Hillary Clinton ran one of the most boring, tired football plays in Houston this week — Wishbone Sweep Left. We’ve seen it over and over again: tell Democrats that Republicans are out to bring back Jim Crow, energize a moribund, racially motivated base by scaring them into thinking the Voting Rights Act has vanished, and claim that not having a month-long election day means blacks are being targeted for vote “suppression.”
The play is tired, familiar, and goes nowhere.
Even reliably leftist MSNBC reporter Zachary Roth seemed to see through Hillary’s stance on voter ID. In his friendly, Clinton-fed piece “Hillary Takes on Voting Rights in Houston,” Roth notes Hillary didn’t really harp about voter ID like the racial interest groups do:
She didn’t offer the kind of broader condemnation of ID laws per se often voiced by voting and civil rights groups. And in criticizing Wisconsin and North Carolina’s slew of voting restrictions, she focused on cuts to early voting rather than those states’ ID laws.
There’s two reasons for Clinton giving voter ID a pass.
First, voter ID is yesterday’s battleground. Sure, there are still court cases and bills, but the Left has moved on to bigger and better things: preserving illegal alien political clout in legislatures; moving to mandatory voter registration and all-mail ballots; extending election day for a month or more to move the unmotivated to the polls; giving SEIU employees the power to help the incompetent vote; ensuring non-citizens on the rolls aren’t detected; and seeing that state power over elections is slowly but surely taken over by Washington, D.C.
The second reason Hillary stayed away from voter ID is because 80 percent of Americans support it, including Democrats. Only the out-of-touch fringe fights voter ID.
It was also no accident that Hillary went to Houston to lay out the radical progressive program for fundamentally transforming elections to aid progressives. That’s where True the Vote is based, an organization that has battled the progressive left over their attempts to manipulate process rules to erode election integrity.
Catherine Engelbrecht, head of True the Vote, called her out:
If Mrs. Clinton were genuinely concerned about state policies on early voting, her speech shouldn’t have been given in Texas, a state that already has a successful early voting program, but rather in her adopted home of New York, a state that has no early voting option at all. If her solution to this claimed civil rights issue is requiring states have 20 days of early voting, then why did her campaign sanction a lawsuit against Ohio on the basis of its early election program, which is already 28 days long?
Pay attention: the Left is very good at manipulating election process rules.
They know that process makes policy. That’s why they dress up fundamental transformative changes to elections in the costume of civil rights and convenience. That’s why fighting voter ID is one small, and increasingly irrelevant, part of the Left’s election process agenda.
As Democrats before her, Clinton runs the most boring and familiar play in the Democrat playbook: sweep left and scare minority voters based on a falsehood. What the Democrats really want are elections where all the rules are stacked against their opponents.
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