Why are Democrats in Congress staging a series of show hearings to generate support for H.R. 4, “The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act”? Because, they claim, there is a wave of “voter suppression” going on across the country.
That is nothing more than a political fabrication. Requiring voters to show ID to authenticate their identity, or trying to ensure voter registration rolls are accurate and up-to-date, are not “voter suppression” and don’t prevent any eligible individual from registering and voting.
H.R. 4 isn’t just unnecessary and unjustified. It’s a dangerous bill that would give the partisan bureaucrats of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department administrative veto powers over states’ changes to election procedures.
As Cleta Mitchell noted in The Federalist earlier this month, H.R. 4 is “even more insidious” than its cousin, H.R. 1, precisely because “it would enable the vastly well-funded Democrat ‘voting rights’ apparatus to control American elections.” This control would extend over states’ election integrity measures like voter ID (even if passed by ballot referenda approved by all of the voters of a state).
These left-wing ideologues are hostile to the equal, non-partisan enforcement of federal voting rights laws. They are a threat to each state’s constitutional power to control its own election procedures and have repeatedly exhibited their biased attitudes over the course of decades.
Abusing DOJ Employees for Doing Their Jobs
In 2005, the Section reviewed Georgia’s voter ID law under the now-expired preclearance provision of the VRA, the same provision H.R. 4 wants to reimplement. The IG found that staff attorneys implied a newly hired attorney who was suspected of favoring Georgia’s voter ID law was a Nazi sympathizer, referring to him as “a hand-picked Vichyite.”
When this attorney recommended that the attorney general preclear the ID law, other members of the review group engaged in a series of “hostile” and “snide” actions. These unprofessional actions included dispersing customized coffee mugs mocking the attorney to staff and secretly accessing the attorney’s intranet work folder and mocking his work product with others under the email cover “lookie what I found.”
h/t CP