Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach should be furious with Congress | Opinion
Kris Kobach should be absolutely furious at Congress.
Imagine if one day you had this incredible “Dr. Evil” idea for how to deny U.S. citizens their right to vote, and then the U.S. House of Representatives does a cut-and-paste job and passes it, pretending it was their idea all along.
That’s what the House did on Wednesday when they passed the SAVE Act to require “documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote.”
Shame on you, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas.
Your SAVE act is nothing but a cribbed version of Kobach’s SAFE Act, so how dare you claim authorship without giving credit where credit is due, you plagiarizing boob.
At Kobach’s urging, our Kansas Legislature proudly passed virtually the same voter suppression law 15 years ago.
We’re the state that proved the effectiveness of making people go pay one government office to print out a birth certificate from their computer system, so we can carry that certificate to another government office, where officials there can scan the paper copy into their computer system.
That’s for men.
Women could have to visit multiple government offices and courthouses to get birth certificates, marriage licenses and divorce decrees to register to vote. That’s not a glitch, it’s a feature, because women have demonstrated time and again that they’re more willing than men to vote for the “wrong” candidates.
Some might say it’s a Kafka-esque bureaucratic nightmare, especially if the needed documents reside in another state. Some might say all this paper-carrying is an early 20th Century solution to a 21st Century problem.
We like to think of it as our way of weeding out the undesirables and troublemakers — making sure only real Kansans can vote.
If you move here and don’t have the time, money or patience to cut through all the red tape, we’d really just as soon you don’t vote anyway.
As right-thinking Kansans often say, “We’re not a democracy, we’re a republic.” What that means is these are our elections and we get to decide who votes.
That may sound a little strange to people from some other states, or those who grew up watching liberal woke stuff like “Schoolhouse Rock.” Republics without functional democracy are actually pretty common around the world.
As the Annenberg Center for Public Policy explains: “China, Cuba, and North Korea are non-democractic republics because they neither conduct democratic elections nor justly protect the rights of particular minorities. Prominent among the non-democratic republics of the world today are such authoritarian or despotic countries as Algeria, Angola, Burma (Myanmar), Iran, Libya, Pakistan, Sudan, Syria, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe.”
So we’ve got company from Angola to Zimbabwe, and Kris Kobach is the one who led us here.
Who suspended the voting rights of 30,000 Kansas citizens because they couldn’t produce the right paperwork?
Kris Kobach, that’s who.
Who spent countless lawyer hours and Kansas taxpayer dollars in court, proudly defending our right to keep those citizens from voting, before being told “You can’t do that” by a federal appeals court?
Kris Kobach, that’s who.
Who’s valiantly prosecuted voter fraud for the last 11 years and caught maybe a dozen people who voted when they weren’t supposed to?
Kris Kobach, that’s who.
And we’ve been right there with him all along, electing him time after time to ensure the sanctity of our ballots, because as he often says, every ballot cast by an ineligible voter cancels out a citizen’s vote.
So if 30,000 citizens have to be cancelled to prevent one illegal vote from happening, that’s a price we’re willing to pay.
Representative Roy, our SAFE Act laid the foundation for your SAVE Act.
We don’t appreciate you changing one letter in the title and claiming it as your own without so much as a footnote of acknowledgement. You can take that attitude right back to Dripping Springs with you.
You’ve insulted not just our attorney general, but the entire state of Kansas.
We may be ignorant, but we will not be ignored.
