Kudos to Rep. Artur Davis, D-AL, for his questioning of John Tanner, who was nominated by the Bush administration to head up the DOJ Civil Rights Division's Office overseeing voting rights. You may recall that Tanner had made some prior comments about how supposedly voter ID laws actually benefited minorities at the expense of white voters.
Recall that this voter ID B.S. is now the current Rovian tactic for excluding eligible voters from casting a ballot. This tactic principally affects minorities who tend to vote the Democratic ticket, but are also less likely to have photo ID--both the elderly and the young. The supposed justification for such laws--the most egregious of which is currently on the books in Georgia--is to prevent "voter fraud." Bizarrely, the current conservative talking point on this issue is that somehow "illegal aliens" are casting votes in droves. Not only is this "issue" fabricated out of whole cloth, with no support whatsoever, but it doesn't even make sense: after all, if you give it but a second's though, immigrants who came to the US illegally would not risk deportation by engaging in such a scheme. The natural reaction of a person in that situation is to avoid all encounters with legal authority. How much would it cost to get a "day laborer" to walk into a polling place and attempt to cast a vote? I would venture to say that it would cost so much for one vote that it would be prohibitive--even assuming you could find willing takers among them--to hire "droves" of illegal immigrants to engage in such activity.
But rational thinking never stands in the way of conservative race-baiting. Neither do actual facts, as Rep. Davis so ably demonstrates.
Below is a tape of this segment of Rep. Davis.
Thank you kindly. You're only saying that 'cause it's true!