CORRECTION: According to the Secretary of State’s office, no campaign law was broken. The fundraiser on Wichita State University’s campus violate the rules of the Board of Regents.
This shouldn’t be a surprise, that Kris Kobach doesn’t care about laws he doesn’t like. It’s actually quite common. However, most people aren’t running for Secretary of State saying there is rampant violation of election laws (and completely unable to prove it). He seems absolutely convinced “illegal aliens” are voting en masse.
His proof seems to be that no one’s found the problem. As I’ve mentioned before, he plans on using Kansas as the testing ground to eliminate voter fraud. I still maintain this “voter fraud” is people of specific ethnic backgrounds voting at all (and possibly poor people as he takes aim at ACORN being a “criminal enterprise” which I guess helping poor people, many of whom are people of color, is certainly criminal). But more about Kobach’s racism (and defense of racism) under the cut.
Recently, Kobach and his campaign tried to host a fundraiser on Wichita State University’s campus, which is in clear violation of the policies of the Board of Regents. Kobach claims there was a miscommunication between his campaign and the WSU College Republicans who were hoping to bring in Michelle Malkin for a $50 a ticket fundraising event. The Wichita Eagle’s editorial board simply stated “Kobach should know election law”. (He’s running for Secretary of State, people!)
He put the blame rather squarely on the College Republicans. A group of intrepid Wichita liberals caught that this event was happening and brought it to the attention of the Board of Regents last week spending a day writing emails and placing phone calls. Kobach has run for office before; he’s served as chair of the Kansas Republican Party for two years. He works for the University of Missouri. Isn’t this something he should know?!
Maybe he’s too busy running around the country trying to make life hard for immigrants, documented or otherwise. Last year, he defended a group of students attending university in California who were upset undocumented students paid in-state tuition while they had to pay out-of-state tuition. This policy had been long-standing law in California.
Until Kobach came in and said the federal government’s (and his) hatred of immigrants trumps California state’s rights. But, hey, that doesn’t mean Kobach is a racist. But why does he constantly run around with racist organizations? A somewhat popular analysis of Kobach’s 2004 loss to Dennis Moore says it doesn’t help that Kobach received money from racist organizations. Even the Southern Poverty Law Center recognizes Kobach is nutty anti-immigrant, describing him as a “nativist lawyer”.
Rampant voter fraud? I think not.
Kobach runs around the country telling local law enforcement agencies how to use immigration laws to crack down on brown people in their areas. US immigration law, through a provision called 287(g), allows local law enforcement agencies to act as immigration agents. Kobach defends this law. Even though it is abused.
One of the most famous abusers is Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. His 287(g) abilities have been limited, though not removed. And he’s decided if Immigrant and Customs Enforcement won’t take brown people off his hands, he’ll “take a little trip to the border and then turn them over to the border.” Think Arpaio cares whether they’re citizens are not? You’d think wrong.
Kobach rather defends Arpaio:
Kris Kobach, a law professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City and an advocate of expanding local immigration efforts, said Arpaio’s office – like every other local police agency – can detain people suspected of immigration violations for a day or two until federal authorities come to pick them up.
In the past, Arpaio could have held such immigrants for longer than two days and conducted investigations of smuggling rings, Kobach said.
“It’s really a slight narrowing, but it’s not much,” said Kobach, who worked as an immigration law adviser to then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft from 2001-2003.
287(g) allows local law enforcement officers to arrest people without a warrant if they are suspected of being in the country illegally. Some counties that had agreed to participate in 287(g) recently decided they were done with it. The federal government was expanding their duties, and it was causing some parts of the population to not report crime, and that was becoming a problem.
Arpaio picks up people based on what clothes they’re wearing, the way they’re talking? With Kobach defending Arpaio’s actions (so obviously racial profiling), do we really trust him when he says there is a huge problem with voter fraud? As an election poll worker, I wonder what kind of rules we’d be given to judge whether someone was committing voter fraud. A t-shirt with a foreign language on it? Is that enough to call the cops that an “illegal” is committing voter fraud?
Yes, Kobach should know better – what with degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and Yale. But that doesn’t mean he cares.
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