Samantha Bee wants you to meet the key voter-suppressors on Trump's 'election integrity' commission
President Trump's Commission on Election Integrity met again on Wednesday, with Trump kicking things off by insisting his administration has "no choice" but to investigate voter fraud, despite there being no evidence much of it exists. Trump formed the commission, led by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, after falsely claiming that three million people voted illegally for his opponent, Hillary Clinton. "Those mythical three million illegal voters are the president's obsession, his white whale," Samantha Bee said on Wednesday's Full Frontal, "although if the whale were white, Trump would be a lot less concerned about it voting."
Before the commission even met, it raised eyebrows and hackles by requesting sensitive information on every voter in all 50 states — a request at least partly denied by 45 secretaries of state. "Since the commission wants to know so much about us, let's find out a little about them," starting with Kobach, Bee said. "Expanding the franchise was never really Kris' thing." She noted that in the 1980s, Kobach wrote his thesis at Harvard arguing against divesting from Apartheid-era South Africa — and not surprisingly, he was also the rare Ivy League-educated birther. "But Kris doesn't just talk the voter-suppression talk, he walks he voter-suppression walk," Bee said.
Also on the commission are Hans von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams, Bee noted. The three men share in common a concerted effort to purge voter rolls and a penchant for frequent appearances on Fox News. "Guys like this have been playing the long game, methodically chipping away at the Voting Rights Act since the moment LBJ signed it (and then left the room to expose himself to the steno pool)," Bee said. "And now, this president has handed them the keys to the candy shop so they can run in and purge all the chocolates." You can learn more about the 12 members of the commission from NYU Law School's Brennan Center for Justice, and watch Bee's decidedly NSFW introduction below. Peter Weber
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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.
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