Why The GOP Establishment Still Backs Trump: He Advances Their Outrageous Agenda-- Like Voter Suppression

Yesterday Trumped signed one of his cockamamie executive orders-- ruling by decree-- that establishes a commission to investigate his baseless claims of alleged voter fraud. Worse yet, crackpot Kansas racist and xenophobe Kris Kobach has already been telling people that Trump picked him to head the commission (although he's actually doing it as vice-chair under Pence). Kobach is all about one thing and one thing only: voter suppression techniques, in Kansas and around the country. Trump didn't do one of his big public signings on this one, just a statement from Mike Huckabee's sociopath daughter that he had done the deed behind closed doors and away from the cameras.

DWT readers know him as a bigoted extremist who traffics in fringe conspiracy theories he uses to denigrate immigrants and push his voter suppression agenda. I'd like to share a report from Allied Progress that they released on Kobach yesterday. Karl Frisch, executive director of Allied Progress: "Kobach shouldn’t be allowed near any investigation into voter fraud and suppression. If anything, he should be the one being investigated... This man has made it his personal mission to invent new ways to keep people from voting. Kobach has built his career on bigoted and hateful rhetoric."

KOBACH HAS A CLEAR ANTI-IMMIGRANT RECORD:

• Kobach said, “Illegal immigration is perpetuating a liberal agenda because immigrants, who are at the bottom in income earnings, are ‘a dependency class’ that tends to vote for expansion of welfare services,” and that “voter fraud is also ‘forcing the socialist yoke on the American public’ because it ensures Democrats win every close election.”
• Kobach, in 2014, “warned that President Obama’s executive actions and general ‘lawlessness’ on immigration could lead to ‘ethnic cleansing.’”
• Kobach “helped train the officers of Arizona’s infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio in immigration enforcement strategies.” The U.S. Department of Justice ruled that the “department created ‘a pervasive culture of discriminatory bias against Latinos’ and revoked its authority to conduct immigration screenings.”
• Kobach has written and defended ordinances and legislation in many locales to “discourage businesses from hiring illegal immigrants or renting housing to them.”
• In one instance, Kobach was paid at least $197,000 to defend an ordinance in a small Pennsylvania city “that sought to punish employers who give illegal immigrants jobs as well as landlords who rent to them.” When the city ran out of money to pay him, he raised funds to pay himself from a donor in Texas.
• In another instance, a small Nebraska town had to raise property taxes to pay legal fees to Kobach and others defending an ordinance “to ban the hiring, harboring and renting to illegal immigrants.”
• Kobach helped write the Arizona law that made it “a state crime to be in the country illegally.”
• Kobach supports restricting birthright citizenship and has written anti-birthright citizenship legislation.

KOBACH HAS EXTREMIST VIEWS, SUPPORTS DISCRIMINATION AGAINST IMMIGRANTS, LGBTQ+ AMERICANS, AND OTHER MINORITIES:

• Kobach compared gay people to drug users and polygamists and thinks businesses should not have to serve gay people, comparing it to “state-forced slavery.”
• Kobach’s 2004 congressional campaign received contributions from the U.S. Immigration Reform PAC, which was a PAC with “leadership linked with efforts to prove black people and other racial minorities are genetically inferior and who claim immigrants cause sprawl, aids, and leprosy.”
• Kobach, in 2013, said pro-immigrant protesters acted like the Ku Klux Klan.

KOBACH LED THE CHARGE ON VOTER SUPPRESSION EFFORTS AS KANSAS SECRETARY OF STATE AND HEAD OF THE STATE’S REPUBLICAN PARTY:

• Secretary of State Kobach staunchly defended Kansas’ requirement that people show proof of citizenship to register to vote, even though the requirement has prevented thousands of Kansans from registering to vote and his claims of undocumented immigrants voting “don’t stand up to scrutiny.”
• Kobach said people who had trouble registering to vote because of this requirement are “‘mostly casual registrants, many of whom do not intend to vote,’” and “procrastinators.”
• When Kobach was the chair of the Kansas Republican Party it used a technique known as “caging” to suppress voting.
• Kobach is so concerned about voter fraud that he created the Crosscheck system, allegedly to make it more difficult for people to vote in multiple states.
• Crosscheck, which is championed, managed, and controlled by Kansas Secretary of State Kobach, is purging “black, Hispanic, and Asian American voters” on a massive scale. “‘Already, tens of thousands have been removed from voter rolls in battleground states, and the numbers are set to climb.’”
• Kansas officials have a master list of 6.9 million suspected “potential double voters,” but “the process for checking those names, a computer program called Crosscheck... is incredibly inaccurate.” It intentionally and “deliberately ignores any Social Security mismatches, in the few instances when the numbers are even collected.”
• Kobach’s Crosscheck system “is incredibly broad with a strong bias toward removing people from the rolls. And the means for verifying voter identity–sending postcards to addresses on file–puts the burden of proof on individual voters and is almost designed to take people fff the rolls; with false positives and duplicate names, there’s no guarantee that anyone gets their verification card.”

DESPITE POINTING THE FINGER AT OTHERS, IT’S KOBACH WHO HAS A RECORD OF FRAUD, ETHICS ISSUES, AND CAMPAIGN FINANCE VIOLATIONS: 

• “Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s campaign was Ffned $5,000,” which was the maximum possible fine, by the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission for omitting “about $35,000 in contributions and nearly $43,000 in spending from reports filed for the 2010 campaign,” followed by a “‘lack of candor before the commission.’”
• Kobach’s congressional campaign went years without filing legally required campaign finance reports.
• When Kobach was the chair of the Kansas Republican Party “the state party accepted illegal contributions.”

Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) had a good perspective on Trump's executive order: "In an attempt to distract from his own investigation, Trump announced a new commission dedicated to looking into claims of voter fraud, which he has yet to offer a single piece of evidence in support of. Ironically, spearheading this commission to oversee election integrity is Vice-President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, both of whom have a history of endorsing and implementing voter suppression tactics in Indiana and Kansas respectively. Governor of Indiana, Pence directed state police to raid the Indiana Voter Registration Project offices one week prior to the state’s voter registration deadline, confiscating more than 45,000 voter registration forms. That was a targeted attack on the mostly African American voters who were stripped of their right to vote. On the other hand, Kobach, who helped author Arizona’s anti-immigrant SB1070 law has been marred with civil rights lawsuits left and right. During his tenure as Kansas’ Secretary of State, Kobach has systematically attempted to make voting difficult-- and nearly impossible-- for individuals by introducing legislation, like the Secure and Fair Elections Act [SAFE Act] that’s sole purpose is to create additional voting requirements for newly-registered voters. He has further disenfranchised Spanish-speaking voters by providing false voter registration deadlines in the Secretary of State’s Spanish-language voter guide. A 'Presidential Commission on Election Integrity' chaired by two members who are voter suppressors themselves sounds like something straight out of an Orwell novel. We cannot allow our democracy to be undermined by those who think voter intimidation and disenfranchisement are permissible nor those who would rather waste resources chasing after smoke-mirrors instead of increasing voter registration and participation efforts. The truth remains that it is more likely for someone to be struck by lightning than for someone to have committed voter fraud. Voter fraud is a non-issue in our country; its voter intimidation and disenfranchisement that are the actual threats to democracy."