How Obama aided and abetted Scott’s voter purge mess

Gov. Rick Scott’s administration created a mess by trying to get rid of noncitizen voters.

And President Obama’s administration helped him do it.

First, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security stonewalled the state’s noncitizen voter hunt for nearly nine months by refusing Florida access to an immigration database. Then, on Thursday, Obama’s Justice Department ordered the purge to halt, in part because time had run out.

Ironically, DOJ’s order cited the so-called “Motor Voter” law, which actually calls on states to purge ineligible voters. One former DOJ lawyer and critic, conservative J. Christian Adams, blogged that the former Obama appointee in charge of the voting section announced early on that it would ignore Motor Voter’s purge obligation.

“We have no interest in enforcing this provision of the law,” he quoted Julie Fernandes as saying in 2009 when she was an assistant attorney general. “It has nothing to do with increasing turnout, and we are just not going to do it.” She has since left DOJ.

So to recap: the feds delayed and then said time expired under a law it selectively enforces.

And it’s not the only selective reading by the feds.

A 1996 immigration crackdown law gives Florida the right to access the Homeland Security database known as SAVE, which stands for “Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements.” The federal law provides for "customer agencies to use SAVE for any legal purpose such as background investigations and voter registration."

The words in that quote come from page 12 of Homeland Security’s own booklet on SAVE. So why won’t DHS heed the law and its own booklet and share its info?

It won’t say. “Talk to DOJ,” a Homeland Security official said in an email Friday

DOJ isn’t really forthright, either.

More here

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Marco Rubio earns Senate foreign-policy 'workhorse' plaudits from Joe Lieberman, John Kerry

Marco Rubio had just stepped off the plane from his first visit to Cuba, the homeland of his forebears, a land at the heart of his political identity.

Did he at least bring back a souvenir?

“No,” he said Tuesday evening.

No sand? No water? No rocks?

“No,” he smiled.

For Rubio, who traveled to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base as a member of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, the trip was all business. And that’s pretty typical for the Republican freshmen senator, according to colleagues like Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry and Rubio’s fellow foreign-policy hawk Sen. Joe Lieberman.

“Marco’s not a show horse,” Lieberman said. “He’s a workhorse.”

One day he’ll be giving a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington or the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Thursday. Next, he’ll be lugging Henry Kissinger’s “Diplomacy” tome to a Munich conference, stopping along the way in Madrid to chat with Spain’s prime minister in Spanish as his unilingual Anglo colleagues twiddle their thumbs. He also has travelled to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Malta, Libya, Haiti and Colombia.

The nation’s political chattering class focuses most heavily on Rubio as a vice-presidential shortlister, but his Senate colleagues can’t help but talk about him becoming a key foreign-policy player as a member of the intelligence and foreign-relations committees.

Lieberman and Kerry are Senate experts both in foreign policy and running in a presidential election. Kerry was the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 2004; Lieberman the Democrats’ vice-presidential candidate in 2000 before becoming an independent.

Both say Rubio is able to handle the rigors of the national campaign trail and the Senate at the same time.

“I’ve been impressed by his thinking — doing the homework necessary to earn the credibility with respect to your approach to things. I think that’s constructive,” Kerry said.

“A lot of the colleagues around here, obviously, are interested in substance and interested in people who do the work and are not impressed by people who are prone to play the political end of something and hold a press conference and not do the work,” Kerry said. “They want to see someone buckle down and learn the ropes. And I think he’s clearly been doing that in a very positive way.”

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