The Racists of the DMV.

I never knew a driver’s license could be racist. I mean, it’s just a laminated piece of paper, right? It has no will of it’s own. No sentient thoughts. No opinions. But to hear the Democrats tell it, ANY Photo ID is a racist thing. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. Apparently forcing you to show a photo ID to vote is racist. Um…I’m confused. Why is this, exactly? 

After the Civil War, Slavery was abolished. (In our neo-revisionist history, you’d think that slavery was the ONLY reason the North and South fought. That’s not true. There were many reasons for the war, and slavery was one of the big ones. But making the Civil War only about slavery makes for a simpler, “sound-byte” narrative. And it allows those who want or need it to characterize every caucasian in the South as a racist. But I digress.) Immediately after the Civil War, freed slaves suddenly had a lot of new rights, among them, the right to vote. There were lot of whites back then that were scared to death that blacks would suddenly have voting rights. (A majority of these people were actually Democrats, but that’s been swept under the political rug, and somehow the GOP gets the blame for this one.) Democrats pushed through the so-called “Jim Crow laws” which set financial, educational, and social barriers to voting. They designed these laws to block blacks from participating in elections. Now lets be accurate here: there were a lot of people in both parties that were intimidated by the idea of black voters. But the majority of the Jim Crow laws were invented by and promoted by the Democrats. This from Wikipedia:

in the 1880s, but the establishment Democrats were passing laws to make voter registration and electoral rules more restrictive, with the result that political participation by most blacks and many poor whites began to decrease. Between 1890 and 1910, ten of the eleven former Confederate states, starting with Mississippi, passed new constitutions or amendments that effectively disfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites through a combination of poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, and residency and record-keeping requirements. Grandfather clauses temporarily permitted some illiterate whites to vote.

What was the result of these laws? Read on:

Voter turnout dropped drastically through the South as a result of such measures. For example, Alabama had tens of thousands of poor whites disfranchised. In Louisiana, by 1900, black voters were reduced to 5,320 on the rolls, although they comprised the majority of the state’s population. By 1910, only 730 blacks were registered, less than 0.5 percent of eligible black men. “In 27 of the state’s 60 parishes, not a single black voter was registered any longer; in 9 more parishes, only one black voter was.” The cumulative effect in North Carolina meant that black voters were completely eliminated from voter rolls during the period from 1896-1904. The growth of their thriving middle class was slowed. In North Carolina and other Southern states, there were also the effects of invisibility: “[W]ithin a decade of disfranchisement, the white supremacy campaign had erased the image of the black middle class from the minds of white North Carolinians.”

Those who could not vote were not eligible to serve on juries and could not run for local offices. They effectively disappeared from political life, as they could not influence the state legislatures, and their interests were overlooked. While public schools had been established by Reconstruction legislatures for the first time in most Southern states; those for black children were consistently underfunded compared to schools for white children, even when considered within the strained finances of the postwar South. The decreasing price of cotton kept the agricultural economy at a low.

Wow. So there was an economic cost to all this, as well as making blacks invisible, politically. And it was the Democrats behind it. Interesting.

In 1964, with the prodding of LBJ, the country passed the landmark Civil Rights Act, followed the next year by the Voting Rights Act, two bills that effectively ended both segregation and the Jim Crow laws that prevented blacks from participating in our democratic elections. Oh, and it was the Republicans in the South that gave LBJ this victory. The Southern Democrats voted solidly against this. Guys like U.S. Senator Robert C. Byrd weren’t just against voting rights (and civil rights) for blacks. He was a member of the KKK!

Now let’s fast-forward to 2008. Across the country we hear reports of voter fraud. A “community organizing” group known by the acronym ACORN registered tens of thousands of voters, who vote without actually existing. They add names like “Mickey Mouse” and “Donald Duck” to the voting roles, names that uniformly vote Democrat for some crazy reason. ACORN gets caught red-handed, and authorities prosecute the organization in cities across America.

I think it was Stalin who said something like “It doesn’t matter who votes, it matters who COUNTS the votes.” Yep. And in areas of the country where Democrats hold key offices, they choose to give ACORN a pass. But the damage is done. Sort of. ACORN’ (which turns out to be a subsidiary of the SEIU Labor Union, both organizations with direct ties to Obama) decides to  “disband.” In reality, ACORN simply changes names, and reforms, to cause more mischief at the polls.

All this is pretty distressing to those who want clean elections. Several states pass laws that require some form of picture identification, in order to eliminate (or at least reduce) voter fraud. Without requiring a photo ID, committing voter fraud is actually pretty easy. WITH a requirement to show a photo ID, someone who wants to  submit a fraudulent vote actually has to forge a photo ID, which makes things exponentially more difficult for the one committing the fraud.

Now lest you believe that, by requiring a photo ID to vote means a return to the Jim Crow laws of 100 years ago, understand that the poor, the elderly, and the homeless can all get photo IDs of some kind, most of them for either free or for a ridiculously small fee. We’re not talkin’ a requirement for a Passport, which would set you back several hundred clams. (Although, as a government identification document, it should be legal proof of your identity virtually anywhere.) A driver’s license would do it. So would the kind of identity card issued by the DMVs across the country for those who can’t drive. My dad had one of those, after he grew too ill to drive. I don’t recall them charging ANYTHING for the renewal. According to what I’ve learned online, a state-issued card in Louisiana is a whopping $21. And let’s remember that you have to have a photo ID card to qualify for food stamps, unemployment, welfare, and any number of other things, like buying cigarettes or liquor.  So is it really a hardship on anybody, forcing them to obtain a photo ID? I can’t see how. And if the Democrats are so bloody concerned with it, why don’t they spend a bit of their war chest on helping prospective Democrat voters to obtain photo IDs legally, instead of fighting the Voter ID laws?

Simple. They don’t like Voter ID laws because they are very effective in stopping voter fraud. If you can’t have dead people, pets, and imaginary friends voting, you can’t steal elections. And if you can’t steal an election, Obama’s gonna lose that lovely home office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, come January.

The Left isn’t just turning the full force of Obama’s Justice Department and that noted champion for Justice for All, Attorney General Eric Holder on the case. (New slogan for the Justice Department: “Justice for Just Us.“) Nope. They are also using groups like SEIU and George Soros-funded special interest groups to intimidate corporations who support the Voter ID laws into dropping their support. Coca-Cola folded like a cheap suit in less than 24 hours after these groups announced a boycott. As of this writing, Walmart is standing tough. Let’s hope that continues.

I really want SOMEbody on the Left to explain to me how forcing people to present a photo ID to vote is racist. Seriously. Drop the hyperbole, people, and explain to me how this disenfranchises ANYbody. Please. I want to understand.

I think it makes perfect sense that useful idiots like Maxine Waters and Al Sharpton would come out swinging against Voter ID laws. And attack dogs like Debbie Wasserman Schultz (dog in more ways than one – have you taken a look at that harpie?) are naturally gonna foam at the fangs over Voter ID regulations. (She might even get disqualified – I don’t think a dog license qualifies as a legal ID.) If the ObamaNation is successful in thwarting the will of the States who’ve passed Voter ID laws, they’ll be big winners in local, state and national elections there. It might even help them keep both houses of Congress, and (perish the thought) keep the White House for the next four years. But if they do succeed in overturning these laws, there will be two big losers as well, aside from the Republicans: We the People and Democracy.

If you care about either, now’s the time to take a stand.