Begin the Thawing of Bull Connor

For his vote suppression commission, Donald Trump has truly assembled the 1936 Yankees of people who want as few people of color to vote as possible:

I thought it could not get worse with the Pence-Kobach faux election integrity commission with the appointment of Kris Kobach, the Secretary of State of Kansas who has trumped up claims of voter fraud to advance his career and to make it harder for people to register and vote, and former Ohio SOS Ken Blackwell, who once rejected voter registration forms based upon the weight of the sheet of paper.

But I was wrong.

The President has now named Hans von Spakovsky to the Commission. I talk about him in this old Slate piece on the Fraudulent Fraud Squad, the name I give to people who falsify and exaggerate claims of voter fraud to pass laws to make it harder for people (likely to vote for Democrats) to register and to vote. I also discuss his antics in Chapter 2 of my 2012 book, The Voting Wars. von Spakovsky is not a credible person on issues of election reform.

Also, make sure to read Ari Berman’s story about Kris Kobach, the Grand Wizard of Trump’s vote suppression commission:

For Kobach, the question of citizenship, and who has a rightful claim to it, is at the heart of his lawsuits and legislation. Years before Donald Trump began talking about building a wall, the fate of America’s white majority was a matter of considerable interest to Kobach, who once agreed with a caller to his radio show that a rise in Latino immigration could lead to the “ethnic cleansing” of whites and has written scores of laws across the country to crack down on undocumented immigration. He told The Associated Press in May that he met Trump through his son Donald Trump Jr., with whom he has a mutual friend. Kobach has since become close to the White House inner circle, including the president and his chief strategist, Steve Bannon. Two weeks after the election, Kobach met with Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., where the president-elect was auditioning potential members of his cabinet before the press, and was photographed holding a white paper outlining a “Kobach Strategic Plan for First 365 Days.” Though partly obscured, what could be read of the document was a bullet-pointed wish-list of right-wing policies that included “extreme vetting” and tracking of “all aliens from high-risk areas,” reducing “intake of Syrian refugees to zero,” deporting a “record number of criminal aliens in the first year” and the “rapid build” of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Kobach did not go to work in the Trump administration: He said in May that he had turned down two offered positions, one in the White House and the other at the Department of Homeland Security, although The Wall Street Journal reported in January that John Kelly, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, had balked at making Kobach his deputy. But on May 11 Trump named him vice chairman of a new Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to be led by Vice President Mike Pence. The commission will examine “improper voter registrations and improper voting” — issues that Kobach, with his high-profile efforts in Kansas, almost single-handedly put on the Trump administration’s radar.

And, of course, this isn’t just about Trump — a longstanding Republican vote suppression enthusiast is currently the Chief Justice of the United States.