Democrats Lie About Lying About Voter ID

Democrats Were Against Voter ID and Now They're OK With It ...
Whatever Serves Their Political Purposes

EDITORIAL

June 23, 2021 | Washington Examiner

Let’s not sugarcoat this: For decades, Democratic politicians and their enablers in the media cartel have flat-out lied when claiming it is racist to require voters to provide proof of their identities.

A sudden about-face on the issue by Democratic leaders shows the allegation was a cynical, race-baiting falsehood all along.

The change occurred when Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia said he could support the so-called John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act if Democrats would amend it in several ways, including voter ID requirements to cast a ballot.

The bill would allow federal bureaucrats to supersede state sovereignty over election practices, thus forcing procedural changes expected to benefit Democrats.

The John Lewis Act contains numerous jokers in the deck worthy of separate analysis. Those jokers are seen as so helpful to Democrats that party leaders, knowing Manchin is a key swing vote, are happy to embrace Manchin’s voter ID demand to gain his support for the overall package. For years, Democrats found voter ID requirements an easy target for cheap charges of racism. Now that requiring voter ID helps them accomplish their larger political goals, they pretend it was never a big deal.

In 2014, then-President Barack Obama blasted voter ID laws as a serious barrier to black voters. Now, he endorses Manchin’s “compromise” measure that would include an ID requirement.

What changed? Naked political calculation.

In 2018, Georgia’s wannabe governor, Stacey Abrams, said voter ID laws are intended to “scare people out of voting." Now, she audaciously says, “No one has ever objected to having to prove who you are to vote. It's been part of our nation's history since the inception of voting.”

For years, then-Pastor Raphael Warnock, now a senator from Georgia, claimed ID laws were a form of “voter suppression” so “unnecessary and unjustifiable” that they amount to “dismember[ing]” Martin Luther King Jr.

Now he lies, “I have never been opposed to voter ID. And in fact, I don’t know anybody who is.”

On goes the roster of Democrats and leftist groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union who opposed voter-ID laws as “part of an ongoing strategy to roll back decades of progress on voting rights.” The most recent Democratic summary sheet for the John Lewis Act repeatedly names voter ID laws as a chief example of the supposedly nefarious practices it aims to combat.

Now that they see what Manchin sees — the public supports voter ID despite the Left’s decades of scaremongering against it — they are finally willing to jettison the claims they knew were meretricious all along. They knew that even liberal Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens led the way in pronouncing voter ID fully constitutional as a legitimate interest in preventing vote fraud. They knew former President Jimmy Carter, hardly a racist, led a Commission on Federal Election Reform that embraced voter ID.

They knew long ago states that implemented ID laws tended to see minority voting participation rise, not fall. And they knew that even honest liberal outlets acknowledge major studies repeatedly show “state ID laws don’t stop voters.”

Still, until about a week ago, they kept throwing out false charges anyway because they thought the lies served their political purposes.

In doing so, they pushed a fiction for decades insulting to black people. The fiction was that blacks are somehow too helpless to secure any acceptable forms of ID and too frightened to show identification at the polls. They also pushed the noxious narrative that the United States remains so racist that blacks rightly fear authorities or vigilantes will terrorize them for showing enough identification to vote.

Well, nine years ago, a centrist, black, Democratic former U.S. representative from Alabama, Artur Davis, made a series of speeches belittling these lies. Holding up a valid driver’s license, Davis would say, recalling violent civil rights battles of the past, that “this is not a billy club. This is not a fire hose. ... This is not Jim Crow. … This tiny little thing that doesn’t wound, that has no sharp edges.”

He added, “To call photo ID a degradation of human rights is not only something that is so fundamentally wrong but is something my parents would not even recognize. ... That [claim that ID requirements violate human rights] is the old tactic of telling us the very opposite of what is true.”

Davis was right. Now that national Democrats effectively admit as much, will they apologize for their years of race-hustling humbug?