A interesting hearing, presided over by Judge Richard Leon, took place in D.C. federal court two days ago. What is so intriguing about this particular hearing? Simply this: the case involves pitting the Dept of Justice along with quite a few left-wing organizations against a ruling decided by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and the states of Alabama, Georgia, and Kansas. Specifically the ruling in favor of those states involved their setting election rules requiring proof of citizenship before someone is allowed to vote.

Think about that for a minute. The Department of Justice wants to intervene and overrule a state and demand that they let anyone vote – and the state shouldn’t care if the voter is actually a U.S. Citizen. In fact, they want it so much that they went so far as to swing their support AWAY from the EAC, the organization they are SUPPOSED to defend, and to the left wing organizations involved, League of Women Voters, NAACP, etc. That move raised some serious eyebrows, including that of Judge Leon:

Leon called “unprecedented” the Justice Department’s decision to agree to a preliminary injunction blocking a federal official’s decision, a stance POLITICO highlighted before Monday’s hearing.
“I’ve never heard of it in all my years as a lawyer,” the judge said.
Leon also criticized the government for taking an incomplete position in the case, conceding that a preliminary injunction was appropriate but not addressing issues about what decisions the elections panel must make itself and which the panel’s director could make on his or her own.
“This is a very unusual way for the Federal Programs Branch to litigate,” the judge said.

Here’s why we should be concerned with this move by the DoJ.

First: Our Constitution is pretty clear that eligible voters in any election must be U.S. citizens. Amendments XV, XIX, XXIV, and XXVI bear that out. In fact, to channel the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the word citizen means exactly that.

Secondly: The State of Arizona established precedence concerning this issue in 2013 when the AZ wanted to include citizenship-verification before someone is allowed to vote, a precedence that had to travel all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court before the EAC and DoJ would back down.

However, the majority opinion in that case, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, stipulated that if the EAC refused Arizona’s request to accommodate the proof-of-citizenship requirement, the state could sue the EAC and establish in court that “a mere oath will not suffice to effectuate its citizenship requirement and that the EAC is therefore under a nondiscretionary duty to include Arizona’s concrete evidence requirement on the Federal Form.”

Third: This has ramifications for voting requirements here in Colorado and in California. Two states that jumped the shark and started issuing drivers licenses willy nilly to illegal immigrants. When, here in CO, people can show proof of residence by displaying a utility bill before being allowed to vote, but don’t have to show proof of actual citizenship…what could possibly go wrong?

Yesterday afternoon, in a four-page ruling, Judge Richard Leon made his opinion clear. You can read his ruling here:

“Given that the registration deadlines for the Alabama and Georgia primaries and for the Kansas Republican Caucus had already passed at the time this TRO motion was filed…and that the effects of [the federal] actions on the ongoing registration process for the Kansas Democratic Caucus and plaintiffs’ rights and efforts thereto are uncertain at best, plaintiffs have not demonstrated they will suffer irreparable harm before the hearing on their Motion for a Preliminary Injunction,” Leon wrote in a four-page order issued Tuesday afternoon.

You know, I think Paul Mirengoff at Powerline blog called it correctly. The DoJ along with the Obama Administration is indeed taking a deep unprecedented dive into very murky waters so that the voter rolls can be padded in favor of the left-wing Democrat organizations. But what about Constitution and the rights of REAL U.S. Citizens you ask?

The actions of the Department of Justice give us the answer. They. Don’t. Care. And that extreme partisanship, ladies and gentlemen is one more item on the list that highlights the very real danger our Republic is in.