The Febrile State of our Union: Only Citizens May Vote

The political ferment in the U.S. emanating from Washington since Obama’s election grows more intense by the week. Just to name three issues with huge implications for our immediate and long-term future:

• The ruling by the Supreme Court on ObamaCare has set the chattering classes to working overtime but that’s merely the latest move in a long, fierce battle. Without the passage of ObamaCare, there would be no Tea Party;
  
• The Department of Justice’s secret program, “Fast and Furious”, with Eric Holder at the head of it. Blowback from that has been intense and will continue;
  
• Again, the Department of Justice’s cynical and openly racialist Civil Rights division. Holder is clutching the keys to that one, too.

There are many sub-issues spinning off from these three concerns. We’ll be seeing them play out for years, but for the moment, look at the last one: the DoJ's Civil Rights division’s racialist pursuits and the brake applied to them in Florida. We can only hope that the message from this particular ruling gets through to Attorney General Holder, currently playing at Disneyland...

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Federal Judge Rebuffs Justice Department

The Obama administration has encountered a setback in its attempt to stop Florida from removing non-citizens from the state’s voting rolls. On Tuesday, a federal judge rejected DOJ’s argument that the National Voter Registration Act bars the removal of non-citizens within 90 days of a federal election. Florida’s primary is on Aug. 14. U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle, a Clinton appointee, refused DOJ’s request for a temporary restraining order. Hinkle agreed that federal laws are designed to block states from removing eligible voters close to an election. But he said those rules are not designed to stop states from blocking voters who should have never been allowed to cast ballots in the first place, the Associated Press reported.

Florida Governor Rick Scott (Republican) has a response up on the Florida state website. On the home page the list of press releases includes this one, titled: Court: “Irreparable Harm” if Non-Citizens are Allowed to Vote:

Today’s ruling puts the burden on the federal government to provide Florida with access to the Department of Homeland Security’s citizenship database. We know from just a small sample that an alarming number of non-citizens are on the voter rolls and many of them have illegally voted in past elections. The federal government has the power to prevent such irreparable harm from continuing, and Florida once again implores them to grant access to the SAVE database.[emphases are mine]

In other words, the state of Florida has been “imploring” Napolitano for information that ought to have been available to them in the first place. And now a federal district judge has at least implied the state has a right to that information.

Given the lengths to which this administration has gone to get those non-citizens registered to vote in the first place (we’ll skip the dead voters for the moment), this is a welcome limit placed by a federal judge on their flouting of the U.S. Constitution. Instead, they relied on their own methods, known as “the Chicago Way”. All that muscle in aid of hanging onto power by whatever means necessary is now wasted; Florida may yet have a valid election.

But you do see the fly in the ointment here, right? The next move will be up to the Department of Homeland Security. If Janet Napolitano were not equally a Holderian slippery rogue cabinet member, the SAVE citizenship database would long ago have been turned over to Florida. But if she holds onto it long enough, dancing through the same choreographed steps of that stonewalling dance Holder has used, there is a good chance Florida will never gain its already legal access to information stored in Washington. Or not gain it in time for the primaries in August or the elections in November.

That’s why the constitutional concept of federalism was put in place to begin with: to limit the powers of the central government. And that’s what the cultural Marxists are fighting to obliterate. The erosion of those original concepts of limited government has been inexorable and do not begin with Obama. He has simply been the most brazen in recent memory.

Where in our history would we find the first beginnings of federal eruption? The Whiskey Rebellion? Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War? The shoe-in-the-door start of federal taxation in 1913?

We have many fine historians among our readers. I hope some of you will step forward with your own findings on the usurpation of states’ rights as defined by our 10th Amendment. However, I have one proviso: to leave the swamp of Civil War contentions out of it. We are still suffering from that war and the arguments will never, ever be settled this side of the River Styx. In fact, it’s probably being hotly argued over on the other shore even now.

The other many erosions since Reconstruction ended are plentiful enough to demonstrate the length and breadth and depth of the ongoing attempts to limit freedoms via federal overreach. Enough regulation and oversight to ham shackle us all.

Obama's reign in the Oval Office, with his many executive directives aimed at by-passing the other two separate powers- juridicial and congressional - is creating ferment indeed.

Washington D.C. was erected smack dab on a swamp. Never has that environment seemed more suited to what is transpiring there right now.