From the Hill.

Excerpt:

The Justice Department will file a lawsuit against Texas on Thursday, arguing that the state’s voter ID law violates the Voting Rights Act.

Attorney General Eric Holder vowed to fight state voting laws that the DOJ views as unfair or in violation of federal law, despite a recent Supreme Court decision striking down a key part of the Voting Rights Act (VRA).

[…]The Texas law requires voters to produce one of the following before casting a ballot: a driver’s license, a personal ID card, a military ID card, a citizenship certificate with a photograph, a U.S. passport or a license to carry a concealed handgun.

Opponents of the law argue that it unfairly discriminates against minority voters who might not have a photo ID and might not able to obtain one easily.

Many Republicans, especially the Texas delegation, have balked at the possibility of the DOJ’s lawsuit against Texas.

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), the former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, blasted the DOJ’s decision to move against Texas.

The congressman said he talked with Holder and asked him to withdraw the lawsuit, arguing Congress should be the one to resolve discrepancies within the Voting Rights Act.

“I regret that the Department of Justice announced its intent to file a lawsuit against Texas’ Voter ID law citing Section 2 to the Voting Rights Act,” said Sensenbrenner in a statement. “Voter ID laws are an essential element in protecting the integrity of our electoral process and do not have a discriminatory intent or effect.

Some of my readers in other countries often ask me – “if Obama is such a bad President, then how come the majority of Americans voted for him”. Well, first of all, a lot of these people are simply voting for Obama in order to get a share of what their working neighbors earn. They want the government to give them money, in short. But a lot of the votes for Democrats are simply fraudulent votes. People voting twice in two different states, dead people’s names being used by fraudulent voters, etc. Voter fraud is a Democrat specialty. It’s so sacred to them that even Attorney General Eric Holder is suing anyone who tries to take away voter fraud. This is about what you would expect from an administration that facilitated the sale of weapons to drug cartels and covered up Benghazi by blaming a Youtube video.

Related posts

• Treasury Dept. IG: IRS targeted 292 Tea Party groups but only 6 progressive groups
• New study: IRS targeting of Tea Party conservatives had significant effect on 2012 election
• Federal court: Obama appointees interfered with New Black Panther prosecution
• Obama administration sues Florida for purging non-citizens from voter rolls
• College student discovers election fraud in Indiana’s 2008 primary
• Is it “racial discrimination” to ask someone for a photo ID before they vote?
• How many ACORN employees have been convicted of voter fraud this year?
• Is Obama’s Department of Justice enabling voter registration fraud?
• Department of Justice won’t purge dead or ineligible voters from roll
• ACORN employees, voter fraud and the Democrats
• Democrats will push amnesty to give 12-20 million illegal aliens citizenship

Tim M. sent me this article from the Washington Examiner.

Excerpt:

Refuting Democratic suggestions that progressive groups were also swept up in the IRS probe of the tax status of Tea Party organizations, the Treasury Department’s inspector general has revealed that just six progressive groups were targeted compared to 292 conservative groups.

In a letter to congressional Democrats, the inspector general also said that 100 percent of Tea Party groups seeking special tax status were put under IRS review, while only 30 percent of the progressive groups felt the same pressure.

The Wednesday letter to the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee punched a huge hole in Democratic claims that progressive groups were targeted as much as the Tea Party groups from May 2010-May 2012, the height of the Tea Party movement.

The letter from the Treasury Department Inspector General for Tax Administration revealed that there just weren’t many progressive groups who even sought special tax exempt status. A total of 20 sought it, and six were probed. All 292 Tea Party groups, meanwhile, were part of the IRS witchhunt.

“At this point, the evidence shows us that conservative groups were not only flagged, but targeted and abused by the IRS,” said Sarah Swinehart spokeswoman for the Ways and Means Committee.

This article was useful to me because one of my co-workers tried to tell me that progressives were targeted just as much as conservatives by the IRS. So I showed him this article. If you know any leftists who need correction, be sure and send the article along to them, too.

From the American Enterprise Institute.

Excerpt:

In a new research paper, Andreas Madestam (from Stockholm University), Daniel Shoag and David Yanagizawa-Drott (both from the Harvard Kennedy School), and I set out to find out how much impact the Tea Party had on voter turnout in the 2010 election. We compared areas with high levels of Tea Party activity to otherwise similar areas with low levels of Tea Party activity, using data from the Census Bureau, the FEC, news reports, and a variety of other sources. We found that the effect was huge: the movement brought the Republican Party some 3 million-6 million additional votes in House races. That is an astonishing boost, given that all Republican House candidates combined received fewer than 45 million votes. It demonstrates conclusively how important the party’s newly energized base was to its landslide victory in those elections, and how worried Democratic strategists must have been about the conservative movement’s momentum.

The Tea Party movement’s huge success was not the result of a few days of work by an elected official or two, but involved activists all over the country who spent the year and a half leading up to the midterm elections volunteering, organizing, donating, and rallying. Much of these grassroots activities were centered around 501(c)4s, which according to our research were an important component of the Tea Party movement and its rise.

The bottom line is that the Tea Party movement, when properly activated, can generate a huge number of votes-more votes in 2010, in fact, than the vote advantage Obama held over Romney in 2012. The data show that had the Tea Party groups continued to grow at the pace seen in 2009 and 2010, and had their effect on the 2012 vote been similar to that seen in 2010, they would have brought the Republican Party as many as 5 – 8.5 million votes compared to Obama’s victory margin of 5 million.

How far was Barack Obama willing to go to win the 2012 election?