Freedom Line Blog

Nancy Pelosi today made the risible claim that the contempt citation against Eric Holder is part of an effort at voter suppression. What bunk. But it is true that Holder is heavily involved with the flip side of vote suppression, which is that he is deliberately taking steps that enable vote fraud, via his lawsuits against Texas, Florida, Alabama, South Carolina, etcetera, concerning voter ID and cleaning up voter rolls.

Well, here is the little-known background to all this:

It goes back to the Clinton Administration’s very first big battle — which wasn’t about health care, or energy taxes, or spending. The first battle involved the Motor Voter bill, which Democrats in Congress introduced on the very first legislative day in 1993, several weeks before Bill Clinton was inaugurated. Motor Voter was assigned to the House Administration Committee – and Louisiana Congressman Bob Livingston, the committee’s ranking Republican, had the job of deciding whether to object. I happened to be Livingston’s press secretary back then…. Livingston didn’t object to registration at drivers’-license bureaus, but he argued that other bill provisions (too numerous to list here) would promote vote fraud. Livingston’s legislative aide Tripp Funderburk had the brilliant idea to say that “Motor Voter” would better be described as “Auto Fraudo.” Using Tripp’s new catch-phrase, I started a media pushback, including a column in the Washington Times and many radio appearances for Livingston.

The pushback failed to kill the bill – but it did succeed in forcing acceptance of some anti-fraud provisions into the bill’s Section 8…. But, as reported by whistleblowers J. Christian Adams and Christopher Coates, DoJ official Julie Fernandes announced in late 2009 that the department would refuse to enforce Section 8’s anti-fraud provisions because “it has nothing to do with increasing turnout, and we are just not going to do it.” Now that Florida is doing its job to enforce it anyway, DoJ is trying to stop the state’s efforts.