“About 80 percent of the people who are given amnesty, when they’re registered to vote, will vote Democratic,” noted Texas congressman Lamar Smith in 2014. While his number could be a bit low, he was shining a light on a poorly hidden agenda: Today’s im/migration, illegal and legal, amounts to a Democrat get-in-the-vote scheme. And now it’s apparent that the Obama administration is attempting to cut to the chase and enable illegal aliens themselves to cast ballots.
In fact, the federal government’s current actions are so outrageous that just yesterday a federal judge called them “unprecedented” and “extraordinary.” American Thinker’s Thomas Lifson provides some background:
The National Voter Registration Act, aka Motor Voter, aka auto fraudo, ostensibly was set up to ensure that people would be able to vote without much effort at all. It has now been hijacked to enable noncitizens to register and vote.
As part of that act, an independent commission, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), was set up, with two members each nominated by leaders of the two major parties in order to help states comply with the law, despite the fact that the 17th Amendment of the Constitution explicitly lays out that the states have the power to set the “[q]ualification requisite for electors.”
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This situation got really interesting when some states, such as Arizona, wanted to include citizenship-verification requirements with voter-registration forms. This is when “the institutional Left — including the League of Women Voters, People for the American Way, Common Cause, Project Vote, and Chicanos for La Causa — brought a lawsuit [against Arizona] claiming that the EAC hadn’t approved such requirements,” wrote National Review’s Hans A. Von Spakovsky on Sunday. But the story got stranger still.
The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 2013 that while the EAC would have to agree to any voter-verification changes to the federal form before they could be made, Arizona could sue the agency if it refused to do so. And the Court made clear that the state would have a lot of leverage in such a case. Arizona then made the request for such changes, but it was denied by a single EAC bureaucrat, Alice Miller, who was merely the acting executive director at the time.
Yet it appears that Miller didn’t even make the decision. Von Spakovsky reports that sources inside the Department of Justice (DOJ) told him “it was partisan, left-wing lawyers in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department who actually drafted the denial letter.” This is striking, the writer explained, because the EAC is supposed to be an “independent,” non-partisan agency. Moreover, the DOJ officials, Von Spakovsky reminds us, are “the same cadre of lawyers that dismissed a voter-intimidation charge against members of the New Black Panther Party who physically threatened voters in Philadelphia to help President Barack Obama get elected in 2008; that has waged a war on voter ID and other election-integrity measures; and that has refused to enforce the Voting Rights Act in a race-neutral manner as called for by the plain text of the statute.” As to the last trespass, note that while under oath, whistleblower and ex-DOJ attorney J. Christian Adams revealed in 2010 that the bureaucracy had a policy of not pursuing “voting-rights cases involving black perpetrators and white victims.”
The good news is that after some intra-agency reorganization, the EAC reversed Miller’s decision and allowed states to include the citizenship-verification requirements with the federal voter-registration form. But no good deed goes unlitigated in today’s America, and that brings us to this month’s happenings. Now the Left wants to reverse the reversal and, on February 12, filed a lawsuit in D.C. federal court to accomplish just that.
The plaintiffs include the aforementioned “institutional Left” groups, and there was a hearing just yesterday in which they requested a restraining order (TRO) and preliminary injunction (PI) against the EAC. And who was defending the federal agency? Why, federal lawyers, of course — from the DOJ. It was a classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse.
Von Spakovsky wrote Monday about how he attended the hearing, presided over by District of Columbia federal judge Richard J. Leon:
This morning, as I predicted would happen in an article on Sunday, the U.S. Justice Department took a dive and filed a pleading in which it not only failed to defend the actions of the EAC, but agreed with the plaintiffs and consented to both a TRO and a PI. Judge Leon called the pleading “unprecedented” and “extraordinary.” He said he had never seen such a document in his entire experience as a lawyer or a judge. He was obviously astonished that the Justice Department was not defending the agency, and it was soon clear he was not going to allow DOJ to just roll over.
The atmosphere in court was so ridiculous — the plaintiffs showed up with 12 lawyers, although only one was actually going to argue the case — that Judge Leon called it a “travelling roadshow.” He then opened the hearing, writes Von Spakovsky, “by reading into the record an astonishing letter he had just received from the chair of the EAC, Christie McCormick. It informed the court that DOJ had told the EAC that it would not defend the agency, and that it would not allow the EAC to hire its own counsel. McCormick informed the judge that she believed DOJ was not fulfilling its duty and obligation to defend the EAC and had a potential conflict of interest.” So the fix was in.
Fortunately, Judge Leon applied his own fix, having issued orders just before the hearing allowing both the State of Kansas and the Public Interest Legal Foundation to defend the EAC’s position with their own lawyers. In fact, “It was clear that Judge Leon was shocked at what DOJ had done. While he gave the plaintiffs 20 minutes to argue their case, he gave the lawyer from the Federal Programs Branch of DOJ only five minutes because he said that DOJ was obviously on the same side as the plaintiffs,” reported Von Spakovsky. And the plaintiff’s lawyer was pretty shocking as well: He became so desperate at one point that he actually characterized the EAC as being like Nazi Germany.
So matters didn’t exactly go the plaintiffs’ way. Judge Leon denied their request for the PI and said he’d announce his decision on the TRO today.
And all this is just so illegals can vote in our elections — which is happening. In fact, a 2014 study found that enough non-citizens cast ballots to influence close races. It’s no surprise that Democrats have steadfastly opposed voter-ID measures, either (even though identification is required for most everything else, from receiving government benefits to visiting the White House). Seventy to ninety percent of legal immigrants vote Democrat upon naturalization, and the figure for illegal migrants is at the upper end of that range.
This use of immigration to empower statists via cultural and demographic genocide isn’t limited to the United States, and it has at times been acknowledged. Andrew Neather, a former advisor to ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, admitted in 2009 that one of the goals of the mass immigration authored by his Labour Party was “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.” Barack Obama said last year he was “pretty optimistic” that conservatism would be drowned out because immigration was making the United States “more of a hodgepodge of folks.” Even more outrageously, there was this report, which tells us that “Obama’s amnesty plan is to use illegal aliens as ‘seedlings’ … [who will] ‘navigate, not assimilate,’ as they ‘take over the host,’ create a ‘country within a country’ and start ‘pushing the citizens into the shadows,’” as I wrote in March. But most brazen of all was Swedish multiculturalist social engineer and Social Democrat politician Mona Sahlin. She bluntly said in 2001, “The Swedes must be integrated into the new Sweden; the old Sweden is never coming back.”
It’s an old story. If you can’t get the people to change the government, just change the people.
