Kansas has used President Donald Trump's so-called "voter rights" panel to try and access to the ballot. Now he's whining that the lawsuits trying to prevent his voting limits.
According to the Topeka Capitol-Journal, the commission was scheduled to meet in January, but the work they've attempted to do so far has been hit with road blocks.
“I’m not aware of any presidential commission that has encountered so much litigation from special interest groups,” Kobach lamented.
Trump started the commission in efforts to prove how 3 million people voted illegally and that he actually won the popular vote.
“Much of the past few months has been spent by commission staff answering discovery requests for information and drafting affidavits and things that like — going through the legwork of litigation, and that takes time,” Kobach whined. “We have a very small staff in Washington, D.C., and that staff has been bogged down in litigation.”
In one case, the commission demanded the voting records and information of all voters in every state, however, many states refused while other states only gave partial data. A bipartisan group of secretaries of state refused, insisting there was no reason for it.
In another lawsuit, the so-called bipartisan commission is alleged to have shut out Democratic member Matthew Dunlap, the Secretary of State for Maine.
The complaint explains he had no choice but to bring the suit “as an action of last resort to enable him to fulfill the oath he took and the obligations to which he committed when he joined the Commission.”
Thus far, eight lawsuits have gone to federal court in opposition of the commission's demands or findings. Plaintiffs range from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
The Cap-Journal quoted Washburn political science professor Bob Beatty who claimed no other commission has seen such pushback.
“The reactions to Kobach have been swift and furious, not just by interest groups, but by states,” Beatty said.
However, most presidential commissions are a means of research or a body to bring findings and proposals to the president. Few have any real power outside of the advice given to the president. One from 2010 was called the Interagency Task Force on Veterans Small Business Development, another from the George W. Bush administration was a Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry. President Ronald Reagan established one in 1987 called the President's Commission on the HIV Epidemic, which President Bill Clinton restablished in 1995. Kobach's commission, by contrast, has been given an open authority to determine lawsuits and make demands of state leaders.
