In yet another testament to the corrupt if inventive workings of the liberal mind, Attorney General Eric Holder recently decided to defraud the United States Supreme Court in the hope of preventing sections of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) being ruled unconstitutional.
Section 5 of the VRA requires 9 Southern states and a number of jurisdictions in 7 others—all charged with a history of voting rights abuses–to obtain “preclearance” from the DOJ or the District Court of DC before making any changes to state election policies or procedures. Passed into law in 1965, Section 5 was enacted as an “emergency provision” designed to “promote full access to the voting process” and expire in 5 years.
But now, nearly 5 decades later, Section 5 has become the darling of Civil Rights groups, the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ, and liberal bureaucrats throughout the federal government as it has been inexorably extended and amended into a sacrosanct behemoth that virtually guarantees “election success for certain candidates chosen by certain racial groups.”
It was the Justice Department’s dishonest use of Section 5 that prevented the implementation of Voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina prior to the 2012 election. In fact, Holder and the Civil Rights Division blocked both laws from taking effect even though the changes proposed by the 2 states were patterned after the Indiana Voter ID law ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court in 2009.
Of course the Department’s behavior should surprise no one, for Section 5 frankly BEGS to be misused by the Democrat Party. After all, it provides a means of accomplishing voter fraud, something that has worked to the benefit of the Party for 6 decades and more. A case in point: Mitt Romney won every state in which Voter ID laws were in effect.
But then something happened. In 2009, the Supreme Court came very close to striking down Section 5 as Justices Kennedy and Scalia lambasted that portion of the VRA, which both believed to be outdated, harmful, and quite probably unconstitutional. And though the Court wrote a VERY narrow ruling allowing Section 5 to escape unscathed in the Northwest case before it, the die had been cast, and the DOJ knew it had to take action in order to maintain its stranglehold on 9 states.
States subject to Section 5 provisions may seek an exemption from DOJ oversight in the form of a “bailout.” This involves satisfying a prescribed list of rigorous requirements in the text of the VRA itself. Once satisfied, Section 5 provisions no longer apply, and the state may initiate the change to its election law.
For years, the DOJ had deliberately made the bailout process virtually impossible to negotiate, even threatening states that dared make the attempt. But as the Supreme Court had gone to great lengths to grant a bailout in the 2009 Northwest case, the Holder Justice Department decided that bailouts might be the key to salvaging Section 5.
As former DOJ attorney J. Christian Adams explains it:
Because the Roberts court bent the language of the statute to permit a bailout in 2009, DOJ now thinks a flurry of bailouts, some of them obtained improperly, will convince the Supreme Court that Section 5 is not much of a burden and should survive. Cranking out as many bailouts as possible is the deliberate DOJ strategy to convince Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy that Section 5 should survive because it really isn’t a heavy burden.
In short, Eric Holder decided to SCAM the Supreme Court, as the DOJ has gone from making bailouts impossible to obtain to literally soliciting states and jurisdictions, telling them now is the time to get the bailout of their dreams! And as Adams says, it is Holder’s hope that, upon finding the bailout procedure working so well and bailouts so easy to obtain, the Court will decide that Section 5 requirements may remain in force.
The Supreme Court has disappointed the American people on any number of occasions, the most recent being the ludicrous ruling by John Roberts on ObamaCare. We can only pray the 5 Court “conservatives” will not betray the public once again by allowing Section 5 to remain in force.
Photo Credit: mira (on the wall) (Creative Commons)
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Memo To RNC: It’s About Principles Not Process
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus has launched a nationwide “Growth and Opportunity Project” reviewing eight key areas he believes must be examined in the wake of a disappointing 2012 campaign.
While I applaud Priebus for his willingness to engage in some self-critical analysis, the reality is that none of the eight aspects he’s reviewing holds the key to a Republican resurgence. It’s not that reviewing campaign mechanics, messaging, fundraising, demographics, SuperPacs, campaign finance laws, the primary calendar, and successful Democrat tactics aren’t important because they are. That’s why I might spend as much time analyzing the process of politics as any nationally-syndicated conservative radio host does.
But if you’re analyzing what went wrong in 2012 (and is still going wrong for the GOP right now), it begins and ends with its principles—or lack thereof.
No campaign, no matter how well-funded and organized, can rise above its own candidate. Now, a campaign can sink a good candidate (and haven’t we seen plenty of that recently), but it can’t make a bad candidate good because grueling campaigns reveal every candidate’s true character and capabilities. You can’t hide your candidate in today’s multi-media environment where everybody has a camera on their phone and mobile device. If a candidate lacks integrity, consistency, professionalism, or discipline, it will be found out. A good campaign with a bad candidate is like good marketing of a bad product. All that good marketing can do for a bad product is help consumers realize quicker just how bad the product really is once they buy it.
There was no technology, messaging, or fundraising that was going to save Mitt Romney. For heaven’s sake, the GOP was so flushed with cash that the RNC ended the 2012 campaign cycle with unspent money in the bank. No tactic was going to make people forget that Romney was on every side of every issue. No tactic was going to make the conservative base forget how many times Romney had sold them out. The campaign revealed that Romney failed to be bold, consistent, and aggressive. If he does those things effectively and credibly, then the process comes into play; but until he does, the process is irrelevant.
People become Republicans or vote Republican based on issues and not personalities. People become Democrats or vote Democrat based on personalities (identity based politics). This is why Republicans tend to win general elections when they’re about issues, and Democrats tend to win when they’re about personas.
When you think Republican, you think issues: limited government, pro-life, anti-tax, strong national defense, family values, etc. When you think Democrat, you think personas: blacks, Hispanics, single women, homosexuals, young adults, etc. That’s why Obama ran in 2008 on the narrative of being the first black president (or “the one”) and in 2012 on the phony “war on women” meme.
What did Romney run on? He ran solely on Obama’s failures, but that’s not an issue: that’s a complaint. Yes, Reagan famously asked voters in 1980 “are you better off than you were four years ago?” But he still had to give them a credible vision on issues they could vote for and not just against. To this day, decades later, its still those issues Reagan’s presidency is most known for—specifically tax cuts to stimulate the economy and defeating the Soviet Union.
Romney couldn’t win the general election for the same reason all establishment milquetoast candidates have lost since 1976: they failed to inspire their base in the primary, which is always a sign they won’t inspire the masses in the general election. It should be simple common sense to anyone with any marketing acumen that if you can’t convince those most likely to buy your product to buy it, you’ll never convince those initially skeptical to do so.
Until Reince Priebus and the other five Republican “leaders” assisting him on this project make first things first – and in this case that means principles – they’re either not really serious about winning or incapable of it. Voters, even many Republicans, could care less about voting for a political party brand-name. They also don’t care that you dressed your stink-brick up in pretty pastels, or that you said “pretty please” when you asked them to take that lemon off their hands on social media.
There’s a reason the most noteworthy national Republican election victories of the last 30 years happened in 1980, 1984, 1994, and 2010. It’s because those were the years the GOP did the best job of offering a truly principled contrast to the Democrats, thus framing the election those years around issues and not personalities. The Left tried saying we hated women and minorities those years, too. But since Republicans focused the voters on issues first, it never became about personalities.
Right now, the average American thinks Republicans hate Obama because he’s black and/or just because he’s a Democrat. Until that changes, no amount of addressing the process will change that perception of Republicans. And until Republicans rediscover their principles again, that perception will remain.
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Photo Credit: Donkey Hotey (Creative Commons)