Inventing "Fraud" Isn't Necessary for the GOP's 2024 Robbery Plans

In 2020, Republican politicians made bogus claims of fraud in order to justify attempting to steal an election they lost. But why bother with the "fraud" allegation at all? Why not just attempt the robbery? The answer, presumably, is that claiming fraud -- however spuriously -- was necessary to justify overturning the will of the voters and assigning electoral college voters to a candidate who got fewer votes.

The problem with this strategy was, of course, that the fraud claims were obvious nonsense and every sane observer -- including virtually all judges -- knew it. Insofar as the strategy was based on a flagrant lie, it was vulnerable to rejection once it actually hit the judiciary.

Fast forward a few years, though, and Republicans are coming to a realization: They don't need to claim fraud. They can cut out the middleman entirely and just assert the right to ignore the voters entirely. The claim being developed is a version of the "independent state legislature" doctrine that just asserts that state political officials (themselves often in highly gerrymandered seats that bear no relationship to the popular will) have free reign to decide who gets their state's electoral votes. Their decision need not be in any way constrained by such piddling trivialities like "who the voters of their state actually voted for" -- even in the funhouse mirror sense of "well if you discount the votes that we assert are fraudulent because *mumble mumble brown people*, then the voters actually chose our guy." The new version of the steal is a straight line argument that if the state legislature wants to assign their EVs to Trump, Trump gets them. The people can pound sand.

Unlike the concocted fraud allegations, this is fundamentally a legal assertion -- an extreme, terrifying legal assertion, but a legal assertion all the same. Getting the GOP judiciary to accept it does not depend on forcing judges to deny reality, it just depends on getting the right mix of reactionary nihilists who can issue a chin-stroking pontification about how slave states in 1810 organized their elections with a straight face -- and recent history suggests that a welter of federal court judges will be eager to accommodate them. 

Nonsense fraud claims might gild the lily of this endeavor, but they aren't necessary to the strategy. And for that reason, this strategy for stealing the election is far more likely to succeed than the last one. The 2020 steal attempt was a largely ad hoc, on-the-fly paint splatter thrown together by the least competent attorneys Trump's money could buy in a context where it still was mostly taken for granted that the vote tallies ought determine the winner. In 2024, the GOP establishment will have had time to prepare itself logistically, but also mentally -- it will have come to terms with making the argument that in our allegedly constitutional democracy votes don't have to matter at all (See the Senate! See the electoral college itself! We're a republic, not a democracy!).

Republicans swung as hard as they could in 2020, but they just weren't strong enough to ring the bell. This time around, they'll be trained, toned, and ready. I hope we are too.

Reluctantly Not Being Evil

In Texas, a federal judge has thrown out an effort by Texas Republicans to invalidate over 100,000 legally cast ballots down via "drive-up" voting procedures in Harris County, ruling that the plaintiffs lacked standing. That's rightfully the headline, and it certainly puts this judge ahead of his colleagues on the 8th Circuit, but buried in the middle of the story we read that -- had he found the plaintiffs had standing -- he would have enjoined any further (i.e., today's) drive-up votes from counting. In other words, he thinks the plaintiff's crackpot theory is correct on the merits, he's just bound by technicalities not to give them what they want.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court today reversed the 5th Circuit's decision that prison guards leaving an inmate in a cell overflowing with his own bodily waste and sewage deserve qualified immunity, concluding this was one of the rare instances where even general statements of law could provide fair notice that the relevant governmental conduct was unconstitutional. This is noteworthy on its own, as the Supreme Court virtually never intercedes to chide lower courts for being too willing to grant qualified immunity, but apparently this case was a bridge too far. Justice Alito concurred in the case -- which, again, puts him ahead of Justice Thomas, who dissented without opinion -- but wrote separately to chastise the Court for even taking the case, deeming it a matter of mere error-correction that was not worthy of the Court's time. Again, Justice Alito seems flatly annoyed that he was placed in a position where he felt compelled to be less of a schmuck than he'd like -- and anyone who voted for to intercede in Dunn v. Ray has permanently lost the ability to complain about the Court being too loose in hearing cases.

The Farr Nomination and the Future of Senate Oversight

The announcement from Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), the Senate's sole Black Republican member, that he would oppose the nomination of Thomas Farr to a federal district court seat in North Carolina has officially torpedoed the nomination. Without Scott (and Jeff Flake, who has said he will vote against all judicial nominees until a bill protecting the Mueller investigation is brought to a vote), Farr didn't have enough votes to be confirmed.

The reason Farr was a particularly controversial figure is that he was implicated in racist voter suppression efforts in North Carolina, dating all the way back to his time on the Jesse Helms campaign. I assume that, aside from that bit of historical pedigree, he is more or less identical to any other candidate the Trump administration might nominate for the seat.

It is interesting to me, then, that in all cases such as this the burning question is always "will these two or three Republican Senators vote no?" We're way past the possibility that the bulk of Republican Senators might in any way buck the Trump administration's dictates -- even in circumstances where the tangible impact of the defection is nothing. The man (or woman, but let's be realistic about probabilities here) who is nominated instead of Farr will no doubt be a conservative, FedSoc approved jurist whose pattern of voting on controversial cases will be almost impossible to distinguish from how Farr would have voted. When that jurist gets confirmed instead of Farr, there is no net loss for the conservative legal project.

And yet -- by all appearances, it is beyond the realm of possibility that more than a bare handful of Republicans would oppose Farr. Scott's defection did trigger a belated (and pointless) return back to undecided from Official Moderate Republican Susan Collins (surprising no one, when it looked like she'd be the decisive vote she announced she'd back Farr). One might think that -- especially after Scott sank the nomination anyway -- a cluster of, I don't know, 30 Republican Senators might announce that Farr's history of racist voter suppression made him unsuitable for the federal bench, bask in the praise the media would heap upon them for their independence, and then get ready to vote for the functionally-identical nominee Trump put forward instead. But no.

This, above all else, was my thought during the Kavanaugh hearing. Had Kavanaugh been defeated, the alternative would have been almost certainly "a judge whose predicted voting record on the bench would be substantively identical to Kavanaugh's in every respect, but who wasn't also maybe a sexual predator in his youth." Oh the sacrifices! But apparently it is one, since pretty much no Republican Senator has ever found this logic remotely compelling.

This is why I have no confidence in the GOP Senate's ability or interest in providing even a modicum of checks upon the Trump administration. Faced between the choice of a conservative nominee who is corrupt/racist/incompetent/criminal, and waiting another few weeks for a nominee who is just as conservative but doesn't have any of that baggage, the Republicans in the Senate have proven they'll choose Door #1 every single time.

David's Novel Post-Election Electoral Proposal

There's been a lot of controversy regarding several extremely close races whose ultimate victor remains up in the air. These include the Arizona Senate race and the Florida Senate and Gubernatorial races (as well as, potentially, whether the Georgia Gubernatorial race will head to a run-off).

Here's my novel proposal to defuse these controversies and ensure that the person ultimately seated has democratic legitimacy:

1) If, after election day, a Democrat is ahead: count all the votes.

2) If, after election day, a Republican is ahead: count all the votes.

3) If, after all the votes are counted and a Democrat is ahead within a preset margin of victory: recount all the votes just to be sure.

4) If, after all the votes are counted and a Republican is ahead within a preset margin of victory: recount all the votes just to be sure.

5) If steps 1 - 4 are scrupulously and fairly followed: seat the winning candidate.

I know it's crazy -- but it's just crazy enough to work!

Lakisha and Jamal Go to the Polls

Also, now they're Latino.

A very interesting study out of USC tests responsiveness of legislators to Latino versus Caucasian citizens with concerns about how to vote. State legislators received the following message:

Hello (Representative/Senator NAME),

My name is (voter NAME) and I have heard a lot in the news lately about identification being required at the polls. I do not have a driver’s license. Can I still vote in November? Thank you for your help.

Sincerely,
(voter NAME)

For half, the voter's name was "Jacob Smith," and for the other half it was "Santiago Rodriguez". In all of the states tested, the actual answer to this question was "yes" (a driver's license is not required to vote).

The study found that legislators were considerably more likely to respond to Jacob Smith than Santiago Rodriguez. And that gap exploded when one compared voter ID supporters to voter ID opponents. Opponents of voter ID responded the Caucasian-sounding constituent 50% of the time compared to 43% of the time for his Latino-sounding peer (a seven point gap). For proponents of Voter ID, by contrast, that split was 45/27.5 (a gap of 17.5 points). In other words, proponents of voter ID are far less likely to respond to Latino constituents who have simple questions about the voting process.

This gap still exists for opponents of voter ID, but it is almost purely a result of partisan differences. Republican proponents of voter ID evinced a nearly 40 point gap in response rates between White and Latino constituents, while Republican opponents of these laws showed only a 16 point gap. Democratic opponents of voter ID laws, by contrast, responded to White and Latino voters at equal rates (within the margin of error). There were too few Democratic supporters of voter ID laws to measure.

The draft paper is available for download here.

Identifying the Problem

Seventh Circuit Judge and noted polymath Richard Posner has come out and stated that he was "absolutely" wrong to have voted to uphold voter ID laws. Posner authored a 2-1 opinion in Crawford v. Marion County, later upheld by the Supreme Court, which affirmed the constitutionality of Indiana's voter ID requirement.

Yes [I got the Crawford case wrong. Absolutely. And the problem is that there hadn't been that much activity with voter identification. And ... maybe we should have been more imaginative ... we ... weren't really given strong indications that requiring additional voter identification would actually disfranchise people entitled to vote. There was a dissenting judge, Judge Evans, since deceased, and I think he is right. But at the time I thought what we were doing was right.

It is interesting that the majority opinion was written by Justice Stevens, who is very liberal, more liberal than I was or am.... But I think we did not have enough information. And of course it illustrates the basic problem that I emphasize in book. We judges and lawyers, we don’t know enough about the subject matters that we regulate, right? And that if the lawyers had provided us with a lot of information about the abuse of voter identification laws, this case would have been decided differently.

I don't necessarily disagree that there were, in fact, plenty of people who had the knowledge and imagination to understand how voter ID laws would act primarily to disenfranchise selcted classes of voters while doing virtually nothing to staunch the voter fraud non-issue. Nonetheless, Judge Posner deserves a nod of approval for admitting that he was wrong on such a high-profile issue. Between this and A Failure of Capitalism, Judge Posner has shown an admirable willingness to revisit his positions when new facts warrant it, and that is laudable.

Suppressive Cycles

I confess to having similar thoughts to Harold Meyerson:

If voter suppression goes forward and Romney narrowly prevails, consider the consequences. An overwhelmingly and increasingly white Republican Party, based in the South, will owe its power to discrimination against black and Latino voters, much like the old segregationist Dixiecrats. It’s not that Republicans haven’t run voter suppression operations before, but they’ve been under-the-table dirty tricks, such as calling minority voters with misinformation about polling-place locations and hours. By contrast, this year’s suppression would be the intended outcome of laws that Republicans publicly supported, just as the denial of the franchise to Southern blacks before 1965 was the intended result of laws such as poll taxes. More ominous still, by further estranging minority voters, even as minorities constitute a steadily larger share of the electorate, Republicans will be putting themselves in a position where they increasingly rely on only white voters and where their only path to victory will be the continued suppression of minority votes. A cycle more vicious is hard to imagine.

This does not strike me as a negligible risk. The voter suppression tactics of today are "justified" by reference to a non-existent phenomenon, so its not like Republicans have to worry about a fig leaf jarring loose. And if GOP's only path to competitiveness is in each year blocking more and more minority voters from reaching the polls, there's a real chance that's the strategy that they'll adopt.

Body Swappers

Wouldn't it be awesome if former Florida Governor Charlie Crist (then-R, now-I) and Alabama ex-Rep. Artur Davis (then-D, now-R) ran against each other for something in the future?

This came to mind after Crist came out against the voter ID fraud in the Washington Post, and delivered an unapologetic defense of democratic values and access to the ballot box. It was precisely apostasies like this, of course, that caused him to lose what had seemed a sure-shot bid to the US Senate as a Republican in 2010 to the tea-flavored Marco Rubio. Davis, of course, originally showcased his GOP-curiosity by jumping on the voter fraud bandwagon, though he was outraged when media critics made unreasonable demands of him like "give examples of when this has ever happened".

I had liked the old Davis, which is part of the reason the new one is so risible -- he's smart enough to know that "voter fraud" is a fraud, but he's also smart enough to know that jumping on that train is a fast way to leap to prominence amongst the GOP. Crist, by contrast, I liked even before he dropped the "R", and of course, I like him even better now. But still, they do seem to be walking similar paths (in opposing directions).

Snyder Vetoes Voter Suppression Bills

I'm pleasantly surprised by this: Michigan Governor Rick Snyder (R) has vetoed a set of bills which, though nominally targeting (largely non-existent) voter fraud, would in effect serve to suppress eligible voters. Snyder said the bills would cause "confusion" due to the obscure procedures they enacted.

I have no idea why Snyder -- a rather orthodox (which is to say, tea-flavored) Republican, decided to break with the GOP orthodoxy on this. I don't know of any inside-baseball explanation for this, so let's just congratulate him on doing the right thing.

Weekend Roundup

I have been dialed in these past few weeks, and the blogging has suffered, I know. Not sure if things will pick-up or not in the upcoming days.

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Rick Santorum lets the economic cat out of the bag -- if it improves, Republicans suffer.

Republicans try, fail, to lift a consent decree barring them from voter suppression.

Sarah Palin says Obama pines for pre-Civil War America. I have to say, anytime someone says "obviously, even the most hardened conservative wouldn't say such-and-such", I immediately have very little trouble envisioning a conservative saying it.

My job is awesome. But lots of jobs stink.

Jon Chait postulates that "Bellgate" is just an instantiation of Jewish Republicans wild tendency to see Black anti-Semitism in every corner.

Technical Error Roundup

This one might be a bit more haphazard than most, as it incorporates some election night celebration. As for the title, my laptop had its hard drive replaced, and in the middle of doing so my wireless card somehow snapped. So that has to get fixed too.

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My comment to this post set of a twitter war between myself and the Republican Jewish Committee, centered around my observation that if disliking Bibi means hating Israel, then disliking Obama means hating America. Why do Republicans hate America so much, anyway?

Occupy movement inspires unions to get bolder.

Andre Berto is dropping his belt to pursue a rematch against Victor Ortiz, which may pave the way for a match between Randall Bailey (42-7, 36 KOs) and Carson Jones (32-8-2, 22 KOs) to claim the vacant belt. I like both guys, but I'm a particularly fervent Jones fan, so I approve. Bailey is average at best in all dimensions of the sport save one: concussive, brutal, devastating, one-punch power. So it should be good.

Though Blacks are far more likely to be imprisoned for it, it's White kids who actually are more likely to use drugs.

Mostly a good election night for Team Blue: Maine voters reinstated same-day voter registration, Ohio voters tossed Gov. John Kasich's (R) anti-union law, Mississippi(!) voters decisively rejected a "personhood amendment" that would declare life begins at conception, and won massive victories in most Kentucky statewide races as well as an Iowa State Senate election that preserves their control of the chamber. Also, one of the chief xenophobes in the Arizona State Senate, Senate President Russell Pearce, was successfully recalled by another (more moderate) Republican.

On the negative side, the Virginia state Senate will likely flip by an agonizingly small margin (86 votes in the pivotal race) and Mississippi approved a voter ID law (and elected a new GOP governor -- no shock there).

UPDATE: Another bit of good news: Dems have retaken the Wake County (NC) school board. That's a big deal: Wake County had been one of integration's few true success stories, and the GOP board that swept to power last cycle was looking to undo that.

Yay Disenfranchisement

A South Carolina GOP operative, Wesley Donehue, is taking some heat for tweeting "Nice! ... EXACTLY why we need Voter ID in SC" in response to an article entitled "SC voter ID law hits black precincts".

If you hit his feed, Donehue spends a lot of time moaning about how people didn't "read the follow-up" tweets. Basically, what those tweets focus on is that many of the people affected by the voter ID law may be students who originally hail from outside the state. This, he says, raises the prospect that they are trying to vote in two states (South Carolina, and their states of origin), which would be fraudulent.

And yes, that would be. The problem, though, is that while one can't legally vote in two states in the same election, one certainly can elect to vote in South Carolina elections exclusively as a student, even if one originally hails from another state. Donehue has no evidence that the former occurs, and the latter is perfectly legal. Ergo, Donehue is excited about suppressing legal (mostly Black) votes.

When I went to Carleton, for example, I sometimes voted in Maryland, and sometimes in Minnesota (never both at the same time, of course). I can do that, because I could credibly claim to be domiciled in either state, and the only legal requirement for being a "citizen" of a state is that one "resides" there. See U.S. Const. Amend. XIV ("All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.") (emphasis added). Students electing to register in the state where they live nine months of the year is perfectly valid and accepted practice, and well within the confines of the word "reside". And if they do so, they are legally as "South Carolinian" as Donehue is.

At times Donehue seems to admit that the only cognizable legal problem is not students originally from Georgia deciding to vote in South Carolina, but rather people voting in both states at once (other times he indicates that yes, his problem is with people legally voting in South Carolina when they originally hail from another state). While this has the advantage of keeping him on the right side of the constitution, it also has nothing to do with the law he's defending. The risk of double-voting occurs because one might be simultaneously registered in two states. When I registered to vote in Minnesota, there was nothing that canceled my Maryland registration -- or, for that matter, nothing that would let them know that I was ever registered in Maryland or anywhere else in the first place. If I had shown ID when I registered -- guess what? -- that's still true. Worse yet, most voter fraud that does occur happens through absentee ballots. Guess what isn't covered by voter ID laws? Yep -- absentee ballots.

Donehue's slipperiness between a valid but possibly non-existent "problem" that wouldn't be solved by the law in question anyway (double-voting), and an extant but perfectly legal phenomenon, the blocking of which is aptly called voter suppression (students voting where they go to college), should be an indicator that his analysis isn't exactly on the up-and-up. Whether that's because he really is excited at suppressing the Black vote, or because he's just not all that bright and doesn't understand how the constitution works with respect to residency, is an open question.

Who Gave Steve King a Magic Lamp?

Ah, Steve King. The Republican from Iowa has graced the pages of my blog at several points as among the dumbest members of Congress -- defending the "mendacity" of Republican leaders, worrying that women will never have babies if we allow them access to birth control, and referring to America as a nation of slackers. And today, we get a new entry: pining for a return to 19th century voting rules, where only propertied (White) men could vote. You think I'm exaggerating:

“[T]here was a time in American history when you had to be a male property owner in order to vote. The reason for that was, because they wanted the people who voted — that set the public policy, that decided on the taxes and the spending — to have some skin in the game."

King was making a "skin in the game" argument, and we'll put aside my general objections to that argument. I'm not 100% convinced that the only reason voting was restricted to white male property owners was that they, unlike the rest of the population, had "skin in the game". Call me a skeptic if you like.

But if the goal is to see America return to pre-Voting Rights Act electoral rules, King may be getting his wish. Check out this story from Tennessee, where a 96-year old Black woman who was able to vote during Jim Crow is facing disenfranchisement due to the state's draconian new voter ID requirement. The woman actually has a photo ID, just not one that counts under the law. So she went to get one that would qualify, but showing the clerk her (a) rent receipt, (b) lease copy, (c) voter registration card and (d) birth certificate wasn't enough to satisfy the clerk and get the card.

Monday Roundup

I'm not feeling it today, dear readers.

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Ex-Rep., current nutcase Cynthia McKinney and ANSWER host an event on NATO's Libya campaign, refuse to let in Libyans.

Gay Orthodox groups get their first float at the Tel Aviv gay pride parade.

I remember when this scandal broke, but I confess I didn't expect any criminal indictments to come from it: Aides of former Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich (R) charged with voter suppression crimes.

The "Anthony Weiner's secret Muslim agenda" conspiracy theory still has legs on the far-right.

Supreme Court rejects class certification for a giant sex discrimination case against Wal-Mart. Scott Lemiuex has good commentary up.

Monday Evening Roundup

Forgive me, I've been busy.

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A host of leftist luminaries, including Noam Chomsky, have lent their imprimatur to a book which, among other things, effectively denies the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Well, let nobody accuse folks of singling out the Jews anymore, at least.

The internal IDF probe of the Gaza flotilla incident (distinct from the independent Terkel commission) has found mistakes in the operation, but fully sanctioned the use of force by the commandos. One of its observations was that there aren't really that many ways to stop a ship from going someplace without boarding it, and there aren't that many ways to board a ship whose crew is violently resisting without yourself using some violence.

Whoever wrote the screenplay for this World War II thing I keep seeing on the History Channel needs to find a new profession. I mean, sheesh.

It's not nice to kick folks while they're down, but Matt Yglesias I think is appropriately harsh to journalists just now discovering that John McCain is 95% hack. He didn't really change, you just weren't paying attention.

Switzerland refuses to extradite Roman Polanski, bowing to an international outcry that punishing a convicted child rapist is a gross injustice when the rapist is friends with important to people.

Adam Serwer has a good post on the Justice Department dropping voter intimidation charges against the New Black Panther Party.

The NAACP is considering a resolution condemning racism in the Tea Party movement.

The Battle of New Orleans

Last April, the Supreme Court uphold an Indiana voter ID law which disenfranchised folks for literally no tangible reason. The intangible reason was to prevent voter fraud. I call that reason "intangible" because Indiana had never, in its history, had a prosecuted case of voter fraud of a form this law would address. Indeed, the state had seen voter fraud in absentee balloting before, so naturally, absentee ballots were exempt from the law. It was a rare case of the Supreme Court allowing a fundamental right to burden based on nothing more than mythology and Republican hysterics. Not their proudest moment.

But having lost the war, it looks like voting rights advocates may have nonetheless managed to win a battle after the fact. The Indiana Court of Appeals has struck down the voter ID law the US Supreme Court upheld, holding it to be a violation of the state constitution by not treating all voters alike (particularly with regards to the aforementioned exception for absentee ballots).

More coverage here and here. Also worth noting is that this is an intermediate appellate opinion, so it can and likely will be appealed to the state Supreme Court.

It's Way Too Hard

Texas legislator Betty Brown (R): Asian names are way too hard for Americans to deal with (this was in the context of a voter identification bill).

“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” Brown said.

Brown later told Ko: “Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?”

Okay, number one: If they're voting, that means they're citizens. If they're citizens, then they're Americans too.

But also, and not to play Brown's game here, when I think of stereotypical Asian names, I think what distinguishes them is their simplicity. Park, Chan, Ho, Wang, Chang, Tran. Quite simple. I'll put the average Chinese name up against Mike Krzyzewski any day (Krzyzewski doesn't even glance sideways at its phonetic pronunciation until the third syllable). But somehow, I doubt Ms. Brown is going to have a follow-up hearing to lecture Poles on their lack of American-ness.

Civil Rights Roundup: 10/23/08

Your daily dose of civil rights and related news

Breath-taking results from a study by Ian Ayres on racial profiling by the LAPD. I'm probably going to write a separate post on this one -- the data is jaw-dropping.

The polls on Proposition 8 have been narrowing, and it looks like the right to gay marriage will go down to the wire.

Three Jews, Four Opinions has a good perspective on how Jews concerned about Halakah should approach issues like same-sex marriage.

ACORN is fighting back against smears that it is (among other things) destroying the fabric of democracy.

America wastes the talents of immigrants with college and professional degrees. One in five college educated immigrants are either unemployed or in unskilled professions, and the problem persists even when the field is restricted to those here legally. Unsurprising note: Highly educated African and Latino immigrants fare worse than their Asian and European peers.

The number of low-income families in America has risen by 350,000.

The EU parliament has given a prestigious human rights award to a Chinese democracy proponent, in direct rebuke to the ruling Communist regime.

The Senate is trying to get the number of foreclosures under control in exchange for the massive bailout money the banks are getting from the federal government.

A federal court is preparing to rule on the propriety of citizenship tests for voters.

In Wisconsin, the forces who care about voter suppression (Democrats) gear up to do battle against those who care more about voter fraud (Republicans).

Though it has been trying to make some reforms, the system for re-enfranchising ex-felons in Florida remains seriously broken.

The Government Accountability Office blasted the civil rights record of the USDA, saying it was unresponsive to reports of discrimination and suggesting it be brought under external oversight.

The British High Court wants to see documents which might verify whether a British Guantanamo detainee was tortured.

Civil Rights Roundup: 10/20/08

Your daily dose of civil rights and related news

The US Supreme Court will resolve a circuit split on identity theft by illegal immigrants. The question is whether aggravated identity theft requires knowledge by the user that the documents he obtains are those of a real person, as opposed to fabrications.

Immigrants with family members on both sides of the US/Mexico border are dreading increases in border fortifications, as they may interfere with simple visits to the border to share pictures, food, or just conversation together across the line.

Meanwhile, the dance between border patrol agents, and those who are waiting for their chance to make it back over, continues along the edge of the fence.

In spite of all this, immigration has been a surprisingly quiet topic on the campaign trail. The Bishop of Orlando reminds the candidates, however, that it is not an issue they'll be able to ignore once in office.

DC is switching strategies on homelessness, trying to get the homeless permanent housing first before proceeding to crack the underlying causes of their plight.

More former DOJ officials are coming out with the obvious: the Bush administration's investigations into "voter fraud" are entirely politically motivated.

Unsurprisingly, the Wall Street Journal comes out in full support of the efforts to ban affirmative action, which they describe as "the same kinds of discrimination they were designed to prevent" (right down to the lynching, no doubt). Moral relativism, anyone?

Dog bites man in Cleveland, and Black defendants in low-level drug cases are treated substantially worse than their White counterparts.

Nebraska is changing the rules on its "safe haven" law, to allow only infants up to three days old to be dropped off without penalty.

Several luminaries, including Desmund Tutu and Sandra Day O'Connor, showed up at Harvard to speak at a conference on race relations.

Steve Chapman writes for Reason Magazine that "the people", not the courts, should decide when gay people are equal human beings.

Obama Calls the ACORN Bluff

So John McCain has been crying wolf over ACORN registration fraud? Fine, says Obama, let's appoint a special prosecutor to take a look at it, along with all other allegations of voter fraud or voter suppression. The McCain campaign's response? Strident opposition, of course. It's an "absurd" attempt to "criminalize political discourse". But, the spokesman continued,

Rest assured that, despite these threats, the McCain-Palin campaign will continue to address the serious issue of voter registration fraud by ACORN and other partisan groups, and compliance by states with the Help America Vote Act's requirement of matching new voter registrations with state data bases to prevent voter fraud.

Yes -- having qualified professionals actually take a look at your allegations would be a threat when your claims are completely bogus.

Meanwhile, it is worth stressing again what this ACORN business is all about. ACORN's objective is to register as many new voters as possibly (or, depending on your level of cynicism, as many new liberal voters as possible -- it actually doesn't matter for purpose of our analysis). It pays some of its employees by the amount of registrations they collect, and some of those employees collected fraudulent registrations -- either by registering the same person multiple times, or by simply putting down false names. ACORN is legally bound, however, to turn in every registration card that it receives -- a good thing if you think they're just a left-wing front group, as it means they can't sort through the cards and chuck out all the Republicans.

But if ACORN's goal is get new (liberal) voters out there, registration fraud doesn't help them. Federal ID is required for first time voters, so even if Micky Mouse is on the rolls, he's not going to show up at the polling place, ID in hand, and cast a ballot. There is, in fact, virtually no evidence that registration fraud spills over to voter fraud. The fraud here is being committed on ACORN, who has to pay its employees for bogus registrations that don't actually help their cause.