AG Holder Tells Black Religious Leaders that Voting Rights 'Hang in the Balance'

Attorney General Eric Holder held a campaign-related meeting with scores of black pastors and religious leaders Wednesday. The meeting itself was unprecedented, as its intent was to instruct religious leaders how they might help re-elect a sitting president without jeopardizing their tax-exempt status. Holder used the meeting to say things are blatantly dishonest:

“In my travels across this country, I’ve heard a consistent drumbeat of concern from citizens, who – often for the first time in their lives – now have reason to believe that we are failing to live up to one of our nation’s most noble ideals,” Holder said in a speech before the Council of Black Churches.  The threats of legal assaults and lingering discrimination, he added, means that “some of the achievements that defined the civil rights movement now hang in the balance.”

As if to underscore the point, however, a voting rights group is worried that Holder and the Justice Department aren’t acting quickly enough to stop Florida’s Republican governor from continuing a purge of registered voters from the state’s rolls because they lack proof of U.S. citizenship.

That’s Politico’s spin on things.

Holder is talking about the voter ID laws that several states have passed, and efforts to clean up voter rolls that have been compromised by, on the one hand, the ease with which non-citizens can register to vote, and on the other hand, concerted efforts to register ineligible voters by groups like ACORN. Holder is telling “his people” that making it more difficult to cast fraudulent votes puts their own voting rights in the balance.

Nothing could be further from the truth, and Holder knows it.

Before Indiana passed its voter ID law, people like Holder and the activist groups he aligns with warned that the law was designed to and would prevent minorities from voting. Reality: Voting among minorities increased across the board. Georgia passed a similar voter ID law, and voting rates went up there, too.

Holder’s racist “my people” comment probably should’ve earned him a humiliating resignation. His comments to black leaders that sensible efforts to secure the integrity of our elections are threat to their voting rights a dishonest disgrace that definitely should end in him leaving his post. Holder is using the office of attorney general, the people’s lawyer not the president’s counsel, to militate against secure elections. Eric Holder is a partisan first, in an office that should be apolitical, and he needs to go.