If I were Hispanic, I would be furious with Attorney General Eric Holder and his condescending Department of Justice.
Apparently, the DOJ is of the opinion that Hispanics citizens can’t get it together to obtain an ID and present it at a polling place. That, according to the DOJ, is why the Obama administration is blocking a Texas law requiring that voters present a government- issued ID before voting.
The Washington Post reports:
“Even using the data most favorable to the state [which is calling for voter IDs], Hispanics disproportionately lack either a driver’s license or a personal identification card,” Thomas Perez, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, wrote in the letter to Keith Ingram, the director of elections for the Texas Secretary of State.
The reason states want voter ID requirements is to prevent voter fraud, and the DOJ’s voiding of the Texas law leaves doors open to elections being stolen, a particularly troubling possibility in an era of an evenly-divided electorate.
The Thomas Perez quoted by the Post is, by the way, already known to readers of J. Christian Adams’ book, Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department. In the book, Adams described Perez’s role in dismissing the case involving voter-intimidation charges against members of the New Black Panther Party, even though the case had been essentially won. Adams paints a picture of an attorney general and his DOJ that looks at everything through the prism of race.
Texas is one of the 16 states that has to get DOJ’s permission to require voter IDs because of abuses rooted in the segregated past. But it seems to me that the abuse today is looking at Hispanics and other members of minorities as people somehow unequal to the task of obtaining identification.
Of course, if you read Adams book, you will also come away with the impression that some politicians build power bases through voter fraud. Key to this fraud is the lack of an ID requirement. Texas is not trying to bring back the bad mores of the past—it is trying to protect the integrity of elections.