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Partially buried in Wednesday’s flood of news—and especially, of nasty gossip and insult-flinging—was the fact that Donald Trump disbanded his voter suppression commission. Anything that removes voter suppression fanatic and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach from prominence is good, but this isn’t grounds for a wholehearted celebration. Killing off the commission doesn’t mean that Trump has ended his obsession with proving that he lost the popular vote because of millions of undocumented immigrants. He’s just handing the investigation over to the Department of Homeland Security:
[Kobach] said he expects officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and political appointees overseeing that agency to take over the commission's work and begin efforts to match state voter rolls to federal databases of noncitizens. He insisted he was not disappointed with the president's decision. [...]
Kobach acknowledged that ICE has little expertise in other types of potential voter fraud, such as multiple voting or voting by felons who've been disenfranchised, but he noted DHS has a broad mandate to address election security issues as critical U.S. infrastructure.
And as we all know, a federal agency with a broad mandate to address election security issues should spend its time looking for a handful of possible undocumented or otherwise ineligible voters, not, say, investigating major systemic attacks on the system by a foreign country.
While the prospect of Trump political appointees at ICE using this as further grounds to wage war on immigrants is horrifying, it’s clear that Team Trump does see the commission as a humiliation—they quickly turned to blaming it on the scapegoat of the day. That’s right: it was all Steve Bannon’s idea, they now say.
“This was his idea, and it was not a good one,” the official said.
The commission was a “blundered Bannon rollout” and “should’ve never been in place,” another person familiar with the effort said.
Well, at least the White House is committed to tying together the seemingly disparate threads of a crazy news day.