Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Last Call For Kobach Chameleon

I've talked about Kansas GOP Secretary of State Kris Kobach a number of times on this blog, and at every juncture he's been on a crusade to disenfranchise as many Democratic party voters as possible in the name of "eliminating voter fraud".  He's the man behind Crosscheck, a compact of red states to compare voter registrations and to toss millions off the voter rolls in 2016. He's been involved in helping to neuter the Federal Election Assistance Commission to keep the federal government from helping to register voters. And in Kansas, he's been behind efforts to misinform Hispanic voters in the state by giving them false information.  Most of all, he's the man behind Arizona's awful SB 1070  "Papers, please!" law that Kobach later tried in Kansas and was struck down by the Supreme Court.

In other words, if the GOP effort to disenfranchise black and Hispanic voters has a face and name, it's Kris Kobach.

So guess whose name just surfaced as Attorney General of the United States in the Trump administration?

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, best known for his very hardline immigration stances, could be President-elect Donald Trump's choice for attorney general. Kobach helped formulate Trump's controversial plan to build a wall along the United States' southern border and crafted an Arizona law that made it a crimeto be in the country illegally and allowed Hispanic people to be asked to "show their papers." 
Phil Kerpen, president of the conservative group American Commitment, tweeted Tuesday that credible sources told him Kobach was the likely choice. But Bryan Lowry, a reporter at Kansas.com, tweeted that a Kobach representative said it was "just chatter" at the moment, signaling nothing was definite just yet.
Kobach is a controversial figure, in large part for his very tough stances on immigration. Kobach has indicated that Trump's immigration stances will immediately shift away from President Barack Obama's efforts to extend rights to undocumented immigrants. Trump has said he would deport between 2 and 3 million undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions. Kobach suggested this week that Trump would also deport undocumented immigrants who are arrested but not convicted.

Understand that if Kris Kobach becomes Attorney General, the DoJ's Civil Rights and Voting Rights divisions will be used against people of color at every opportunity, and that I fully expect a national, federal effort to institute GOP voter ID laws nationwide, along with, oh yes, the nation's top cop almost certainly instituting national racial, ethnic, and religious profiling and "stop and frisk" policing.

Oh, yeah, and mass deportations.

Kobach cannot be allowed to be Attorney General, guys.

Period.


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