Wednesday, June 13, 2012

It's time for Eric Holder to GO!....He's Nothing but Obama's Political Bag Man.....


Holder Fires Back at GOP With Florida Voter Suit


By Chris Stirewalt Power Play Published June 13, 2012

“The debate is over about whether people are out there that are non U.S. citizens who registered to vote. They have. There’s no debate about whether they’ve voted. They have. There’s no debate that they can impact elections. They can.”

-- Gov. Rick Scott, R-Fla., on “Your World with Neil Cavuto”

Even as Attorney General Eric Holder was pleading with Senate Republicans for a compromise on a looming contempt of Congress vote over an alleged cover-up of a botched gunrunning sting, he was preparing to open a new front in his battle with the GOP.

Holder’s agency moved Tuesday to block Florida from an ongoing effort to purge voter rolls of dead people and non-citizens. The federal lawsuit warns of voter disenfranchisement from Florida’s effort to crosscheck a list of more than 2,600 potentially ineligible registered voters produced by public safety officials against county registration records.

This is just the latest effort by Holder to stop Republican governors and state lawmakers from cracking down on voter fraud, warning that the efforts in states like Texas and South Carolina to require voters to show identification could wipe out significant gains of the civil rights movement against “Jim Crow.”

But President Obama isn’t going to win Texas or South Carolina. Holder’s interventions against those states and insistence that southern states still need special restrictions and supervision by his agency 47 years after the Voting Rights Act was passed, has a limited political currency.

The value of these lawsuits and of Holder’s heated rhetoric is mostly related to re-energizing black and Hispanic voters, especially older ones who have misgivings about Obama’s social liberalism but can still recall the era of segregation.

But when the discussion moves to a swing state like Florida, the stakes go way up.

No state is better known for close elections and voter shenanigans than the Sunshine State, having been host to the matter of Bush v. Gore. Consider this: the number of voters on the Florida list of potential ineligibles is about 5 times as many ballots as separated George W. Bush and Al Gore 12 years ago.

Florida has tilted right since Obama’s 2008 victory there, electing conservative Republican Rick Scott as governor and giving the GOP majorities in both houses of the state legislature. And like most conservatives, the new GOP majority was interested in zapping voter fraud.

Whatever the philosophical views behind the moves in Florida and elsewhere, there’s a practical consideration for Republicans: Democrats are typically the ones who benefit from ineligible voters.

In Wisconsin, where a voter ID law is stuck in the courts, Republicans warn about out-of-state union members showing up and taking advantage of the state’s permissive same-day registration rules. In states like Virginia and Pennsylvania, the worry is over heavily Democratic inner-city precincts where ballot-box stuffing has been alleged.

In Florida, Republicans have long complained that Democrats get a boost from illicit ballots cast by illegal immigrants, especially in the state’s large and growing Haitian community.

Indeed, the Miami Herald found that 87 percent of those on the potential purge list were minorities. While Democrats say that this is evidence of Scott’s discriminatory aims, it is certainly evidence that if all those folks went to the polls, Democrats would be better off.

President Obama won nearly 60 percent of Florida’s Hispanic vote and 96 percent of the state’s black vote in 2008. Assuming he maintains similar numbers, there could be more than 1,000 potential Obama voters on Scott’s purge list.

Holder is already facing a growing chorus of calls for his resignation over a refusal to comply with subpoenas from House Republicans and is under increasing pressure for his handling of a torrent of national security leaks.

It might seem an inconvenient time to wade into a swing-state election battle on the side that would benefit his boss, but Holder is not one to back down to the GOP. It’s that tenacity that has made him a doyenne of the left and the most controversial member of Obama’s cabinet.

While the attorney general was publicly pleading for comity and compromise with Republican Senators, his actions later that sent a very different message: bring it on.


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