Fresh off of their efforts to rewrite their history of supporting the Defund the Police movement, Democrats have moved on to trying to revise another aspect of their history: Their opposition to voter ID.
Staunch Democrat opposition to voter ID laws has led to many lawsuits filed in states like North Carolina and Georgia. In particular, NC’s voter ID law has been tied up in the courts for several years. Democrats like Stacey Abrams and others claim that voter ID is just another supposed attempt by Republicans to “suppress the black vote.” Abrams, President Biden, and Sen. Raphael Warnock have called voter ID a modern-day version of racist Jim Crow laws, which were, incidentally, implemented by Democrats.
But if you listen to Democrats now and didn’t know of their history of opposing voter ID, you’d never know it. For example, here’s what House Majority Whip James Clyburn said Sunday when asked about Sen. Joe Manchin’s compromise election reform bill, which included elements of voter ID:
House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) said Sunday that he “absolutely” could support a proposed national voter ID requirement offered last month by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), despite Clyburn previously calling voter ID laws a form of “voter suppression.”“When I first registered to vote as a 21-year-old — back then, 18-year-olds could not vote — I got a voter registration card, and I always present that voter registration card when I go to vote, and that is voter ID,” Clyburn, the No. 3 House Democrat, told CNN’s “State of the Union”.“We are always for voter ID. We are never for disproportionate voter ID,” Clyburn added. “When you tell me that you got to have a photo ID, and a photo for a [college] student for an activity card is not good, but for a hunting license it is good, that’s where the rub is.”
Watch:
It was a rather odd statement for Clyburn to make, considering his past comments in opposition to voter ID don’t include any qualifiers about supporting ID if only Republicans would relent and allow any photo ID. For example:
Abrams is another who has conveniently done a 180 on her past opposition to voter ID laws. She said this last month:
When asked about the compromise on Thursday, Stacey Abrams, the former gubernatorial candidate for Georgia and Fair Fight Action founder, who has long railed against voter ID laws, said she “absolutely” could support Manchin’s proposal even if voter ID was a part of it. “That’s one of the fallacies of Republican talking points that have been deeply disturbing. No one has ever objected to having to prove who you are to vote. It’s been part of our nation’s history since the inception of voting,” Abrams told CNN.
Except no, it’s not a “deeply disturbing fallacy” to point out the truth of Democrat objections to voter ID, objections Abrams made as recently as April:
Warnock, who along with Abrams, helped lead the fight in Georgia against their new election law, in part, based on the voter ID requirement, flip-flopped last month as well:
“I have never been opposed to voter ID,” Warnock told NBC News in an interview published Thursday. “And in fact, I don’t know anybody who is — who believes people shouldn’t have to prove that they are who they say they are. But what has happened over the years is people have played with common sense identification and put into place restrictive measures intended not to preserve the integrity of the outcome, but to select, certain group.”
Except no, his claim that he has “never been opposed to voter ID” is not true:
Predictably, the Washington Post spun the left’s switcheroni on voter ID not as a flip flop but as an “evolution”:
There’s a reason Democrats believe they can get away with doing about-faces on their prior positions with no political repercussions, and the Washington Post proved it with their attempt at running interference.
As to Manchin’s bill, thanks to the successful Republican filibuster last month, it’s off the table for now. But Democrats have made clear they plan on trying again at some point soon.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY