Reviving another great Southern tradition

In the psychosis of the right, conservatives are victims and liberals mysteriously control all the levers of government. The guy over at Southern Apartheid has this to say.

John Fund has a great article in the WSJ on liberals' use of racial scare-tactics and "victimization" in order to try to maintain their power. It is hard to believe that these people can actually stand for the proposition that a particular people group -- identified primarily by their skin color -- simply cannot handle obtaining a free ID to vote. This type of not-so-subtle racism would have Douglass, Washington (Booker T., that is), and many other real civil rights leaders spinning in their graves. And if I -- a white male -- made such a statement, I would be quickly and appropriately put down as a racist.

I saw much of this rhetoric as an attorney with the Bush team stationed in Tampa.

Yes, we liberals must use blacks' inherent low self-esteem to cynically maintain our iron grip on power.

Indeed, "real" civil rights leaders -- as opposed to minority politicians in Georgia who think of their constituents as just so many pickaninnies -- are spinning in their graves over this issue.

The facts surrounding Georgia's voter identification requirement cannot be disputed. Virtually every black legislator opposes the legislation, and most black lawmakers staged a walkout to protest its passage. Every major civil rights and minority advocacy group, including the NAACP, and many legal scholars, oppose the restriction; several have submitted comments to the Justice Department for consideration.

Additionally, it is surprisingly difficult to obtain a photo ID in Georgia. Though the state has 159 counties, there are only 56 places in which residents can obtain a driver's license, and not one is within the city limits of Atlanta or within the six counties that have the highest percentage of blacks.

There is also considerable evidence that photo ID requirements have a disproportionately negative impact on blacks and other minorities. The Justice Department found as recently as a decade ago that blacks in Louisiana were four to five times less likely than whites to have photo IDs.

Studies in other states indicate similar disparities. Consequently, the Michigan attorney general deemed a less restrictive voter identification bill unconstitutional, and the Federal Election Commission reported that photo identification requirements impose an undue and potentially discriminatory burden on citizens exercising their right to vote. Indeed, the Justice Department rejected a less restrictive Louisiana law in 1994 and 1995.

The law's proponents claim that it will help protect against voter fraud, but there appears to be no evidence to support this claim. Georgians already have to show one of 17 forms of ID to prove that they are who they say they are when they vote. Georgia's chief elections official, Secretary of State Cathy Cox, has said that not one instance of voter fraud relating to impersonation at the polls has been documented during her tenure.

Furthermore, while purporting to combat fraud, the Georgia law expressly excludes absentee ballots from the ID requirement. While all the evidence indicates that minorities are far less likely to vote absentee than whites, absentee balloting is the only form of voting in which there is documented fraud in Georgia. The exclusion of absentee ballots from the identification requirement raises serious questions about whether the anti-fraud justification for the law is purely pretextual.

As another sign of liberals' vast conspiracy to turn the Supreme Court into a ecstacy-soaked rave party, let's turn to our favortie gay judge, John Roberts, and his views on these types of cases.