Kobach is a truly awful person who specializes in voter suppression laws and anti-immgration policies. I would love this guy to end up in jail, but it doesn’t seem likely. Oh well:
Kris Kobach is a bad lawyer, a great fearmonger, and an even better grifter https://t.co/vbR8P6zgNr pic.twitter.com/jsGHWPCJdr
— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) August 1, 2018
The weasel goes down! The judge also ordered him to take 6 additional continuing education hours on the rules of evidence and procedure:
A federal judge on Monday ruled that Kansas’ proof of citizenship voter registration requirement was a violation of the Constitution as well as the National Voter Registration Act.
U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson had in previous orders temporarily blocked the requirement, which was championed by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Robinson on Monday handed down her final decision on the case, which went to trial earlier this year.
Her 100-plus page opinion also knocked Kobach, who defended the law himself in court, for his “history of non-compliance with this Court’s orders,” and imposed “sanctions responsive to Defendant’s repeated and flagrant violations of discovery and disclosure rules.”
In a 5-4 decision along party lines, the Supreme Court ruled Monday that Ohio can purge thousands of voters from its rolls, freeing fellow red states to follow suit ahead of the 2018 and 2020 elections. Critics have rightly observed that Husted v. Philip Randolph will disenfranchise innumerable minorities and low-income earners, and yet its potential harm to American democracy would probably pale in comparison with the Trump administration’s efforts to rig the 2020 census.
Last December, at the Justice Department’s behest, the Census Bureau was instructed to add a question to its decennial survey about its respondents’ citizenship status. When the move was announced in March, officials justified the decision as one necessary to “fully enforce” the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But as a new NPR release reveals, their true agenda was decidedly more insidious.
According to more than 1,300 pages of documents published last week as part of a multistate lawsuit filed against the Trump administration, erstwhile White House adviser Steve Bannon and Kris Kobach, former vice chair of President Trump’s now-defunct Election Integrity Commission, aggressively lobbied Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross for the question to be added.
“[Kobach] told Ross that he was writing ‘at the direction of Steve Bannon’ and said it was ‘essential’ that the citizenship be added to the census,” notes Mother Jones’ Ari Berman. “Kobach wrote that the absence of a citizenship question ‘leads to the problem that aliens who do not actually ‘reside’ in the United States are still counted for congressional appointment purposes.’ “
Trump adviser Kobach is the Republican patron saint of voter-suppression fuckery, and it’s always cheering when he gets slapped by his betters:
A federal judge has ordered that Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach be held in contempt of court for disobeying her orders in the proof-of-citizenship voter registration case.
Judge Julie Robinson in her decision Wednesday bashed Kobach’s failure to send postcards to voters whose registrations were restored by her previous move to block the proof-of-citizenship requirement for the 2016 election.
“Kansans have come to expect these postcards to confirm their registration status, and Defendant ensured the Court on the record that they had been sent prior to the 2016 general election,” Robinson said. “They were not, and the fact that he sent a different notice to those voters does not wholly remove the contempt, nor does his attempt to resend postcards eighteen months after the election and five months after Plaintiffs notified him of the issue.”
She also took issue with Kobach’s refusal to update the state’s training manual for election officials to reflect her 2016 order blocking the proof-of-citizenship requirement. Kobach had argued that he need not change the manual until the Supreme Court had a chance to weigh in on the case, and that he communicated with election officials via email the changes in policy due to her 2016 order.
Republicans have to lie, cheat, and steal to win. They suppressed 200,000 voters in Wisconsin alone, and Kris Kobach is the master of these dark arts:
WASHINGTON — A Kansas official who repeatedly has made unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud will help lead President Donald Trump’s new Commission on Election Integrity, sparking outrage among civil rights groups.
Trump on Thursday named Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach vice chairman of the commission. Vice President Mike Pence will serve as chairman.
The 12-member commission will review claims of improper registrations and voting, fraudulent registrations and voter suppression, White House officials told McClatchy.
“I’m very excited and honored to have this opportunity to serve the country,” said Kobach, who explained that Trump first asked him to serve on the commission in February. He pushed back on the idea that the commission was set up with the specific goal of validating Trump’s voter fraud claims.
“The commission does not begin with foregone conclusions,” he said. “All members of the commission are approaching it with an open mind. … The objective is to go where the facts lead us.”
Trump’s creation of the commission by executive order on Thursday — and Kobach’s role in particular — immediately drew fire from critics who called it a farce intended to perpetuate the president’s false narrative that millions of people voted illegally in November. They said the commission’s findings will be used to justify unnecessary restrictions on the right to vote.
“This commission is a fraud. And President Trump has chosen a fraud to be in charge of it,” said former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander, a Kansas City Democrat who founded Let America Vote, a national organization dedicated to defending voting rights.
