OBAMA'S DEPT. of JUSTICE GETS OUT THE LA RAZA VOTE!
THE LA RAZA DEMS ARE DETERMINED THAT THEIR LA RAZA PARTY BASE OF ILLEGALS NEED NOT BE BOTHERED WITH HAVING TO PULL OUT OF THEIR POCKETS ONE OF THEIR FRAUDULENT I.D’s TO VOTE!
THERE IS NO LEGAL PERSON IN THIS COUNTRY THAT CAN GO INTO A BANK FOR A TRANSACTION, AND CLAIM THEY DON’T HAVE ANY, AND SUCH A REQUEST IS RACIST, ANTI-IMMIGRANT, OR VIOLATES MEXICO’S RIGHT TO VOTE IN OUR BORDERS!
THERE IS A REASON WHY OBAMA’S ADMIN IS INFESTED WITH LA RAZA SUPREMACIST! THERE IS A REASON WHY OBAMA HAS MET REPEATEDLY WITH THE LA RAZA PARTY, AND REFERRED TO AMERICANS (LEGALS) AS “OUR ENEMIES”… IT’S ALL ABOUT HISPANDERING FOR THE ILLEGALS’ VOTES!
IT IS THE OBAMA DEPT of JUSTICE THAT HAS SUED FOUR (4) STATES ON BEHALF OF HIS LA RAZA PARTY BASE!
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This year, more than a dozen states enacted new voting restrictions. For example, eight — Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin — imposed new laws requiring voters to present state-issued photo identification cards.
December 13, 2011
Holder Speech to Fault New Restrictions in Voting Laws
AUSTIN, Tex. — Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is expected to enter the turbulent political waters of voting rights on Tuesday, signaling that the Justice Department will take an aggressive stance in reviewing new laws in several states that civil rights advocates say are meant to dampen minority participation in the national elections next year.
The speech could inflame a smoldering partisan dispute over race and ballot access just as the 2012 campaign cycle intensifies. It comes as the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is scrutinizing a series of new state voting laws that were enacted — largely by Republican officials — in the name of fighting fraud.
Mr. Holder is to speak Tuesday evening here at the presidential library of Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The act enables the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to object to election laws and practices on the grounds that they would disproportionately deter minority groups from voting, and to go to court to block states from implementing them.
Mr. Holder, in a draft of his speech, declares that protecting ballot access for all eligible voters “must be viewed not only as a legal issue but as a moral imperative,” and urges Americans to “call on our political parties to resist the temptation to suppress certain votes in the hope of attaining electoral success and, instead, achieve success by appealing to more voters.”
Mr. Holder is also expected to lay out a case for a sweeping overhaul of election systems that would “reform them in ways that encourage, not limit, participation,” including automatically registering all eligible voters; barring state legislators from gerrymandering their own districts; and a bill — expected to be introduced Wednesday in the Senate by two Democrats, Charles E. Schumer of New York and Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland — that would create a federal statute prohibiting the dissemination of fraudulent information to deceive eligible voters into not voting.
Mr. Holder’s remarks come against the backdrop of a huge turnout of young and minority voters in the 2008 election that helped propel President Obama to victory. In the 2010 election, when voting by such groups dropped off and enthusiasm among Republican-leaning voters surged, Republicans won sweeping victories, winning or expanding control of many state legislatures and governorships.
This year, more than a dozen states enacted new voting restrictions. For example, eight — Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin — imposed new laws requiring voters to present state-issued photo identification cards. Previously voters were able to use other forms of identification, like bank statements, utility bills and Social Security cards.
Proponents of such restrictions — mostly Republicans — say they are necessary to prevent voter fraud that could cancel out the choices of legitimate participants in an election. Opponents — mostly Democrats — say there is no evidence of meaningful levels of fraud and contend that the measures are a veiled effort to suppress participation by eligible voters who lean Democratic.
The Justice Department is reviewing the new laws in South Carolina and Texas requiring voters to present photo ID cards. It has sought information from the states about the racial breakdown of the group of eligible voters who do not currently have such identification to see whether the rule would disproportionately deter minorities from voting.
Mr. Holder is also set to single out litigation with Florida over a new state law restricting the availability of early voting — including banning it on the Sunday before Election Day, when black churches had traditionally followed services with get-out-the-vote efforts. It also imposed new rules on groups that conduct voter registration drives, including fining them each time a volunteer does not turn in a voter registration form within 48 hours. That section has prompted the League of Women Voters to stop registering new voters in Florida.
Florida, South Carolina and Texas are among 16 jurisdictions that must, under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, receive “pre-clearance” from the federal government for any changes to their election laws because of their history of suppressing minority voting. They bear the burden of proving that their changes will not disproportionately prevent minority groups from voting — even if there was no discriminatory intent.
“Although I cannot go into detail about the ongoing review of these and other state-law changes, I can assure you that it will be thorough — and fair,” Mr. Holder says in the draft of his speech.
He was also set to quote with approval a speech by Representative John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat and longtime civil rights activist, who recently declared that voting rights were “under attack” in “a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process.”
Such concerns, Mr. Holder is expected to add, include “some of the state-level voting law changes we’ve seen this legislative season.”
The speech comes at a time when Mr. Holder has been a popular target for Republicans, most recently because of a disputed gun-trafficking investigation called Fast and Furious, and his speech seemed likely to heighten partisan frictions over his tenure.
Robert Driscoll, who served in the civil rights division in the administration of George W. Bush, said that many claims about the racial impact of “ballot integrity” laws, like a requirement to present photo identification, were “overblown.”
“Most ballot integrity measures are race-neutral and have nothing to do with racial discrimination,” he said, adding that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act “was essential for several decades, but this shows why to a large extent Section 5 has outlived its usefulness and has become just a tool to federalize state and local election laws.”
In 2008, the Supreme Court upheld an Indiana law requiring voters to present photo ID cards, ruling that the state’s interest in preventing fraud outweighed the burdens the law placed on voters. That case, however, was based on the Constitution’s equal-protection clause and did not address the different standards imposed by the Voting Rights Act.
In 2009, the Supreme Court said that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, despite its “undeniable” historic importance, “now raises serious constitutional concerns” because it intrudes on states rights. However, it declined to strike down the law.
There are five pending lawsuits asking the court to strike it law down. But the draft of Mr. Holder’s speech argues that the protections in the act were still necessary — pointing, among other things, to a legal dispute over a recent Texas redistricting plan that the Justice Department has said was designed to minimize the voting power of the state’s growing Hispanic population.
Civil rights groups have also urged the Justice Department to use another part of the Voting Rights Act, Section 2, to file lawsuits against other states that are not covered by Section 5. That section also bans election practices that have a discriminatory impact, even if there is no evidence of intentional discrimination.
John Payton, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who was set to attend Mr. Holder’s speech, said it was “really important that he bring the powers that he has to bear on this challenge to our democracy.”
Mr. Payton added that “we have not seen this much action that will have the effect of limiting people’s ability to vote” since the Voting Rights Act was signed.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 13, 2011
A previous version of this article misstated when Robert Driscoll worked for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division; it was in the administration of George W. Bush, not Ronald Reagan’s. (And a previous correction misstated that it was the elder George Bush’s administration.)
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OBAMA'S AMERICA FLIES THE LA RAZA FLAG!
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
from the May 28, 2009 By Lawrence Harrison
What will America stand for in 2050?
The US should think long and hard about the high number of Latino immigrants.
Palo Alto, Calif.
President Obama has encouraged Americans to start laying a new foundation for the country – on a number of fronts. He has stressed that we'll need to have the courage to make some hard choices. One of those hard choices is how to handle immigration. The US must get serious about the tide of legal and illegal immigrants, above all from Latin America.
It's not just a short-run issue of immigrants competing with citizens for jobs as unemployment approaches 10 percent or the number of uninsured straining the quality of healthcare. Heavy immigration from Latin America threatens our cohesiveness as a nation.
The political realities of the rapidly growing Latino population are such that Mr. Obama may be the last president who can avert the permanent, vast underclass implied by the current Census Bureau projection for 2050.
Do I sound like a right-wing "nativist"? I'm not. I'm a lifelong Democrat; an early and avid supporter of Obama. I'm gratified by his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. I'm also the grandson of Eastern European Jewish immigrants; and a member, along with several other Democrats, of the advisory boards of the Federation for American Immigration Reform and Pro English. Similar concerns preoccupied the distinguished Democrat Barbara Jordan when she chaired the congressionally mandated US Commission on Immigration Reform in the 1990s.
Congresswoman Jordan was worried about the adverse impact of high levels of legal and illegal immigration on poor citizens, disproportionately Latinos and African-Americans. The principal beneficiaries of our current immigration policy are affluent Americans who hire immigrants at substandard wages for low-end work. Harvard economist George Borjas estimates that American workers lose $190 billion annually in depressed wages caused by the constant flooding of the labor market at the low-wage end.
The healthcare cost of the illegal workforce is especially burdensome, and is subsidized by taxpayers. To claim Medicaid, you must be legal, but as the Health and Human Services inspector general found, 47 states allow self-declaration of status for Medicaid. Many hospitals and clinics are going broke because of the constant stream of uninsured, many of whom are the estimated 12 million to 15 million illegal immigrants. This translates into reduced services, particularly for lower-income citizens.
The US population totaled 281 million in 2000. About 35 million, or 12.5 percent, were Latino. The Census Bureau projects that our population will reach 439 million in 2050, a 56 percent increase over the 2000 census. The Hispanic population in 2050 is projected at 133 million – 30 percent of the total and almost quadruple the 2000 level. Population growth is the principal threat to the environment via natural resource use, sprawl, and pollution. And population growth is fueled chiefly by immigration.
Consider what this, combined with worrisome evidence that Latinos are not melting into our cultural mainstream, means for the US. Latinos have contributed some positive cultural attributes, such as multigenerational family bonds, to US society. But the same traditional values that lie behind Latin America's difficulties in achieving democratic stability, social justice, and prosperity are being substantially perpetuated among Hispanic-Americans.
Prominent Latin Americans have concluded that traditional values are at the root of the region's development problems. Among those expressing that opinion: Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa; Nobelist author Octavio Paz, a Mexican; Teodoro Moscoso, a Puerto Rican politician and US ambassador to Venezuela; and Ecuador's former president, Osvaldo Hurtado.
Latin America's cultural problem is apparent in the persistent Latino high school dropout rate – 40 percent in California, according to a recent study – and the high incidence of teenage pregnancy, single mothers, and crime. The perpetuation of Latino culture is facilitated by the Spanish language's growing challenge to English as our national language. It makes it easier for Latinos to avoid the melting pot and for education to remain a low priority, as it is in Latin America – a problem highlighted in recent books by former New York City deputy mayor Herman Badillo, a Puerto Rican, and Mexican-Americans Lionel Sosa and Ernesto Caravantes.
Language is the conduit of culture. Consider: There is no word in Spanish for "compromise" (compromiso means "commitment") nor for "accountability," a problem that is compounded by a verb structure that converts "I dropped (broke, forgot) something" into "it got dropped" ("broken," "forgotten").
As the USAID mission director during the first two years of the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, I had difficulty communicating "dissent" to a government minister at a crucial moment in our efforts to convince the US Congress to approve a special appropriation for Nicaragua.
I was later told by a bilingual, bicultural Nicaraguan educator that when I used "dissent" what my Nicaraguan counterparts understood was "heresy." "We are, after all, children of the Inquisition," he added.
In a letter to me in 1991, Mexican-American columnist Richard Estrada described the essence of the problem of immigration as one of numbers. We should really worry, he wrote, "when the numbers begin to favor not only the maintenance and replenishment of the immigrants' source culture, but also its overall growth, and in particular growth so large that the numbers not only impede assimilation but go beyond to pose a challenge to the traditional culture of the American nation."
Obama should confront the challenges by enforcing immigration laws on employment to help end illegal immigration. We should calibrate legal immigration annually to (1) the needs of the economy, as Ms. Jordan urged, and (2) past performance of immigrant groups with respect to acculturation.
We must declare our national language to be English and discourage the proliferation of Spanish- language media. We should limit citizenship by birth to the offspring of citizens. And we should provide immigrants with easy-to-access educational services that facilitate acculturation, including English language, citizenship, and American values.
Lawrence Harrison directs the Cultural Change Institute at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, in Medford, Mass. He is the author of "The Central Liberal Truth: How Politics Can Change A Culture And Save It From Itself."
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