With the President’s approval rating averages now falling below the levels of Richard Nixon, defenders of the administration, particularly Attorney General Eric Holder, have resorted to divisive tactics in an attempt to dismiss such widespread disapproval. Case-in-point, last week the Attorney General took to ABC News to declare that, in his judgment, a great number of his and the President’s detractors are motivated by “racial animus.” In other words, according to Eric Holder, the only reason the President’s approval ratings are in the tank is because too many Americans are simply still racists at heart. Such divisive and dishonest tactics are nothing short of shameful, as they seek to revive the ugly politics of race to avoid a substantive discussion of national policy. Doubling down on the politics of race, the Attorney General didn’t stop with suggesting that the administration’s falling approval ratings are due in part to “racial animus;” he went after voter ID laws, claiming that they are advanced by Republicans only to disenfranchise minority voters.
The general assertion that the President’s political opponents are motivated by race doesn’t even warrant a response, as any rational person can clearly see that such allegations are an attempt to delegitimize serious critics of the administration’s policies. As to voter ID laws being tools of voter disenfranchisement, let’s take a look at some statistics. To claim that voter ID laws are about returning America to an era of voter disenfranchisement is woefully wrong. Nevertheless, even President Obama himself has asserted as much in his speeches. In a 2012 campaign speech the President said that “The right to vote is threatened today in a way that it has not been since the Voting Rights Act was passed in to law nearly five decades ago…The real voter fraud is people trying to deny our rights by making voting harder in the first place.”
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Such speeches by the leader of the free world are not only inappropriate; they are clearly an attempt to rewrite history as it is being made. In every single state where voter ID laws have been passed, minority voters have gone to the polls in at least the same levels as in previous elections, and in most states African American and Hispanic voters have turned-out in much higher numbers after voter ID laws were implemented. That’s because voter ID laws protect the legitimacy of the electoral process, thus ensuring that every single voter has a chance to cast a ballot. Far from being a tool of twenty-first century would-be segregationists, voter ID laws protect all voters – regardless of race or gender- as they make it harder for a criminal to cast a ballot using the name of a legally registered voter. Voter ID laws impose no tax, exact no penalty, and deny no registered voter the right to cast a ballot; they simply ensure that the person casting a ballot is who they say that they are on their voter registration card.
In spite of the political games the President and his team are playing with voter ID, most Americans understand what such laws are really all about: free and fair elections. In fact, seven out of 10 (70%) registered voters across the country support voter ID laws, which they believe will alleviate election fraud and further legitimize the democratic process in our free republic. The supermajorities of Americans who support voter ID laws include 91% of Republicans, 56% of Democrats, and approximately 66% of independents. From a race and gender standpoint, over 50% of African-Americans and nearly 60% of Hispanic voters support voter ID laws. There is not one single demographic group in this country of which less than 50% have supported voter ID laws in recently conducted polls.
The only reason the far left tries to revive the ghost of poll taxes and voter disenfranchisement to try and scuttle voter ID laws is that they know most Americans view such laws as common sense. If Americans know what voter ID laws are really all about, they support them by strong majorities. For that reason, a Democratic Party that has become all-too-comfortable with Mickey Mouse casting his ballot 100 times in every election in Chicago cannot have such common sense prevail. Voter ID protects every voter, denies no voter the chance to vote, and maintains the dignity of the electoral process.
Let’s don’t allow desperate politicians like Eric Holder to paint a sinister image of something that makes so much sense for all of our citizens.
