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Hilary Rosen On This Week: GOP Targeted Eric Holder Over Voter Suppression Investigations

Hilary Rosen continues to be a great Democratic representative, turning the Fast and Furious conversation back to where it belongs: Why the Republicans are really targeting Eric Holder. On This Week with Jake Tapper: WILL: Well, this is being

Hilary Rosen continues to be a great Democratic representative, turning the Fast and Furious conversation back to where it belongs: Why the Republicans are really targeting Eric Holder. On This Week with Jake Tapper:

WILL: Well, this is being played out in a context of executive aggrandizement, as Republicans see it. First of all, the president rewrites immigration law by executive fiat. Then, while it's saying we must shield the secrets here regarding Fast and Furious deliberations, there's a torrent of leaks on the most sensitive national security matters appearing on the front page of the New York Times. Finally, Mr. Holder himself has made himself obnoxious to Republicans by saying, unlike the Supreme Court, that photo I.D. laws constitute voter suppression, that is, if you have to present when you vote a photo I.D., the way you have to present a photo I.D. to get into Justice -- Attorney General Holder's Justice Department.

I just have to say here: Do you have any idea how frequently this happens, that a president decides where to place enforcement efforts? Ronald Reagan did not want to deal with the PR problems of repealing programs - he simply cut the budgets to make sure they were de facto repealed.. Under George W. Bush, the FDA simply stopped doing random inspections of drug manufacturing facilities, instead moving to a system of self-reporting. (Uh huh.) George Will knows this. He's just a hack who parrots the line of the day. He must hold the world's record for coasting on a Pulitzer Prize, because he hasn't done an honest day's work since.

ROSEN: Now we're getting to the real issue. This is why Republicans don't like Eric Holder, because he has challenged voter I.D. laws under the civil rights statutes as voter suppression rules that they are, because he has challenged the Arizona, you know, discriminatory immigration law, because he has refused to implement the discriminatory anti-marriage law.

So, you know, Eric Holder has shown a lot of backbone in the Justice Department, and the Republicans hate it. So what do they do? They call for his resignation; they throw him with document requests that are impossible to respond to; they just throw more and more stuff at him to distract him from doing the things that actually the president and the people hired him to do.

WILL: Let the record show that the Supreme Court, with Justice John Paul Stevens, liberal justice writing it, said that there's no constitutional flaw in photo I.D. voter laws.

Yes, Stevens did say that. In the same decision, Antonin Scalia wrote in his concurring opinion:

"It is for state legislatures to weigh the costs and benefits of possible changes to their election codes, and their judgment must prevail unless it imposes a severe and unjustified overall burden upon the right to vote, or is intended to disadvantage a particular class."

ROSEN: You know, they're going to have to review that in the courts. Thirteen states, George, have instituted new statutes since the Republicans took over those state legislatures in 2010, purely for the purpose of limiting voting.

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