On Sept. 22, 2021, Ted Cruz, in a Senate Judicial Committee hearing, questioned a panel of legal experts on the subject of voter I.D. laws. I was taken aback when he took Law Professor Franita Tolson’s claim that Texas’ laws were racist and suggested she had implied all Texans were racists. She had not said that. A Sept. 23 article in the Washington Post made much of his questionable inference in contending that Cruz and those like him were in fact trying to deprive certain minorities of the right to vote. But with typical partisan bias, what the Post article failed to mention were the several indisputable facts Cruz cited in support of the notion that those charges were but another attempt by the Left to distract attention from the actual substance of the issue at hand.
The Obama administration, Cruz pointed out, had endorsed the Texas laws which Olson found so repulsive. Polls show that 81% of Americans think airtight voter protocols are absolutely essential, including 77% of those Blacks consulted. While all 35 of the States with such laws have offered to provide free I.D. to their citizens, that offer, Cruz says, has had little impact on voting statistics. Could it be that human volition rather than “oppression” is, as with all things human, a significant factor?
Having pointed out that valid I.D. is readily available to every citizen of the States in question, Cruz asks how their protocols could possibly be racist. Sidestepping this eminently rational question, more than one of the legal “scholars” involved declares emphatically that it is the laws’ intentions that are malicious. They apparently read minds! It is the inevitable stratagem of the contemporary Left, rational, fact-based arguments traded for torrents of mindless insults.
As Solicitor General of Texas in the first decade of the century, Cruz was active in supporting Indiana’s voter I.D. Law as it was challenged before the Federal Supreme Court. The court ruled in favor of Indiana by a vote of 6 to 3. As Cruz claimed that Left leaning Associate Justice John Paul Stevens had declared in his ruling that “Voter I.D. protects the integrity of elections,” I was surprised to discover that Stevens had been a Republican for much of his lengthy career. But by 2008, the year of the ruling in question, he had become what Wikipedia described as “the outspoken leader of the court’s liberal wing.” Cruz’ point, therefore, had merit, a staunch liberal concluding as recently as 13 years ago that demanding photo I.D. from a voter was certainly not unreasonable.
It is not just Republicans who anguish over the issue of voter integrity. Hillary Clinton continues to believe she was robbed of victory in 2016. Stacey Abrams, also a Democrat, makes the same claim of her failure to win Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial race. Clearly pragmatic measures like updating voting lists and purging them of those not legally qualified to vote are essential to restoring confidence in American electoral integrity. Chief among those pragmatic measures, of course, is the insistence that each and every voter show irrefutable evidence that they are who they say they are. The irony of Democrats who claim to have been the victim of voter fraud only to denounce as “racist” legislation essential to the elimination of such fraud, is remarkable, but typical of the multiple ironies that have come to define the political Left.