You may recall that one of the president*’s earliest and most favorite recreational prevarications was blaming the fact that he lost the popular vote by a mere three million because “millions” of illegal immigrants voted for the other ticket, some of them in several states at once, if you parse the president*s theory closely, which I would not advise because it’s too early in the week for that much vodka.

Anyway, in an attempt to make a silk purse out of the jawbone of an ass, there was set up a commission to study this highly fictitious national crisis. The chair of that commission was Kris Kobach, the secretary of state in the benighted blight-hole we used to call Kansas. (Kobach wants to be governor, which is not something Kansas deserves. Hell, it’s not what Hell deserves.) Kobach is one of America’s most energetic suppressors of the vote. He’s a five-tool vote suppressor.

The commission crashed and burned because it was a burlesque and things got so bad that one of its members, the great Matt Dunlap, the Democratic secretary of state from Maine, sued the commission because Kobach et. al. were freezing him out on work product. Dunlap got a federal judge to agree with him. As a result, the president* disbanded the commission. (Nice going, Matt!) Kobach went back to being a freelance suppressor of the franchise. Now, however, it’s put up or shut up time.

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On Tuesday, in a federal district court in Kansas City, Kobach will have to defend another one of his pet measures, a law that requires a voter to present proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Kobach’s justification for this law is that voter fraud is rampant. Now he has to prove it. From PBS:

Courts have temporarily blocked Kobach from fully enforcing the Kansas law, with the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver calling it “a mass denial of a fundamental constitutional right.” The trial before U.S District Judge Julie Robinson in Kansas City, Kansas, centers on the National Voter Registration Act, commonly known as the Motor Voter Law, which allows people to register to vote when applying for a driver’s license. Robinson will decide whether Kobach has legal authority to demand such citizenship paperwork, and a key consideration will be whether Kansas has a significant problem with noncitizens registering to vote.

Quite simply, Kobach’s rationale for this law is pure fiction. Any number of studies have shown that actual voter fraud has roughly the same effect on American elections as do visitations from Jupiter. But it’s been an effective fiction as far as convincing the Republican base that busloads of Guatemalans and Congolese are riding up Rte. 93 from Boston to New Hampshire to vote every fourth winter or so. These, of course, are cleverly disguised as old white people heading for the outlet malls, but that’s obviously part of the plan. Kris Kobach now gets a chance to make his case under oath. They should sell tickets.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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