Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

And the award for Dick Move of the Week goes to our old friend Gov. Lex Luthor Rick Scott as he says the state will now sue the Obama Administration over Florida's apparent Constitutional right to throw 180,000 eligible voters off the rolls for the crime of being likely Democratic voters.

Rick Scott made the announcement moments ago on Fox News: “the Florida’s Secretary of State office will be filing a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security to give us that database. We want to have fair, honest elections in our state and so we have been put in a position that we have to sue the federal government to get this information.”

Neil Cavuto, who conducted the interview, pressed Scott on why many of those who objected to the purge were Republican election supervisors. Cavuto also noted that other prominent Florida Republicans, such as Sen. Marco Rubio, were notably silent on the purge.

Now, this is a too clever by half move on Scott's part.  He's basically saying that the Federal government can't tell Florida what to do with its own voter database if it has a "better and more accurate" database through Homeland Security.  If that's the case, the Feds need to pony up access for Florida to assure that "justice is being served" and the onus to prove that is on DHS.  If it's not, then the Obama administration has no business telling Florida how to maintain its database.

This is pretty much akin to saying "There are crimes in other states, therefore the federal government has no business telling us how to handle crimes and we reserve the right to use Florida law enforcement for FBI matters.  If Washington really cared about solving crimes, they would move FBI headquarters to Miami and give us access to the best law enforcement resources in the country so we're going to sue them for not doing that.  The fact they won't do this means they're not serious about helping us fight crime and they have no business saying word one to us about the issue."

A little thing called Article VI in the Constitution puts an end to that noise.  It's called the Supremacy Clause:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.

In other words, states have to defer to the federal on laws that the federal passes concerning the states.  We kind of settled this in 1865 the hard way.  Luthor here wants to refight that battle for, well, pretty much the same damn reasons they fought 150 years ago.

He's a funny guy, but the law is very much settled.  (That is unless Romney gets to throw in a couple more nutjobs on the Supreme Court, then Article VI means whatever they say it means.)  And once again let's remember that the point of the exercise is that Florida wants to toss thousands of eligible voters off the rolls and make it as hard as possible for them to vote again.

Damn right the Feds should step in.