Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has filed lawsuits in Wisconsin and Ohio to fight voting rights laws passed by Republicans, and some say those lawsuits could be read as a sign that Clinton is worried about winning those states in 2016.
In 2012, both Wisconsin and Ohio went blue for President Obama. But they’re considered swing states now, and with Midwestern GOP contenders such as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker poised to enter the presidential race, Clinton may have turned to her superstar lawyer to help eliminate her GOP competition.
Marc Elias serves as general counsel of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. He has filed lawsuits in Wisconsin and Ohio, and more may be coming.
The Clinton campaign has insisted it had nothing to do with the liberal legal warfare, but Elias typically intervenes on behalf of Democrats in desperate need of assistance. He “emerged as the star” of the 2008 recount battle that resulted in Minnesota Sen. Al Franken, a “Saturday Night Live” alum, upsetting a Republican incumbent by just 312 votes.
And when Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., suddenly appeared vulnerable in last year’s midterm elections, Democrats called on Elias to ensure that Roberts would square off solely against one liberal opponent, independent Greg Orman, by removing the Democratic candidate from the ballot. A favorite of the outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., Elias reportedly helped Democrats sneak a provision into a spending bill late last year that raised the maximum amount of money that donors can provide to Democrats and Republicans.
As 2016 approaches, Elias joined the Clinton campaign and appears to have begun waging a full-bore attack against the GOP. His lawsuit in Wisconsin alleges that several state laws — including the controversial voter ID law that has already survived judicial scrutiny — needlessly restrict citizens’ right to vote.
“That right has been under attack in Wisconsin since Republicans gained control of the governor’s office and both houses of the State Legislature in the 2010 election,” his complaint stated. State laws enacted in Wisconsin “have had and will have the effect of burdening, abridging, and denying the voting rights of Wisconsinites generally and of African-American, Latino, young and/or Democratic voters in Wisconsin in particular.”
“What is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people from one end of our country to the other,” Clinton said Thursday in a speech. “Republicans are systematically and deliberately trying to stop millions of American citizens from voting. What part of democracy are they afraid of?”
But Hans von Spakovsky, a former Federal Election Commission member and former Justice Department attorney who is now a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, suspects that while Clinton’s camp says the lawsuits are about voting rights, they’re really about making trouble for Republican candidates in states where Clinton may feel vulnerable.
“I think they’re targeting states where they think they might lose,” he said. “I’m sure Wisconsin was picked because they think they might have a good chance with some of the liberal federal judges there and because Wisconsin is a state where Republicans have made great gains in recent years, particularly with the governor that they have there, and they probably hope this will help upset their base and help turn out their voters.”
Clinton may also be hoping her voting rights crusade galvanizes the Obama coalition of young, minority and female voters to line up behind her. She made great pains to praise millennials as the “most diverse, tolerant and inclusive generation in American history,” during her speech in Texas, but may also recognize that the ever-crowded GOP field is more demographically diverse now than the current Democratic crop of candidates.
The Walker team does not seem nervous about the suit. Kirsten Kukowski, communications director of Walker’s political group, told the Washington Examiner in a statement, “Any measure that protects our democracy by making it easier to vote and harder to cheat is a step in the right direction. This is a bipartisan issue and Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are on the wrong side.”
Clinton, however, took the fight to Texas on Thursday, even going so far as to name her enemies — Walker, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and former Govs. Rick Perry of Texas and Jeb Bush of Florida.
In a statement distributed by his political group, Walker responded to Clinton’s speech by arguing, “Hillary Clinton’s extreme views are far outside the mainstream.”
While Spakovsky says the liberal judges in Wisconsin means the lawsuit might have a chance in that state, the legal case itself is weak in his view. For example, he said Clinton lawyer’s complaint committed a sanction-worthy legal error by seeking to adjudicate Wisconsin’s voter ID law all over again.
“This complaint is written like an extended press release, not a lawsuit,” he said. “Look, Marc Elias, I don’t agree with him on a lot of policy issues, but I like the guy and I am just shocked that he would do something that is such a fundamental legal error.”
Spakovsky also took issue with the lawsuit’s opposition to a rule that asked colleges who provided “dorm lists” for voter registration purposes to verify the citizenship status of the students seeking to vote.
“The state said OK, when the college administrators provide that dorm list they have to certify that those students are U.S. citizens, and yet that somehow supposedly violates federal law,” Spakovsky said. “Well that’s a ridiculous claim because it’s illegal for someone who’s not a U.S. citizen to register or vote and all Wisconsin is doing is asking the university who knows whether their students are citizens pr not through the application process to certify that the person is in fact a student.”
