Learn from the past, act for the future

The Friday Letter / #508 / Sept. 2, 2022
Updated with a typo correction at 8:32 a.m. E.T.

The debate – using the term loosely – about whether or not voters should have to prove who they are is simple to understand. One side, as Hans von Spakovsky explains in a Prager U video, wants all votes to be legitimate, meaning that the voter is a United States citizen of legal age who is registered to vote and votes only once in each election. Every vote can be traced to the person who casts it.

The other side “is primarily concerned that as many people as possible have the opportunity to vote.” Spakovsky wants to believe that these two goals are compatible, and in theory, they are. But I don't think he believes for a minute that proponents of these two disparate aims could ever actually agree that their goals are the same. They are not.

The dichotomy is explained by how we define the terms. First, it's important to understand who makes up these two groups. Anyone who can't identify the political parties these viewpoints represent would better serve the country by going back to watching “Secret Singer” and other mindless TV pap rather than vote in our sacred elections.

The side that wants as many people as possible to vote is composed of the same people who support elimination of our national borders. Proving citizenship and registration status defeats the purpose of having “as many people as possible” decide our elections.

They define laws that govern elections as “voter suppression.” Requiring proof of identification – like we do for people who visit doctors, ride on trains and airplanes, maintain bank accounts and credit cards, take part in Social Security, hold a job, own or rent a home, or stay in a hotel – is racist, because these people believe that racial minorities are too stupid to do any of these things.

Their constituents get their information from race hustlers like James Clyburn, Al Sharpton, and Maxine Waters, who feed it to state-friendly media and the state's social media partners Twitter and Facebook.

In the last couple of years some of our states have begun to improve voting security. In recent legislation, Arizona makes it clear that only United States citizens who are eligible to vote in federal elections may vote in Arizona's. This requirement is unlike New York, where foreign nationals may vote (ostensibly in local and state elections only, but we know how that scheme works).

Arizona law – passed by the Republican-controlled legislature and signed by GOP Gov. Doug Ducey – now prohibits early-voting envelopes from revealing the voter's party affiliation. This is a good move because USPS postal workers, whose union gives 100 percent of its political donations to Democrats, now have a harder time deciding which ballots to “lose.” They now have to base this strategy more on neighborhood demographics.

H.B. 2054 now requires, rather than allows, the secretary of state to compare the state's death records with the Statewide Voter Registration Database.

H.B. 2569 prohibits election jurisdictions from taking money from private parties to run their elections, such as Mark Zuckerberg's $400 million-plus grants to Democrat-controlled counties in 2020.

And H.B. 2794 prohibits election officials or anyone else to arbitrarily change any filing date or other deadline. These matters are solely decided in the Arizona State Legislature.

These and other measures are positive steps to restore honest voting in Arizona. More work is needed, including to eliminate early and mail-in balloting and replace electronic voting machines with paper ballots. As for the requirement that only U.S. Citizens may vote, that's a no-brainer. We should reserve large swaths of prison space for foreign nationals who vote or try to vote in our elections. It is an act of war whose aim is no different than that of a missile attack: to destroy the republic.

There is more good news from Arizona that preserves its new voting laws. America-hating George Soros spent millions trying to override the legislature with a ballot measure financed by his Marxist Open Society Foundation. Last Friday the state Supreme Court ruled that the petition seeking repeal of the new laws did not have enough valid signatures (It had plenty of fake ones).

“There's simply no good evidence that possessing an ID presents a hardship to voting,” von Spakovsky says in his Prager U video. “Have you ever met anyone who didn't have an ID? Anyone?”

Some states are moving in the right direction, but voters shouldn't be fooled by the hype designed to assure us everything is swell.

For all the good Florida's election reforms have brought to that state, its ID rules are still full of holes. An ID card from a neighborhood association or retirement center, even a stolen credit card or somebody else's utility bill are sufficient to get into the voting booth. Anybody incapable of pulling off an illegal vote with one of these laughable proofs has no business voting anyway. Obviously, the Florida Legislature has more work to do.

Now back to Georgia. Sorry to keep beating this one to death but Georgia is where fraud-deniers Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger claim their elections are squeaky clean.

(Kemp may regret his preposterous claim if he loses re-election to “I am the Real Governor” Stacey Abrams in this red state. Secretary of State Raffensperger deserves to lose because of his false accusation that President Trump tried to “overturn” the election.)

Since its well-documented election fraud in 2020, Georgia has made some improvements, including proof of identification to vote. But it still allows fraud-laden drop boxes, just not as many. It's a start.

“When a federal judge threw out the ACLU-led lawsuit against Georgia's in-person voter ID law, he noted that in two years of litigation, the challengers could not produce a single resident of the state unable to vote because of the new ID requirement,” Spakovsky said. He notes that the language in Georgia's absentee voting law is identical to that of the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002, which Joe Biden and 91 other Senators voted for (92-2).

Democrats and Uniparty Republicans want to keep us focused on the Mar-a-Lago raid while ignoring the unconstitutionality of Merrick Garland's general warrant and the high probability of planted evidence. (When the target's attorneys aren't allowed to observe the ransacking, anything is possible.)

Voters must stay focused on the midterm elections and press the candidates for their positions on closing the border, re-opening oil and gas production, canceling Biden's taxpayer-funded student loan giveaway to white privileged Harvard graduates, shutting down his plan to restore Iran's nuclear bomb development, overturning the Inflation Expansion Act, granting habeas corpus to Biden's political prisoners languishing in the D.C. Gulag, and impeaching the country's top embarrassments: Garland and the most buffoonish and laughably incompetent of them all, Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas.

Let Trump keep yelling about the 2020 election because even those closest to him can't or won't stop him. As we have said so many times, elections are about the future, not the past. The rest of us must help constitutional conservative candidates stay focused on things that matter.

In the news . . .

Sheriff's police in St. Tammany Parish, La., arrested a female FBI agent for beating up her live-in girlfriend, whom she calls her “wife,” on domestic battery charges, 4WWL reports. Police didn't say if Amberly Boyle, 43, was taken into custody, or whether she has been fired. Speculation: Not. . .

A Jewish student at the State University of New York at Paltz who founded a sexual assault survivor group was kicked out of the organization for supporting Israel, Campus Reform reports. The flap started last year when other members of the group accused Cassandra Blottner of “condoning imperialism and settler-colonialism.” We are curious to know if these children actually know the meaning of colonialism, or even imperialism. . .

It's no wonder he won't come out to campaign. Democrat John Fetterman, the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania who is running against Mehmet Oz for the U.S. Senate, is running a Joe Biden-style campaign – hiding in his basement and refusing to face the voters. And for good reason, The Blaze reports: He has two convicted murderers on his campaign staff. The two brothers served 27 years in state prison for knocking over a bar and shooting three people, one of them dead. They were sprung in 2020 thanks to Fetterman, who headed the commonwealth parole board.

Recommended reading

“Barr-a-Lago:
William Barr remains the defender of the deep state at its worst”
Lloyd Billingsley at American Greatness

First there was Mad Dog Mattis, then John Kelly, and likely a slew of others we outsiders aren't aware of: Trump's worst appointments, deep staters in the White House who functioned as counter-intelligence agents for the permanent governing class. Billingsley considers William Barr among the worst, if not the worst, of the lot.

Billingsley traces Barr's long history of defending FBI corruption, going back to Ruby Ridge in 1992 when an FBI sniper shot and killed unarmed Vicki Weaver while she held her infant child. Barr tried to duck responsibility, but phone records show he was directly involved in the decision to order a military-style attack on a single family. Barr described the FBI thug who ordered the hit as “careful and deliberate” in supporting his nomination as deputy FBI director by AG Janet Reno.

Excerpt:

To all but the willfully blind, the FBI is now the American KGB. And, like that organization engaged in “special tasks,” it is not exactly operating within the law. The FBI plants evidence (money planted on George Papadopoulos), fabricates evidence (Kevin Clinesmith changing the email about Carter Page), engages in stagecraft (the fake Whitmer kidnap plot), and pressures social media platforms to avoid news of Hunter Biden’s laptop, supposedly “Russian disinformation.”

“Lawyer: January 6 Clients Are Being Tortured”
Debra Heine at American Greatness

Joseph D. McBride, who represents two political prisoners locked in the D.C. Gulag without trial for their role in the January 6 (20 months ago) incident, says their treatment as a “subhuman, sub-constitutional class of people” is “the deepest part of evil.”

Making a comparison with the Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots, arson, and killings of 2020, McBride says that because of who his clients are – “mainly white, middle-class, patriotic, pro-Trump Americans – they were targeted, persecuted, and not given the constitutional protections the much more violent and destructive left-wing rioters were routinely given.”

McBride said both of his clients are often held in solitary confinement for long periods in violation of international norms, and their abuse gets worse whenever sometime speaks out.

“Legally, a pre-trial detainee in America is not allowed to be punished, never mind tortured,” McBride told Daniel Horowitz on his “Conservative Review” podcast.

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