Wednesday editorial: Pure meanness
It’s nice to get some recognition, you know? You toil in obscurity, year after year, passing one rotten, lousy, no-good, special-interest bill after another. And all you hear about how bad the Texas Legislature is, or the Florida one or the corruption in Illinois.
What is the Missouri Legislature, chopped liver? We dare you to find any other legislature that’s passed a bill more blatantly anti-consumer as Missouri House Bill 1970, now awaiting Gov. Matt Blunt’s signature. It would allow auto wholesalers to unload wrecked cars and trucks without fear of lawsuits by the saps who wind up owning them.
And then there’s HB 2279, a total surrender to Aquila, a Kansas City utility company that built a power plant in Cass County even though a court said it couldn’t. Actual Senate debate:
Sen. Joan Bray, D-University City: “It’s OK to have broken the law, that’s what we’re saying?”
Sen. Kevin Engler, R-Farmington: “Correct.”
But at last, our Missouri Legislature is getting its due. The issue that did it is voter ID, the proposed constitutional amendment to require would-be voters to present a photo identification. As we’ve said until we’re blue in the face, there is no — none, zero, nada — evidence that any voter impersonation ever has taken place in Missouri. This law merely is an attempt to suppress the votes of poor, elderly and disabled Missourians who don’t have drivers licenses or state ID cards.
This week, Art Levine, a columnist for The HuffingtonPost.com called Missouri’s proposed law “one of the country’s most draconian voter ID requirements.” The New York Times editorial board called the bill a solution to a “made-up problem” and said the bill could “pose a serious threat to democracy and should be stopped.”
Rep. Stan Cox, R-Sedalia, the sponsor of the voter ID resolution, is getting some national press. So is Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, a Democrat who is leading the opposition. The voter ID debate may even lead to a meltdown (we can only hope) in the state Senate if Republicans move to close off debate.
All of this, remember, over a bill that solves a problem that doesn’t exist and will deny the vote to many of the state’s least advantaged citizens. It’s the political equivalent of deliberately swerving a car to run over squirrels and turtles. Pure meanness.
NYT doesn’t like it
Huffington Puffington doesn’t like it
Our Post doesn’t like it.
Must be pretty good then.
This is all about saving the Democratic Party through allowing the city machines to continue the long practice of ‘vote early vote often.’Everybody knows that w/o the huge kick from the City of St. Louis no Democrat would ever be elected to statewide office again. Cut the City back to legal and identified voters and Puffff! goes the Democrats.
Pure meanness? Pure meanness that the City pols would not get to ‘elect’ their guy over the voters in the rest of the state. No more!
Pure meanness? Pure meanness, that the Post no longer sets the agenda in the state. Sorry…
Nearly a quarter of a million qualified Missouri voters will lose their right to vote as guaranteed under the Missouri Constitution since 1821. The only reason proffered is “fraud” for which no proof is given.
I assert that a Missouri Constitutional provision which has the direct impact of imposing additional costs and burdens upon voters for the free exercise of their franchise is an indirect poll tax in violation of the Fifth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution.
Since there is plenty of evidence of voter registration fraud conducted by ACORN, would those same papers, the NY Slimes, the Huffington Windbags, and the Post Disgrace, agree that ACORN is a criminal organization engaged in systematic voter fraud?
Hey guys, you didn’t even mention how purely mean it is that the parasites and phantoms can’t register and vote at the McDonalds drive thru. I sincerely hope that this reasonable bill passes and becomes law. Then I would like to see the PD honestly report when no LEGAL voter is denied their voting “franchise” because of inability to identify themselves. None, zero, nada –
Great, now you are quoting Huffington as a source. First our lefi-wing Secretary of State, Robin Carnahan, the most reversed woman in the world on ballot language, writes for Huffington, now the Post uses its sewage to support an argument. No fruad? Have any of you ever worked at the polls? I worked in North County a few years ago as a poll watcher. When I got there, the woman in charge had allowed some liberal group to escort voters to the booths, they had democrat sample ballots taped up in the booths. The head poll judge told me, “well they seemed so helpful.” They were letting people vote who were not even listed in the books. I challenged several hundred people who were not listed, but said they lived in the precinct and who the people in charge wanted to let vote. These people got to vote provisionally, so, if they were legitimate their vote would have counted, I doubt many, if any were. It was so bad, that some judges quit halfway through the day. When I called the Republican officials, they said, “that’s just the way it is, do the best you can.” No wonder Democrats don’t want any accountability. It is not an imposition to require people who want to vote to obtain a picture ID. This is all about perpetuating voter fraud, not about taking away someone’s vote.
No evidence of voter impersonation in Missouri, none, zero, nada?
The problem of course is that the impersonator signs in, votes and leaves the polling place in minutes, without a trace. The perfect crime.
Thanks for your comments, “flyover”. My experiences as a pollwatcher in the 2006 elections were virtually the same. Voter fraud aided and abetted by two election officials (a Democrat and a nominal Republican, evident old cronies with a common and malicious purpose).
Pure meanness? Try pure BS. Not a single citizen will be “burdened” or denied the right to vote under the voter ID proposal and the PD knows it. They also know there have been dozens if not hundreds of cases of vote fraud documented recently. They’ll never admit it, but they know it.
PS: Regarding the PDs latest trend of pulling stories from the fever swamps that are hyper-partisan liberal blogs, if you think that’s going to increase readership, think again. The people you want to attract and who are likely to agree with your generally vacuous editorials have already seen or heard the same thing in a dozen other places. If the PD is serious about gaining new readers, it should try writing something original.
It isn’t the political equivalent of running over squirrels and turtles, it’s the political equivalent of keeping poisonous snakes out of a daycare center. What could be more offensive to those who value the right to vote than the prospect of voter fraud? What could be more respectful of the right to vote than a step to reduce that possibility?
Unfortunately, if you’re a Democrat, it’s more important to allow urban polling places to stuff the ballot box so that statewide candidates can overcome the suburban and rural vote. Democrats don’t care about voters or the constitution, they care about winning, at any cost.
Let the voter id law apply to everywhere other than the city of St Louis.
Don’t count the federal votes that come out of the city, that way acorn, the PD are happy and the cesspool that is the city remains under control of the machine of politics.