Eric Holder has been busy playing his racial games. Not only did his Justice Department issue a joint guidance with the Education Department on how best to ignore the Supreme Court’s recent affirmative action ruling, but yesterday the attorney general announced a new lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s new election laws, which include voter-identification requirements. This action follows on the heels of lawsuits already filed against the Tarheel State by such groups as the ACLU and NAACP.
Never mind that the Supreme Court approved the constitutionality of voter-ID as recently as 2008 in the case of Crawford v. Marion County (Indiana) Election Board – in a 6-3 opinion written by the liberal Justice John Paul Stevens – but just last year Holder had to back off a similar suit in South Carolina. The formula for valid voter-ID laws is clear: don’t put obstacles (be they monetary or geographical) in the way of someone’s ability to get an approved form of identification and you’ll sail through the courts.
These regulations simply shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Requirements to show proof of identity before voting have been around for decades in all parts of the country. There’s no constitutional right to early voting – many states, including blue ones like New York, don’t have it at all – and North Carolina kept total hours constant anyway, just reducing the number of days of early voting.
And forget partisan divides; the DOJ’s argument that voter-ID laws and other attempts at orderly election administration disproportionately hurt minorities – on top of being offensive – don’t even seem to make sense to those they purport to support. For example, a Washington Post poll last year found that 65 percent of blacks and 64 percent of Latinos support voter-ID.
In our TSA-NSA-show-ID-to-get-into-an-Eric-Holder-speech world, shouldn’t we have the most basic safeguards for the machinery of democracy? And even if most voter fraud comes in through absentee and other mail-in ballots rather than in-person, shouldn’t we at least put in simple measures that demonstrably increase confidence in elections?
While too many so-called civil rights leaders are stuck in the 196Os – memo to Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson: Jim Crow is dead and he ain’t coming back – government officials should know better. It’s shameful to fan the flames of racial division for personal and political gain.
