Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) accused President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder of acting like “despots” over the “outrageous” Justice Department decision to challenge new voter suppression efforts in Texas.
While the Supreme Court recently gutted a key enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, DoJ retains the right to ask a federal court to impose preclearance requirements on a particular state under Section 3 of the law, which the court’s ruling did not alter.
“He’s trying to reinstitute the Voting Rights Act in Texas; if I was a Texan I would be so doggone livid and mad about that I don’t think I’d ever get over it,” Hatch told NewsMax. “It just shows how this administration ignores the law; they act like they are tinpot despots.”
After arguing that the administration’s actions to protect voting rights are part of a plan to create permanent Democratic control, he claimed that Democratic-leaning states treat people of color the “like dirt”: “Some of the worst states are blue states where they treat minorities like dirt, don’t care of them, don’t do what’s right about them and frankly a lot of this liberal stuff comes out of those states.”
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