printFrom her position as a lowly reporter at CNN, dumbo Dana Bash—whose love for Barack Obama is second only to Jessica Yellin’s, another of CNN’s pack animals—often allows herself to editorialize. Today Dana was doing Jackson, Mississippi, where she campaigned (oops, reported) for establishment Republican Thad Cochran, urging Democrats, via her “suggestive reporting” and selective interviews, that, “African-Americans … do have a stake in this runoff election.” In other words, vote against anti-establishment Republican Chris McDaniel if you don’t want to witness a reinstatement of Jim Crow laws.
Dana assures her readers and viewers that, “Mississippi law allows anyone to vote in the runoff, meaning Democrats can go to the polls so long as they didn’t vote in the Democratic primary and they don’t plan to support their party candidate in the general election.”
Not everyone agrees with Dana, who is no more than an Obama devotee, parading as a journalist. J. Christian Adams, “an election lawyer who served in the Voting Rights Section at the U.S. Department of Justice,” has this to say:
Mississippi law has a prohibition against voting in the Republican primary if you do not intend to support the nominee in November. The law is still on the books. A case which undermined the statute was thrown out and vacated by a federal appeals court. The closest thing there is questioning the law is an old attorney general’s opinion questioning the enforceability of the law.
The attorney general’s opinion, issued by a Democrat in 2003, doesn’t do what the left is claiming it does. For starters, it is simply an attorney general’s opinion. When I went to law school, we learned that such opinions are not binding authority. These days it seems that they are binding authority, as long as the left agrees with the outcome.
But the AG opinion cites eight reasons a voter may be challenged. Number 8 says “(g) That he is otherwise disqualified by law.” “Otherwise disqualified by law” certainly might mean they aren’t supposed to vote in the primary because they don’t qualify under Mississippi Code 23-15-575.
When I went to law school, we also learned about the canon of statutory interpretation that “courts must not construe statutes so as to nullify, void or render meaningless or superfluous.”
The chairs of the Democrat Party and Republican Party recognize what the academics apparently do not. Both are calling for Democrats not to raid the Republican runoff Tuesday. … MORE.