CNN political contributor Hilary Rosen got a much-needed education about voter ID laws from George Will on ABC's This Week Sunday.
When Rosen echoed the dishonest Democrat talking point that voter ID laws are considered "under the civil rights statutes" to be voter suppression, Will smartly replied, "Let the record show that the Supreme Court, with Justice John Paul Stevens, liberal Justice writing it, said that there is no Constitutional flaw in photo ID voter laws" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
GEORGE WILL: Mr. Holder himself has made himself obnoxious to Republicans by saying unlike the Supreme Court that photo ID laws constitute voter suppression. That is if you have to present when you have a photo ID, the way you have to present a photo ID to get into justice, Attorney General Holder’s justice department.
HILARY ROSEN, CNN POLITICAL CONTRIBUTOR: Now we’re getting to the real issue. This is why Republicans don't like Eric Holder because he has challenged voter ID laws under the civil rights statutes as voter suppression rules that they are. Because he has challenged the Arizona, you know, discriminatory immigration law. Because he has refused to implement the discriminatory anti-marriage law. So, you know, Eric Holder has shown a lot of backbone in the justice department and the Republicans hate it. So, what do they do? They call for his resignation. They throw him with document requests that are impossible to respond to. They just throw more and more stuff at him to distract him from doing the things that actually the president and the people hired him to do.
ROSEN: You know, they’re going to have to review them in the courts. Thirteen states, George, have instituted new statutes since the Republicans took over those state legislatures in 2010 purely for the purpose of limiting voting.
WILL: To legal voters.
Indeed. The purpose is to limit voting "to legal voters," a concept liberal media members such as Rosen are offended by because it prevents Democrats from committing voter fraud.
As for Justice Stevens and the Supreme Court's ruling on this matter, Will of course was 100 percent correct.
The New York Times reported on April 29, 2008:
The Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter identification law on Monday, concluding in a splintered decision that the challengers failed to prove that the law’s photo ID requirement placed an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote.
The 6-to-3 ruling kept the door open to future lawsuits that provided more evidence. But this theoretical possibility was small comfort to the dissenters or to critics of voter ID laws, who predicted that a more likely outcome than successful lawsuits would be the spread of measures that would keep some legitimate would-be voters from the polls. [...]
In what the court described as the “lead opinion,” which was written by Justice John Paul Stevens and joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the court acknowledged that the record of the case contained “no evidence” of the type of voter fraud the law was ostensibly devised to detect and deter, the effort by a voter to cast a ballot in another person’s name.
But Justice Stevens said that neither was there “any concrete evidence of the burden imposed on voters who now lack photo identification.” The “risk of voter fraud” was “real,” he said, and there was “no question about the legitimacy or importance of the state’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters.”
That liberal media members such as Rosen continue to misrepresent this matter is disgraceful.
Thankfully, there was a conservative on the panel present to set the record straight for if that weren't the case, her totally false assertions would have gone completely unchallenged.
Bravo, George! Bravo!
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— Noel Sheppard (@NoelSheppard) June 9, 2012
