We’re probably looking at a Democratic filibuster in the state Senate today over the voter ID bill. Even before being passed, the bill is attracting national attention, as the P-D’s editorial board points out online:
It’s nice to get some recognition, you know? You toil in obscurity, year after year, passing one rotten, lousy, no-good, special-interest bill after another. And all you hear about how bad the Texas Legislature is, or the Florida one or the corruption in Illinois.
What is the Missouri Legislature, chopped liver? We dare you to find any other legislature that’s passed a bill more blatantly anti-consumer as Missouri House Bill 1970, now awaiting Gov. Matt Blunt’s signature. It would allow auto wholesalers to unload wrecked cars and trucks without fear of lawsuits by the saps who wind up owning them.
And then there’s HB 2279, a total surrender to Aquila, a Kansas City utility company that built a power plant in Cass County even though a court said it couldn’t. Actual Senate debate:
Sen. Joan Bray, D-University City: “It’s OK to have broken the law, that’s what we’re saying?”
Sen. Kevin Engler, R-Farmington: “Correct.”
But at last, our Missouri Legislature is getting its due. The issue that did it is voter ID, the proposed constitutional amendment to require would-be voters to present a photo identification.
The New York Times calls it a solution to a “made-up problem” and Art Levine at Huff Post labels it “one of the country’s most draconian voter ID requirements.”
Since the bill hasn’t passed yet, everybody and his grandmother is urging us to call our senators. (I called Rita Days to thank her in advance for voting against it. It’s good activism to let our people know we’ve got their backs.) Bradblog, for example, a national site which makes voting issues its primary concern, put up links to help us out:
- Find your Missouri state senator online here.
- Find your senator’s phone number online here.
And just to add some zing to our outrage, Brad steered us to TPR for some background. It seems that the bill’s sponsor in the House, Rep. Stanley Cox (R-Sedalia)–pictured at right looking unnervingly like Charlton Heston, didn’t dream this up on his own. He had the encouragement of arch-voting-villain Thor Hearne.
During the 2004 campaign, Hearne reportedly worked with White House political adviser Karl Rove on “voter fraud” issues and spearheaded GOP efforts to challenge voter-registration drives by pro-Democratic groups.
According to a posting at his law firm’s Web site, “Hearne traveled to every battleground state and oversaw more than 65 different lawsuits that concerned the conduct of the election.”
Hearne also has shown up as a background figure in the Bush administration’s scandal that erupted over the firing of nine federal prosecutors, some of whom came under White House criticism for not seeking pre-election voter fraud indictments in 2006.
The P-D editorial board sums up the matter this way:
All of this, remember, over a bill that solves a problem that doesn’t exist and will deny the vote to many of the state’s least advantaged citizens. It’s the political equivalent of deliberately swerving a car to run over squirrels and turtles. Pure meanness.
I don’t want to be accused of making a hasty generalization, so I won’t draw the inference that “pure meanness” characterizes Republicans. It only characterizes a disproportionate amount of what they “accomplish” in government.