Holder's Jim Crow Politics
The AG says Voter ID laws are 'poll taxes.'
The Wall Street Journal
July 10, 2012, 7:22 p.m. ET
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304022004577519202610207274.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Some of our liberal friends were a tad upset when we wrote last month that Attorney General Eric Holder was using the voter ID issue to stir up racial incitement. But maybe they should complain to Mr. Holder, who can't seem to liberate himself from a Jim Crow-era political mindset.
Speaking to the NAACP in Houston on Tuesday, Mr. Holder assailed the Texas law that requires voters to show some identification, using terms redolent of Deep South racism before the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. "Many of those without IDs would have to travel great distances to get them—and some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them," he said. "We call those poll taxes."
The nation's first black Attorney General knows exactly what he is doing by citing the fee that some Southern states used after Reconstruction to disenfranchise blacks. Poll taxes were made illegal by the 24th Amendment in 1964. Yet faced with the prospect of a close re-election battle, and fading support from independents, Team Obama is trying to rekindle its 2008 coalition by using the race card to drive up black voter turnout. Texas and Florida, both with GOP Governors, are the election-year foil.
Mr. Holder knows his charge is buncombe. The Texas law stipulates that voters can use several kinds of ID to vote, including a driver's license, passport, a U.S. military ID and (this being Texas) a handgun permit. As for the "poll tax" canard, the law says the Texas Department of Public Safety will issue a free Election Identification Card if requested.
The AG knows all this, or should know it, because it is contained in a January 12 letter from the Texas Director of Elections to the Justice Department. He also knows, or should know before he throws around racially incendiary language, that the poll tax charge was raised and rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court when it upheld a similar Indiana voter ID law in 2009. The charge was also rejected by a lower federal court in Georgia.
Mr. Holder's wallowing in a Jim Crow metaphor to score political points is a discredit to his department, to the rule of law, and to the nonracist country that 45 years after the Voting Rights Act made him its chief law enforcement officer.
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