Beware The Lame Duck

by digby

You’ll recall that the Republican Party took the Ohio secretary of state to the state Supreme Court over minor mismatches in voter registration. After the lawsuit was dropped, John Boehner and his Republican cronies sent a letter to the Bush administration asking that the Department of justice intervene.

It seemed insane that Bush would actually do anything like that. After all, one of their most infamous scandals was the US Attorney firings, which were proven to have been political in nature but never actually proved presidential involvement. This would lay it right at Bush’s feet.

Rick Hasen at Election Law Blog writes:

Roll Call offers this important report ($), which begins: “President Bush is asking the Justice Department to look into whether 200,000 Buckeye State poll-goers must use provisional ballots on Election Day because their names do not match state databases.”

Wow. Here is what I said earlier this week: “The idea that the DOJ would get involved in the Ohio election now to force Sec. Brunner to produce the mismatch list on voter fraud grounds seems remote. The political uproar would be deafening.” See also this AlterNet report.

There should be a political uproar but in the blaring noise of the last few days of the election campaign people may not hear about it.

The president ordering the Department of Justice to look into this is a stunning violation of DOJ guidelines and ethics. But why should he care? He’s out the door and the worst thing that happens is that somebody accuses him of doing something after the fact. He didn’t care about it when he was still pretending to be a president. He certainly doesn’t care about it now.

Republicans tend to lose their moorings when they have nothing left to lose. Unpopular lame duck Republicans are downright dangerous.

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