Alan If-I-had-known-my-reply-was-going-to-be-seen-by-everybody-I-wouldn't-have-written-it Clemmons.
A South Carolina lawmaker
admitted in court Tuesday that he had responded approvingly to an email from a man named Ed Koziol saying that if rewards were given for obtaining a government-issued photo ID African Americans "would be like a swarm of bees going after a watermelon."
In court during the second day of testimony in a case that contests South Carolina's newly imposed voter ID law, the author of the statute, state Rep. Alan Clemmons, a Republican, conceded that “It was a poorly considered response when I said, ‘Amen, Ed, thank you for your support.’” Poorly considered? Please. Sounds as if that email put a big smile on Clemmons's face.
Back in December, the U.S. Department of Justice blocked the state's voter ID law. Under the provisions of the Voter Rights Act of 1965, the federal government can intervene in 16 states (or counties within states) when major changes are made in voting procedures. The act stems from the Jim Crow era when African Americans in the South were routinely kept from voting by various hurdles, including poll taxes and "literacy" tests. The act also applies to some counties in the West where American Indians were barred from voting. In this case, Justice Department officials said that South Carolina's own data show that black voters are 20 percent more likely than white voters not to have state-issued identification.
Garrard Beeney, the attorney representing civil rights groups in the case
[...] asked Clemmons whether he remembered distributing packets of peanuts with cards that read “Stop Obama’s nutty agenda and support voter ID.”
Clemmons said he did not, though Beeney said he had testified in June that he did.
Riiiiiiight. Cuz Clemmons is such a nice guy it's impossible to imagine him sipping beers with his buddies and having a big old hoot when they came up with the peanut packet campaign.
Had Beeney pressed him long enough in court, Clemmons might well have uttered something along the lines of "I don't have a racist bone in my body."
If that were true, Ed Koziol's email would have gotten a reply so ferocious that it could only have been sent on asbestos pixels. That Clemmons chose to give Koziol a thumbs-up tells us all we need to know about his motivations behind South Carolina's voter ID law.