Although he’s won two presidential elections in unequivocal terms, some Republicans continue to find the presence of President Obama in the White House to be simply too much to bear.
Last weekend at the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa, we had a retread through the swamp of racist horse manure that continues to be laid by Donald Trump, who asked Sunday, “Was there a birth certificate? You tell me. Some people say that was not his birth certificate.”
And now we have a member of Congress who, without specifying a single charge, believes that the House of Representatives could impeach the president: “If we were to impeach the president tomorrow, we would probably get the votes in the House of Representatives to do it,” Rep. Blake Farenthold of Texas said Monday.
But if Mr. Farenthold is really concerned about holding wrongdoers to account, then he should look no further than North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, because yesterday Mr. McCrory did something criminal to the rights of voters in his state: he signed into law a series of measures that will force voters to present government-issued photo identification, shorten early voting from 17 to 10 days, and will end same-day registration and a high school civics program that used to register tens of thousands of students in advance of their 18th birthday.
Gov. McCrory knows exactly what he’s doing because these measures are designed to disproportionately target people who voted for this president—and they are criminal. The Reverend William Barber, who is president of the state chapter of the NAACP, said of Gov. McCrory’s actions, “It is trampling on the blood, sweat, and tears of the martyrs—black and white—who fought for voting rights in this country.”
This is the third stage in Republican objections to the current president. They said he was disqualified because he wasn’t born here, but that was untrue. They’d like to impeach him, but he’s done nothing that rises to the required level of wrongdoing, and so they can’t throw him out of office. But now comes their most pernicious, and arguably most destructive strategy: how about preventing people from voting for the man in the first place?
It’s criminal, and it’s happening in North Carolina.
