Rep. Elijah Cummings is proving that the Michael Cohen hearing did not distract the House Oversight and Reform Committee from other important investigations, as Republicans repeatedly charged during that hearing. Though those same Republicans may not be too happy with this demonstration that Cummings can, indeed, walk and chew gum at the same time. Cummings has sent a major document request to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, centering on voter suppression during his time as the state’s top elections official.
Kemp, of course, edged out Stacey Abrams in an election rife with voter suppression under his purview as secretary of state and, Cummings writes, “The Committee is particularly concerned by reports that Georgians faced unprecedented challenges with registering to vote and significant barriers to casting their votes during your tenure as Secretary of State and during the 2018 election.” He then offers six specific examples, including that “In 2018, 53,000 Georgians, most of them minorities, who tried to register had their applications placed on hold by your office” and in some “counties with significant minority populations, voters waited for hours to cast their ballots, even though hundreds of available voting machines sat unused in government warehouses.”
The committee is requesting a long list of documents, stretching from “All communications regarding any voter roll purges, list maintenance activity, or other government actions to remove voters from the rolls or cancel registrations pursuant to Georgia’s ‘use it or lose it’ law … including the voter roll purge conducted in July 2017, which reportedly resulted in more than 500,000 people being removed from Georgia’s voter rolls due to inactivity,” to “All documents related to the allegations by the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office on November 3, 2018, that there had been a failed attempt to hack the state’s voter registration system, and that the Secretary of State’s Office had opened an investigation into the Democratic Party of Georgia.”
So, no. Republicans on the Oversight Committee are not going to be happy. But this certainly does show that Democrats aren’t obsessed with Michael Cohen to the exclusion of other serious business.