Attorney General Eric Holder put a lump of coal in South Carolina’s Christmas stocking on Dec. 23 when he objected to the state’s new voter ID law. By ignoring inconvenient facts and clear legal precedent, Holder showed once again that politics and ideology—not the rule of law—drive his law enforcement decisions. Given the power of the Justice Department and its potential for abuse, this should worry all Americans, particularly when that abuse has the potential to affect the outcome of next year’s election. South Carolina passed a voter ID law …
Brushing aside criticism that it is savaging religious liberty and some of the most reliable social services in the District of Columbia, the D.C. City Council today is set to approve a bill to end the protected status of traditional marriage. The collision between the redefinition of marriage and religious liberty is being closely followed – and now more attention is being devoted to the collision between that redefinition and the traditional understanding of civil rights. A new column over the weekend by Johns Hopkins graduate student Taylor Harris makes …
The Washington Time’s lead story today is about the Justice Department’s objection to a change of elections in Kinston, North Carolina. Why is this an important story? Because it is another worrisome sign of how the Holder Civil Rights Division is using the Voting Rights Act to benefit a political party instead of to protect voters. Kinston is a majority black town, and in November of 2008 its citizens voted 2 to 1 to change their city council elections from partisan to nonpartisan. It is also a one party town …
Support for school choice in Washington, D.C. continues to grow. The latest national voice to call for saving the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program is MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. Check out this Hardball interview with RNC Chairman Michael Steele: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFUyqr6QsFY[/youtube] Mr. Matthews says: “These opportunity scholarships should be maintained.” Later in the interview, Mr. Matthews makes an interesting point about how the opportunity to attend a private school made a big difference in the life of Judge Sotomayor: “Cardinal Spellman high school is one of the reasons why this woman, Sotomayor got …
In a decision that was virtually unnoticed in the media (imagine the stories if the holding had been different), the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the constitutionality of Georgia’s voter ID law on January 14 in Common Cause v. Handel. A three-judge panel compared the requirement for a voter to show a photo ID to the modern “burden of air travel in contemporary society.” Before you can board an airplane, you have to present to a federal official an identification card with a photograph. As the Court said, the …
