February.
Professor Anzia asked a nationally representative sample of Americans if they prefer elections to be held at different times for different office "because it allows voters to focus on a shorter list of candidates and issues" or consolidated elections "because combining the elections boosts voter turnout for local elections." Voters responded with a clear preference for consolidated elections.
So, given this obvious preference, why isn't there a push to move toward these consolidated elections cycles? Well, from 2001 to 2011 there were approximately 200 bills put forward nationwide to cut down on the number of separate elections and ease the burden on voters. Of these bills only 25 became law. Most interestingly, a majority of the bills were sponsored by Republicans and failed because of Democratic opposition at the urging of Democratic-aligned interest groups, including teachers unions and municipal employee organizations.
Why? Because Democrats know that the voters who turnout in off-year elections tend to have a special interest in the issues or candidates on the ballot. These Democratic groups crave low voter-turnout because they know they will be able to get their members to the polls and that their vote will have a disproportionate impact in favor the groups' liberal agenda.
So while the Democrats are happy to champion voter-rights when it serves as a useful, albeit dishonest, attack on Republicans, it seems they are less inclined to do so when it stands in the way of their policy objectives.
