According to the Associated Press, the Obama administration has taken an aggressive stand in favor of “voter protection,” and Republicans in Texas and North Carolina are apparently in favor of voter assault.
Reporters Keith Collins and Pete Yost summed up Attorney General Eric Holder’s speech to the National Urban League with an introductory flourish:
The Obama administration opened an aggressive new front in the battle over voter protection Thursday, singling out Texas for legal action and promising broader efforts to come after last month's Supreme Court ruling that wiped out a major provision of the Voting Rights Act.
It was the administration's first legal response to counter the justices' 5-4 decision, but Attorney General Eric Holder pledged that "it will not be our last."
In a speech to the National Urban League in Philadelphia, Holder called the Voting Rights Act "the cornerstone of modern civil rights law" and said that "we cannot allow the slow unraveling of the progress that so many, throughout history, have sacrificed so much to achieve."
AP allowed Republicans to suggest there was Democratic politics involved in this push to intervene in state elections, but they wouldn't suggest Holder hasn't always been synonymous with "voter protection" -- as in the case of voter intimidation by Black Panthers in Philadelphia. But Holder said Republicans who stress that are insulting his race, or "my people."
