Sen. Mary Landrieu and Rep. Charlie Melancon stood with practically the entire Congressional Black Caucus and the kook leftist fringe of the Democrats in Congress (including failed presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry) in spouting support for a pair of bad bills, H.R. 3734 and S. 1867 which would facilitate people voting in two states.
Without any Republican support, these bills have no chance of passing, which would allow displaced people registered to vote in Louisiana outside of the normal process to vote in Louisiana federal elections. But is it indicative of the mindsets of Landrieu and Melancon that they would favor an unnecessary law that could subvert democracy.
(And so does Rep. William Jefferson, another co-sponsor, but he remained out of view at this press conference. How discriminatory, how non-inclusive, can Landrieu and her colleagues be? Doesn’t a looter from Louisiana have a right to express his opinion on these bills?)
This legislation is unnecessary because state laws clearly define a process by which a resident out of the parish on election day can vote in Louisiana – an absentee/early voting system designed to minimize the chances of voting fraud. RS 18:1303(4) clearly permits displaced Louisianans the right to vote this way (and the language of RS 18:1306(c)(1) in the use of the word “shall” would permit enough of these ballots to be distributed). The process outlined in RS 18:1307 is incredibly simple – make a request, follow simple instructions to fill out, and mail in.
But from the rhetoric bandied about at the press conference, you would have thought Louisiana was Zanzibar. “The right to vote is all that some people in the Gulf Coast have left,” opined Landrieu, somehow forgetting to explain how without these federal laws who was depriving them of the vote and how it would happen.
More blather from Landrieu: “We took unprecedented steps to protect the voting rights of every Iraqi. We should do the same for the people of the Gulf Coast.” Again, Senator, why don’t you name names so we can prosecute and bring the necessary lawsuits to stop this from happening? Then you might actually be doing your job.
Instead, she advocates passing a national law in an area the Constitution leaves up to the states that essentially is duplicative – does Landrieu, Melancon, and Jefferson deem to insult Louisiana by suggesting its absentee/early voting laws are inadequate? And where’s the money to pay for all of this duplication?
Worse, as lax as the state’s absentee/early voting laws are, these bills would make fraud even easier to accomplish because the state law allows voting only to those who indisputably are state residents. Of displaced people, who knows how many truly intend ever to be Louisiana “residents” again? Or whether the person who claims he is an “evacuee” really is?
We must recognize these bills for what they are – an attempt to subvert elections and the will of the people to choose their own representatives. The House bill sponsor Rep. Artur Davis laid this out perfectly for all to see when he said, “The occasion of a hurricane should not be a de facto redistricting.” Sorry, guy, but the Constitution is clear that only electors resident in a constituency as defined by the state may determine who their federally-elected officials are, not those who might be or never will be residents in the future. Redistricting is a political process, one that his bill attempts to perform unconstitutionally, while choice of residence is influenced by Mother Nature all of the time.
Landrieu, who will run for reelection in 2008 that is covered under the law, was so right when she spoke to us thus: “you basically are impacting your democracy in a way that you don't want to” – by passing unnecessary, expensive laws that subvert democracy. Her support of these bad bills shows that she lives down to her own statement.
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