Staaaarbursts. When you think Rich Lowry, think staaaarbursts.
One great thing about Washington is that they're always willing to cut a guy a break. Sure, Rich Lowry is editor of an entire political outfit of his own, but Politico is still willing to give the little tyke a chance to get his feelings on things known by letting him tell us his "opinions" on those things in their own outlet as well. It's a service to the readers, you see. Though it may seem circular at first, I can assure you that the primary measure of the worth of someone's opinion is how much exposure they are able to generate for themselves: People who appear on television and in print naturally have superior opinions to those who are in only one of those things; people who have opinion columns in the newspaper are, of course, superior to lesser beings who might actually Know Shit about which they speak. We don't need to hear from scientists, and we certainly don't need to hear from anyone we haven't heard from ten times this week already, and God help us all if we were to give the column-space to some poor American sap who was actually affected by the policies that all the more influential people had been droning on about at great length.
Thus we are graced with yet more Rich Lowry, and today Rich Lowry wants to use his very important column-space to tell us that Hillary Clinton is playing the "race card" by not liking the Supreme Court's decision on the Voting Rights Act and by pointing out that there sure are a lot of states dancing their way into new voting restrictions, go figure.
Madam Secretary hasn’t missed a beat. She knows that the calling card of Democrats in the Barack Obama era is a polarizing politics that seeks to fire up minority voters by stirring fears of fire hoses and police dogs.
Well, there you go. I trust that statement needs no explanation, because we ain't gonna be getting one. Opposition to new voting restrictions is
de facto stoking unnecessary racial tensions, and we know that because the rash of new voting restrictions proves there's nothing wrong with the rash of new voter restrictions.
North Carolina is simply joining the American mainstream. It is one of at least 30 states to adopt a voter ID law.
Impeccable logic—really, I can see why this fellow was made an editor of something. By the same token, forcing all poor voters to walk through a pool of burning kerosene would be perfectly reasonable so long as you could get 29 other Republican-led states to suggest the same thing at the same time;
fire hoses and police dogs were of course just as reasonable because hey—everyone was doing it. Not guilty, your honor, because there have been twenty nine burglaries in that town already. I may have poured a barrel of radioactive waste in the river, your honor, but my friends poured twenty nine other barrels in before I ever got there; everyone knows that the thirtieth time a deed is done, it's not wrong anymore.
And yet it continues, below the fold:
The evidence suggests that voter ID laws don’t suppress the votes of anyone. Hans A. von Spakovsky, a voting expert at the Heritage Foundation, […]
Oh my God,
shut up. I can't even pretend to take that sentence seriously, which is what separates me from the lesser primates and from ninety percent of the people who shuffle around the Beltway saying
things at each other.
Voter ID, in other words, is a victimless crime.
If you ignore the people popping up as victims, you would be right.
Critics of the ID laws like to say that fraud is “nonexistent.” This is wrong. There are always cases bubbling up — it was recently revealed that fake signatures got Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on the primary ballot in Indiana in 2008 and Milwaukee County charged 10 people earlier this year with voter fraud in 2012.
All right, this is how I know Rich Lowry is either a liar or a straight-up idiot, in all likelihood both, and this is even after giving him a chance
after he used the name "Hans A. von Spakovsky" in a sentence.
A law requiring voters show identification at the polls has fuck-all to do with petition-gatherers faking signatures on petitions to get out of doing the actual work of collecting them, a problem which keeps coming up except when a nice Republican operative goes to jail over it (ACORN—evil plotters, possibly a branch of the Illuminati. GOP petition-gathering firm—sad victims of cruel, cruel employees). Likewise, if a link showing that the massive sum of two people in Milwaukee are facing hard time for voting twice, two felons voted despite being felons, and a single-digit number of other bastards voted in the wrong polling place is the best available evidence of rampant voting chaos then we are hard up indeed for voting chaos, aren't we? Here's a question: How does requiring identification for voters on election day prevent petition fraud? How does it prevent the nation's hardened vote-criminals from lying on the one form, instead of the other? How is it that a man can use a driver's license to fraudulently! vote, but having a law requiring that same identification will solve the problem? This is rather shoddy work for an editor, I must say.
Here's a fine test. Let's stipulate that we want tighter election restrictions to solve the rampant though persistently undocumented problem of Voter Fraud, where by Voter Fraud we mean fraud perpetrated by a voter and not the myriad frauds perpetrated upon them by countless crooks and shills and direct-mail outfits and jackass governors. Everyone gets a card to vote—I love it. Do it. I have hundreds of Mark of the Beast jokes already lined up, ready for that fateful day when pasty white religious zealots find out the law applies to their counties as well. But here's the thing: Voting is a protected right, so that card has to be free. As in perfectly, absolutely free. You can't charge someone money in order to vote. You can't require that they take a day off work to visit a packed county office in order to get a laminated card they can exchange for a place in the voting lines. You can't tell them to count the beans in a jar, you can't tell them that they can't vote because their name is almost like the name of some other person who you think shouldn't be able to vote, you can't tell them that oh, if they already own a car or a gun they're good to go, no muss no fuss, it's just you other people that need to jump through the extra step because we do not trust people in this state who do not own cars or guns.
If your new law just happens to affect some voters more than others, your law is prejudicial. If your law just happens to put a new burden on voting that some voters will be able to ignore but others will not, your law is discriminatory. If your law just happens to leave so much as one goddamn legitimate voter without their iron-clad constitutional rights come election day, you have committed a crime against them.
If harried, three-job-having Americans cannot easily get to the office they need to get to in order to get the card they need to get, the government needs to drive to their house and give it to them. If poor Americans cannot afford a 10 dollar or a one dollar or even a five cent fee to get the card, screw you—you are not allowed to charge them five cents to vote anyway. If your "identification" law just happens to accept existing forms of "identification" that some classes of people are more likely to have and others are not, you can go straight to hell for pretending not to notice that. Nope. If it's a card, then it's a card that everyone needs to have. If it's a card, it's a card that everyone has to wait in line for, both the inner city kids voting for the first time and the happily ensconced 60-year-old suburbanites of East Republicanville.
You want to do that, we'll talk. But nobody's been talking about that, and the sudden fever to prevent "fraud" that remains stubbornly invisible even to the supposed experts on "fraud" seems to uncannily be landing on the heads of poorer voters, and minority voters, go figure what a surprise, and it's more than a little maudlin to be pretend to be outraged at people pointing that out. Give us a break, fella.