Speaking to the NAACP in Houston last Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder had this to say about Texas’ attempt to protect Americans’ voting rights by implementing a voter ID law that would help ensure that only eligible voters got to vote:

Many of those without IDs would have to travel great distances to get them—and some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them.  We call those poll taxes.

The racism in Holder’s remarks is apparent.  As the WSJ pointed out

The Texas law stipulates that voters can use several kinds of ID to vote, including a driver’s license, passport, a US military ID, and (this being Texas) a handgun permit.  As for the “poll tax” canard, the law says the Texas Department of Public Safety will issue a free Election Identification Card if requested.

When was the last time Holder’s Jim Crow had a poll tax of $0.00?

But this is the new Jim Crow, Eric Holder style: anyone who votes Democratic (as opposed to democratic) should be allowed to vote, regardless of eligibility.  Never mind that the Supreme Court upheld a substantially identical voter ID law in Indiana just three years ago.  But Holder can’t attack Indiana; that state isn’t under his personal thumb, courtesy of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  Texas is.

This is also the same Attorney General that, shortly after he assumed the position, threw out a case of New Black Panther voter intimidation of white voters that the Federal government already had won—at the end of the previous administration—and concerning which it was, literally, all over but the sentencing.  That case eventually led to the resignation of career Federal Prosecutor J Christian Adams.  This case also led to then-active Federal Prosecutor Christopher Coates’ testimony in front of the US Civil Rights Commission about the new DoJ’s policy of not seeking enforcement of voter laws when the victims weren’t people of color or when the suspected perpetrators were.

It would be interesting to hear Holder give the same speech to a more balanced audience.