Eric Holder Cons the Courts to Save Voting Rights Act (PJ Media Exclusive)
December 3rd, 2012 - 10:41 am
Many of them will be familiar to PJ Media readers of the Every Single One series. All of them, except for Section Chief Chris Herren, are leftists hired by the Obama administration. You can read the biographies of Meredith Bell-Platts, Risa Berkower, Anna Baldwin, Michelle McLeod, and Daniel Freeman here.
Meredith Bell-Platts
New Hampshire, represented again by Gerald Hebert, last month filed a complaint seeking statewide bailout. Let’s hope the federal court hearing the New Hampshire bailout doesn’t get tricked like the Merced panel did. But unless a party intervenes in the New Hampshire case, it may be up to the Supreme Court to break up Holder’s con game.
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Justice Roberts’ seems to be adept at using strained readings to uphold law that he would otherwise find unconstitutional. I believe that his decisions are political rather than legal. I do not trust that he is the conservative justice we believed.
That was the line that jumped out at me too. Justice Roberts using a strained reading to uphold a “constitutionally suspect” law. Why does that sound familiar?
Me, too. I guess Roberts is quite willing to bend the law to reach his own ends. That is the definition of an activist judge.
And statutory law means as much to a radical revolutionary POTUS & his similarly bent AG – and the activist court – as a ‘do not rape’ sign means to a rapist!
And as long as the Radical-in-Chief has his Racialist-in-Chief as AG, all manner of illegal activity will be held as the ‘law of the land’.
As such, this blogger posited too many times over their first reign in power – http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/08/01/will-barack-hussein-obamas-lawless-justice-department-under-the-aegis-of-ag-holder-finally-fall-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/
Tragically, the depraved duo – and their surrogates – are far from done in destroying America as a Constitutional Republic! And the people feel powerless to stop them!
His ruling on the ACA aka ObamaCare, showed his true colors as a progressive, he is no conservative…so much for calling balls and strikes.
Or, it could just be that he didn’t have the cojones to take the heat, by striking down the signature legislation of the first black President. In either case, it does not bode well for what is left of the Republic.
So our esteemed Attorney General once again throws the constitution out the window, (if he ever had a hold on it!!), and abuses his position to wage “civil” war against all Americans. His track record actually has been fairly consistent. His mild mannered demeanor hides his disdain for our traditions and legal constructs. I hold the GOP responsible for his approval and consent. They were all warned yet ignored all history. In any other administration in history, this AG would have been thrown out or, better yet, thrown into jail. What a sad time.
Dear Mr. Adams: Question for you on the law. You write: “Before a bailout may occur, the Voting Rights Act plainly requires ten years of complete submissions of all election changes to the DOJ.”
Let’s use Merced as an example. If Merced slips up and doesn’t submit an election change that needs preclearance, does this bar Merced from EVER bailing out? Or does it “reatart the clock” and Merced has to wait ten more years before trying again?
Sincerely yours.
Gregory Koster
They don’t yet teach this openly in most law schools.
No – they don’t. And soon enough they won’t have to if events keep going in favor of these leftist morons. Voting is fast becoming a joke in this country – when 100% of ~90,000 votes go to Obummer something is wrong. Any statistician worth their salt can tell you that at least ONE voter should have screwed up and voted FOR Romney.
Soap, ballot, jury, ammo – the four boxes of freedom.
The first three are all under enemy control for the foreseeable future.
Just sayin’.
I’m sorry, but this article doesn’t payoff what it promises. Essentially, it says that the DOJ is giving “bailout seekers” an easy time through the process in an effort to show the court that the process is easy.
The “documents obtained by PJ Media” do NOT prove that this is an elaborate con. They do not prove that they plan to ratchet down bailout proceedings after the court case. They do not prove that there is some sort of conspiracy at work. They only show that the DOJ, local municipalities AND Judges are all working together with a LOT of (possibly too much) discretion in order to make the bailout process easy.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the DOJ is an absurd farce of an organization with its latest shams around Fast and Furious, Black Panthers, etc. But if you are going to make heated accusations about their motives, and claim that documents back this up, then the documents really ought to back this up. At most you have some circumstantial evidence. It could also be possible that the DOJ is behaving this way because they believe in good faith the law is doing the right things (ensuring certain thresholds of election practices are met) but that it needs to be administered better and faster. I don’t know one way or the other, but neither (frankly) does the author.
No, the article doesn’t say they are getting an “easy time.” It says DOJ is ignoring a law, ignoring the plain language of a statutory requirement. Congress gave no discretion. Perhaps you might use your real name and get back to us. The documents say plainly that the plain language of the statute would bar a bailout. What the 5th layer of their motives are (” It could also be possible that the DOJ is behaving this way because they believe in good faith the law is doing the right things”) is not the question in a country governed by the rule of law; whether or not they follow the law is the begining and end of the inquiry.
“No, the article doesn’t say they are getting an “easy time.” It says DOJ is ignoring a law, ignoring the plain language of a statutory requirement. Congress gave no discretion.”
No, the lead of your article asserts that the documents show motive. You say the documents show that this is part of a “Legal Strategy” aimed at “Upholding the constitutionality” of the Section 5 arguments. But the documents don’t show that. They show that the DOJ is merely walking communities through the bailout process- possibly (or probably) in violation of statute. Fine, I get that.
“What the 5th layer of their motives are …is not the question in a country governed by the rule of law”
No, it is absolutely in question because you ACCUSE them of intentionally trying to undercut an upcoming Supreme Court hearing. If YOU hadn’t made that accusation, I would not have complained.
And I think you know this, since now you are insisting you don’t need to prove such accusations “in a country governed by the rule of law”. If your article led off “DOJ is violating statute by making it too easy for communities to bail out of the electioneering regulations” it would be interesting, but hardly as scandalous. The entire controversy of this article comes from your spin- saying that this is part of a strategy of conning the Supreme Court. And I’m sorry, but I don’t want to live in a country where authors can blindly cast such aspersions and not be called on it.
As for your “Give us your real name” you should be able to see my email, and contact me directly if you would like. I am not in the habit of posting my contact information on public bulletin boards. Not sure why it was germane to this discussion.
Let’s wait and see what the Justice Department’s brief and arguments in Shelby say then. If they don’t mention the ease of bailouts, you are right or the DOJ made an about face. If they do mention it, I am right. Hopefully you’ll return here if crow is on your menu. I sure will if it is on mine. Here are two facts for you to chew on. First, everyone in the Voting Section realizes this is what is happening because it has been part of the strategy for years. Second, I spoke on a panel with Estelle Rogers from Project Vote last week and she said that this is the “long term lifeboat to save Section 5.” You might want to quibble about whether this is part of the plan or not, but to people who follow the issue closely, there is no debate.
Crikey, am I not being clear? I never said this wasn’t their strategy to begin with. I said that you are incorrect to say this strategy is proven in the documents. We don’t need to look at their brief later. We don’t need to see what they do. We just need to look at the documents. Do they say what you accuse? Or do they not.
If this is the strategy, and everyone knows it is the strategy, why not say that? Why not reference that evidence rather than (incorrectly) asserting that the documents you obtained attest this? Why not say “These documents show that the DOJ are doing X. As I will show you below, this is part of a grand strategy to do Y.” Provide the sources in the Voting Section who say this is happening. Provide the quote from Estelle Rogers.
I hope you will understand that this isn’t about eating crow. It is about reporting accurately. It may indeed be that your story is right in substance, even if these documents don’t prove what you say they do. But we can agree that the latter point is still important. Right?
What I really want to know is, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Nope, I disagree with you. the later point is not only not important, it is absurd. When I was at DOJ this was the strategy. When I left DOJ, multiple sources said the strategy has continued. Every single person who knows anything about this issue knows it is the strategy. You do the research on your own, you’ll find it out pretty quick. Until then, I’ll keep wondering about that pin dance.
Or you might read from the brief filed today:
http://electionlawblog.org/wp-content/uploads/motion-to-intervene.pdf
This Court may take notice of two additional matters. First, the Supreme Court has
granted a petition for writ of certiorari to this Court in Shelby County v. Holder, a case that
challenges the constitutionality of the 2006 reauthorization of Section 5. Shelby County v.
Holder, 2012 WL 3018430 (U.S. Nov. 9, 2012). Part of the defense of the constitutionality of
that statute is that the provisions permitting bail-in and bailout ensure that the statute remains
focused on the jurisdictions with the worst records, and that the bailout provision can be readily
used by covered jurisdictions with clean records. Shelby County v. Holder, 679 F.3d 848, 881-
82 (D.C. Cir. 2012), cert. granted, 2012 WL 3018430 (U.S. Nov. 9, 2012). Indeed, one of
plaintiff’s attorneys has cited this case and other bailout cases as an important reason why the
Supreme Court should uphold the constitutionality of Section 5. Gerry Hebert, The Shelby
County, Alabama Case and Bailouts (Nov. 15, 2012), available at http://www.clcblog.org. The
Attorney General thus has an incentive to interpret the bailout conditions very liberally, and his
effort to defend the constitutionality of Section 5 in Shelby County seems likely to influence his
determination of whether the bailout conditions have been met here.
Holder’s behavior should backfire, if a majority of Justices are honest.
That Holder’s DOJ is itself incapable of following the bailout rules should convince the Supreme Court that Section 5 is a burden and should not survive.
Have any bailout requests been denied? If so, those entities should sue for equal protection violation as clearly the law is being enforced arbitrarily.
I believe the legal term “show of cause” may have some bearing on this discussion.
As has been the case for a very long time now, “facts” as the lay person would define them most often have little standing in todays courtrooms of legal proceedings. Today, ones abilities to present “circumstancial evidence” far outweights direct or material evidence ot fact.
Holder can argue any basis of evidence he wants regardless of real evidence you and I as lay persons perceive and have good odds at winning.
“Eric Holder’s DOJ has launched a legal strategy to… by deliberately disregarding statutory law…”
You might want to hang onto that theme. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
The Democrats called in UN observers this election cycle because they said Republicans would try to disenfranchise Democrat voters. Instead what the UN saw was one of the shoddiest and least honest systems of voting in the entire world. They recommended changes like the photo ID Holder has been over backwards to fight against. But if nations like Iraq can have photo IDs, why can’t the US? For that matter many states have photo ID requirements already.
My point is though that voting is the US IS a joke and the UN called us on it, as loathe as I am to say anything positive about them. The world knows Holder is fighting to preserve voting corruption in favor of the Democrats, but mostly the world doesn’t care because Obama means the death of the US, something most of them want anyway.
So what?
The American legal system is by definition and design adversarial. Who is fighting from the other side?
No one, you say?
Well then. How did that situation arrive?
I would read this lengthy article, given that it is written by J Christian Adams who is always on target, but one thing prevents me even undertaking it. I believe the article will detail some Democrat efforts to corrupt our voting system. So what? There was massive evidence of fraud in the recent election, and no Republican I am aware of is even speaking of it. Republicans, and even Conservative Pundits such as Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin, in fact seem to have put Vote Fraud in the same category as discussion of whether Obama is constitutionally qualified to be present – TOPICS THAT DON’T EXIST. In Cleveland, Ohio and Philadelphia, PA there were many precincts where the number of voters was more the total adult population. And every single person voted for Obama. And no Republican has complained. I am trying to figure out why I would even bother to vote in the future. The Republicans seems completely OK with the idea of our large metropolitan areas, where the majority of people are living on the backs of the taxpayers, being given the “deciding power” in all future elections. The big cities can manufacture as many votes as are needed to overcome the suburban and rural areas of all the states. And the Republicans do not object – even when their own poll watchers are physically thrown out. Rather than a long article on the intricate details of Voting Rights litigation, how about an speculative piece on what would be required to wake the Republican establishment out of its deep coma and get it back into the fight?
If you might post the particular precincts in Ohio that had vote totals larger than TVAP, please post them here. I am sure they will be useful to plaintiffs in True the Vote v. Husted in Federal District Court.
Mr Adams
you are fighting a corrupt DoJ and you think you can win a case fairly. Look at what Chief Justice Roberts did in the obamacare ruling.
I applaud your work and efforts but don’t see a return to the rule of law in the foreseeable future.
Best of luck
You got that right.
You assume they were conned. I assume they were complicit. The end result is the same; but no judge is innocent of the intended or unintended consequences of their decisions. They won’t need to face me (I have no power nor desire to settle up with them–and my judgement is probably flawed, too). They may not face the American People (because the press refuses to address it or they suppress it). But they will face a just God (and have to answer for every ruined life they could have saved)…
I have even a more cynical view of DOJ’s tactics. Granting bailouts illegally makes it easier for a change in political power to challenge the bailout and restore the restrictions. So the bailouts continue as a ruse to the court and then local Democrats and their allies file lawsuts after the Supreme Court makes a decision in order to get the restrictions reinstated just in time for the next federal election.
“If Holder didn’t know about Project Gunrunner, why did he give a speech about it over three years ago?”
http://www.justice.gov/ag/speeches/2009/ag-speech-090402.html
Holder speech on April 2, 2009 (according to DOJ site!): “Last week, our administration launched a major new effort to break the backs of the cartels. My department is committing 100 new ATF personnel to the Southwest border in the next 100 days to supplement our ongoing Project Gunrunner, DEA is adding 16 new positions on the border, as well as mobile enforcement teams, and the FBI is creating a new intelligence group focusing on kidnapping and extortion. DHS is making similar commitments, as Secretary Napolitano will detail.”
I guess I’m having trouble understanding the concept of a Federal law that only applies to sixteen states.
Doesn’t the Fourteenth guarantee equal protection? Can a Federal law be valid that applies only to some states and not others? Does this law rescind the Tenth Amendment for those sixteen states with respect to their right to make their own election laws? In addition, doesn’t the Constitution further guarantee that each state’s laws will be given full faith and credit?
Or am I wrong?
The 14th Amendment isn’t the issue. The 15th is. The law at issue was found to be constituitonal under the 15th in SC v. Katzenbach in 1966. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_v._Katzenbach
Yeah.
Well, they’ll just remind you that Senators aren’t elected constitutionally, either (The 17th Amendment, like so many of the building blocks of our present oppression, was never truly ratified on the square. Secretaries of State just plain lied (since their legislatures weren’t even in session at the time) and sent letters to Washington saying they had ratified it. That’s where Soros got his idea on manipulating the Secretaries of State to effect elections. Pray tell me how he has not won THAT particular battle). So the Voting Rights Act is just fine and dandy, even though equality no longer applies, even 50 years later, and the KKK is just a joke. If anything, Southern Whites now provide the required guilt to enable blacks to enslave us. My forebears were the guys who died freeing blacks, and my later forebears loved, as do I, the proud black man who struggles and works hard to make a life for his family. But, in my lifetime, the Great Black men I knew have all but disappeared. They now find more acceptance being scummy race hustlers, instead of great men. Free stuff is what they’re about. Obama supplies it, and they have no scruples about stealing anything, let alone elections, which they don’t even fully understand.
The VRA and Motor Voter equals the tyranny of the useless masses. The IRS has all kinds of hoops I must jump through 24/7/365, but “I cain’t gets me no ID” trumps all. (How did that dumb bitch get to Washington to testify without ID? I certainly can’t).
I don’t much like being a slave. Do you? Especially when my ancestors spilt a load of blood and lives to free the ungrateful bastards.
Someone must pay, but whom?. I propose a tax on Professors of 95 percent, seeing as how they positively salivate over such rates for others. Seeing as how they do no actual work, and have never produced one single useful thing in the last half century except other delusional psychopaths, and have feathered their own nests to an abominable degree, I propose they pay their fair share.
Somehow, I ain’t holdin’ my breath. Obama will continue to fill cabinet posts with retarded professors with no real world experience. Good luck to us. Please don’t count on Boehner, et al, to stand athwart the door, screaming, “Thus far, No Further!” Gandalf, they ain’t.
I don’t like cheated elections, and, if you don’t think the Dems stole this one, I’ll prove it to you, but you must first be able to understand that when someone is applying all their Herculean efforts to do some strange thing, and that thing comes to pass, it ain’t a coincidence. It’s fraud and malfeasance, perhaps even Treason. Cynicism is the order of the Day. Trust no one, especially the scumbag-in-chief, and his lapdogs.
I now more fully understand the phrase, “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”
“Our Lives”, which, of course, meant hanging, drawing and quartering, a most unpleasant thing, indeed. As the heads of the Revolution, their bodies would be utterly desecrated at the altar of the English King, and their parts (quarters) be displayed at the very corners of the realm, as an instruction to others. Brave men, indeed. Anyone who signed that Declaration signed his own death warrant. I know not what John Hancock ever accomplished in his life afterwards, but his sheer balls at his extravagant signing of that treasonous document must assign him a place in posterity forever. What Arab scum calls out the US today, in advance? That very closely resembles the situation today, except the English King would have ordered their deaths immediately, and would have respected no Mosques, while we dither and dather, and let murderers go free.
Who among us remains this brave? Do we still even understand how George Washington was a far braver man than Martin Luther King? No one ever threatened Dr. King with Drawing and Quartering. Shooting was a far better and noble end, comparatively.
I hate to bring this up: they were Englishmen, not Spanish, not Dutch, not French, certainly not Zulu nor Aztec, nor Inca.
This country is upon the precipice of destruction. It may take mayhem and destruction. It will certainly take civil disobedience, of a quite different order. Remember, you always get to decide, but death is an awful thing to contemplate, and sometimes death is the only answer, or the threat of death, or the acceptance of possible death.
Contemplate well, my dears. The status quo ante is now gone. Treason runs rampant. “Safety” will be thy undoing. That’s the plan. Who doesn’t want to be “safe”?
“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”
They didn’t. They trusted “Divine Providence”.
Or is it all over, now?
There’s an easy answer to all of this: 1 citizen = 1 paper vote. But then again Mr Adams won’t have as much to whine about.
Paper ballots are the form of voting which invites the greatest degree of fraud. They must be relegated forever to the past where the paper ballots made it easier to steal elections.