It’s a strange sensation sitting in a room watching a politician try to backpedal from the biggest thing he ever did in office.
I had that experience this week while attending a campaign debate for Kansas attorney general candidates Kris Kobach and Chris Mann.
In the Wichita Crime Commission debate, Mann criticized Kobach for putting an unlawful provision into state law to address the nearly nonexistent problem of people who have broken immigration laws supposedly voting in Kansas elections.
As Mann put it: “The last time that my opponent decided to handle the immigration issue, he pushed a law that was unconstitutional. He defended that law. He cost us $2 million in this state.”
Kobach’s reply was, let’s say, less than fully truthful:
“The … false statement he (Mann) said was that I defended a law that cost the state $2 million. That was our proof-of-citizenship law and we drew a very bad panel in the federal Court of Appeals. But evidently … he doesn’t realize that when you lose in the federal Court of Appeals, which the attorney general’s office did — my office had argued in the district court — it doesn’t matter whether you won or lost in district court, if you lose at the Court of Appeals, then you have to pay the ACLU’s attorneys’ fees. I’m not blaming (Attorney General) Derek Schmidt’s office for that. They fought a good fight but they had a very liberal panel (of judges).”
There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s get started.
First off, Kobach, as Kansas secretary of state, did try to defend the proof-of-citizenship law in federal appeals court himself. I know this for a fact because in 2014, I drove all the way to Denver and watched him do it.
A little background: Kobach wrote the proof-of-citizenship requirement into a law he proposed and shepherded through the Kansas Legislature in 2011, called the SAFE Act. It required voters to provide paper documents proving their citizenship to register to vote.
We’ll get back to the courtroom drama in a moment, but first, a brief aside.
Every time I write about this, some bozo posts a comment on the story or our Facebook page to the effect of: “YOU NEED A PHOTO ID TO BUY BOOZE OR CIGARETTES OR CASH A CHECK SO WHY SHOULDN’T YOU HAVE TO TO VOTE YOU LEFTIST COMMIE???”
So let me be absolutely clear. Photo ID and proof of citizenship are two very different things.
You carry photo ID in your wallet, but that wasn’t acceptable as proof of citizenship under the SAFE Act.
To prove you were a citizen, you had to provide a birth certificate or equivalent document, plus marriage certificates and/or divorce decrees for women.
It was an extremely high hurdle for voters, one that often involved ordering and paying for documents from one or more other states.
At least 35,000 otherwise eligible voters were initially denied registration because of it.
