Discussion for article #245964
3 Likes
Makes My Day and Week-End.
12 Likes
Finally, the voice of sanity… with a properly indignant tone to it. It took long enough. Another naked, aspiring sub-emperor with a penchant for dictating laws whenever democracy fails him.
Kobach’s fooling so few of the people all of the time now, he has to be living in a self-insulated realm to imagine anyone still thinks he’s protecting democracy or anything even like that.
Kobach’s a blatant suppressionist, he’s crossed the line to conspiracy so many times, the only reason he’s not called a criminal is because he’s the one with the legal authority.
Anyone who can, with a straight face, say Kobach’s travels and conspiracies were for the purpose of protecting democracy is one of the liars.
Federal law says it is illegal to conspire to keep people from voting, and that is the ONLY thing he was trying to do, it was not some side effect. And Kobach appears unaware or unconcerned about the negative and microscopic legal exposure it has generated, on the contrary, the more extreme the situation gets the more he embraces the extreme. He doubles-down recklessly, and very publicly, as if he fancies himself as some Tea Party Slim Pickens ridin’ that Red White and Blue doomsday nuke down on all those godless evildoers.
Voter suppression isn’t just another cause to him. He has become it.
Now he’s taken it on as a personal-glory stage on which to act out his neoroyal aspirations, and he has nowhere to go but down, at the hands of a dying oldstream media that is glad to help him go there.
And unless he’s lying to himself, Kobach’s no boy scout. Some might try to disagree, but the thought he really believes he’s some knight for democracy is a knee-slapper, it would take a mighty confused AND deeply delusional “Leave it to Beaver” boy inside a wily Ivy League lawyer to maintain that reality chasm.
No doubt that is what he wants his FOX-addled followers to think, but anyone who’s done serious GOTV work knows how obvious it is to the sane eye that this is SUPPRESSION, not protection.
How far the mighty fall, when they deign to place themselves above the rule of law they represent.
38 Likes
i live in a purple state and have had to show my driver’s license at the polls ever since i started voting, which was for carter by the way.
and really, how much redder can kansas really get anyway?
1 Like
What all the GOP strategists know is that old white people are dying. Immigrants generally don’t vote for people who hate them, think Republicans. The only way they can win is by preventing more and more of the wrong people from voting. Short of fixing the voting machines to win electkons, this is the only chance they have to win elections.
7 Likes
In the absence of a caption one would assume by the way the article starts out that the photo is of Brian Newby, but unless Newby is a dead ringer for Kris Kobach one would be wrong.
3 Likes
Sigh.
It’s really pretty elementary. If you don’t have a driver’s license and you don’t have a passport and you don’t have a birth certificate, etc., what do you do then?
Whether Kansas is red or not is irrelevant. People everywhere should have equal rights to vote.
19 Likes
If it would take a few dozen busloads of illegals to change an election in just ONE Kansas county, imagine the army of Spanish-speaking voters it would take to match Kobach’s feign-ed fears.
It would be great for the Kansas economy, especially the hospitality industry.
1 Like
actually, that connection was quite subtle, and masterfully so.
1 Like
Sometimes, defending voting rights feels like playing Whac-a-Mole. You smack down a threat here, and it rears its ugly head over there.
-
The Court of Appeals rightfully ruled in 2014 that the NVRA preempted those draconian state laws.
-
Kobach’s mole-head reemerged at the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015, and got whacked down again when the Court refused to review the appeals court decision, leaving it in place.
Game over, right?
But Whac-a-Mole, it seems, is never over.
The EAC—without any public process of review—just added proof-of-citizenship requirements to the instructions on the federal form for residents of Kansas, Georgia, and Alabama.
We don’t know what prompted this outrageous capitulation (cough), but we know it’s wrong.
-
We do know that the federal form, as created by the NVRA, has been used for 20 years with a simple attestation of citizenship, and there is no evidence that non-citizens are using it to register and vote.
-
We know that the NVRA supersedes state law, and we know the highest courts in the land have agreed.
And we know … it’s time to play Whac-a-Mole again.
44 Likes
there’s a thesis in that cough you got…
3 Likes
Exactly, Jalus.
Also, it doesn’t take much imagination to realize that Kobach’s game is hardly aimed at Kansas, which, as noted, is deep red. If this stands we will see the same thing in purple states, which will then no longer be purple, or less so.
By which time it will be a bit late to wonder how the GOP got control of the whole damned country.
10 Likes
[quote=“upwitoulz, post:12, topic:32817”]
If this stands we will see the same thing in purple states, which will then no longer be purple, or less so.By which time it will be a bit late to wonder how the GOP got control of the whole damned country.
[/quote]
THIS!
22 Likes
What makes sense is to make everyone automatically eligible to vote. We all know what the GOP is up to.
6 Likes
Oh for goodness sake, not every precinct in even the reddest of states is red. All minorities are entitled to equal access. You know, that Constitution thing?
3 Likes
When I look at the MSM, I look at it the same way as I look at Tass of the former USSR. Both “news” services operate in the social-cultural environment of their respective countries.
The people of the U.S. are too independent-minded to stomach the types of expressive repression of the old USSR. However, the U.S, populace is basically self-enslaved. It would HAVE to be so, if a hundred or so families control public policy. It would have to be so if (as a Princeton Univ. study asserts) there is a near-zero connection between public policy and the wishes of the majority of the population.
The MSM is an integral part of this self-enslavement. WHAT they report on. UNASKED questions to political shills like Trump, Ryan or Boehner. The perpetual HorseRace. Mouse-click non-stories assuming centrality. Carvinal-barker tittilation. Being a stenographer instead of a journalist.
The fact that (unlike in the mid 20th Century) 100% of the function of the “news” is profit-making.
10 Likes
welcome to Kansas.
Especially since Sebelius departed, the Blues all got the blues… it started with education boards fighting evolution in the schools, then really went 6ft under with the rise of the Tea Mob. Brownback’s coronation closed the casket.
Citizens United put the last nail in the coffin lid.
It didn’t happen overnight, but it happened in just a few years, purple Kansas went crimson and now it is so deep, all the elections are fought out in primaries, between centrist republicans and their tea party fellows.
Democrats won’t even field a candidate in the 1st US Congressional district this time around, because they don’t want to impede what little sanity now prevails among regretful Republicans.
They’ll all get behind the moderate Republican to get shed of Huelskampf and his tea party provocateurs.
The only reason that the Democratic party in Kansas struggles so badly is because the institutional FOX/drive-time brainwashing unleashed against Democrats during the Clinton/Bush era went to it’s most ignorant core, and ruined us for two-party politics.
Young Kansans aren’t entering the process, they are either dull and easily confused or they are planning to move somewhere else. And because we are losing our younger generation, there is no more blue in the near future, or even on the distant political horizon, not even much purple anymore in Kansas, it has all turned to different shades of red.
9 Likes
If you are wondering “how the GOP got control” this late in the game you need to go back over the history. For a long time the GOP mission number 1 has been to entrench itself. Bust Unions ( sources of Democratic funding ), Voter Fraud Laws ( with a preponderant negative effect on the poor and minorities …ie Democrats ) and “redistricting” …we all know about that one. Once you vote your State into GOP control…you aint going back. This is not new.
10 Likes
It is very good to see those groups acting so quickly, and I think there is a very strong case against Newby’s actions.
The suit aims at the right target. Had they challenged Kansas, the state would say that, per the guidance of federal courts, it had asked EAC to change the registration form and had received EAC approval.
I wonder, though, if the first legal action will need to be by the commissioners or a commissioner against the director they so recently appointed.
2 Likes
Who hired (bribed) this guy?
2 Likes