It didn’t take long for Obama’s executive amnesty for illegal aliens to be followed by a major opinion piece in the New York Times complaining about voters being required to show identification at the polling place. How convenient for illegal aliens who want to vote to Obama!

Timed to coincide with the dedication of the made-in-Red-China statue of Martin Luther King Jr., the op-ed by civil rights figure Rep. John Lewis, currently a Congressman from Georgia, compared voter ID with the hated poll tax which historically kept black Americans from exercising the franchise.

At least he didn’t compare the requirement for voter identification with attack dogs and fire hoses.

However, an editorial in Sunday’s Times (The Nation’s Cruelest Immigration Law) opined that the recent Alabama enforcement legislation “brings to mind the Fugitive Slave Act.” So the queen of crazy liberal media now compares basic immigration law enforcement to the practice of slavery, a crude escalation of rhetoric that hints at the 2012 Democrat campaign.

Rep. Lewis asserts that poll shenanigans are not really problematic, but the Weekly Standard said in response that dozens of Acorn workers have been convicted for organizing voter fraud.

We can be sure that voter fraud will not be a deportable offense. And that’s the point. Illegals will hear on Spanish-language radio and TV that Obama is the amnesty President and must be kept in office at all costs to preserve open borders — it’s the illegals’ duty to vote early and often, in the Chicago style.

As word gets around in Mexico and beyond that Obama has repealed deportation, the floodgates will reopen and millions of job thieves will head north for American employment and freebies — meaning more D-voters for 2012. The Mexican flood has supposedly “sputtered to a trickle” in the phrase of the New York Times, which is overstated IMO. The word “amnesty” is like a dinner bell to Mexicans — they’ll be back.

Following is the John Lewis piece:

A Poll Tax by Another Name, New York Times, By JOHN LEWIS, August 26, 2011

AS we celebrate the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, we reflect on the life and legacy of this great man. But recent legislation on voting reminds us that there is still work to do. Since January, a majority of state legislatures have passed or considered election-law changes that, taken together, constitute the most concerted effort to restrict the right to vote since before the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Growing up as the son of an Alabama sharecropper, I experienced Jim Crow firsthand. It was enforced by the slander of “separate but equal,” willful blindness to acts of racially motivated violence and the threat of economic retaliation. The pernicious effect of those strategies was to institutionalize second-class citizenship and restrict political participation to the majority alone.

We have come a long way since the 1960s. When the Voting Rights Act was passed, there were only 300 elected African-American officials in the United States; today there are more than 9,000, including 43 members of Congress. The 1993 National Voter Registration Act — also known as the Motor Voter Act — made it easier to register to vote, while the 2002 Help America Vote Act responded to the irregularities of the 2000 presidential race with improved election standards.

Despite decades of progress, this year’s Republican-backed wave of voting restrictions has demonstrated that the fundamental right to vote is still subject to partisan manipulation. The most common new requirement, that citizens obtain and display unexpired government-issued photo identification before entering the voting booth, was advanced in 35 states and passed by Republican legislatures in Alabama, Minnesota, Missouri and nine other states — despite the fact that as many as 25 percent of African-Americans lack acceptable identification.

Having fought for voting rights as a student, I am especially troubled that these laws disproportionately affect young voters. Students at state universities in Wisconsin cannot vote using their current IDs (because the new law requires the cards to have signatures, which those do not). South Carolina prohibits the use of student IDs altogether. Texas also rejects student IDs, but allows voting by those who have a license to carry a concealed handgun. These schemes are clearly crafted to affect not just how we vote, but who votes.

Conservative proponents have argued for photo ID mandates by claiming that widespread voter impersonation exists in America, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. While defending its photo ID law before the Supreme Court, Indiana was unable to cite a single instance of actual voter impersonation at any point in its history. Likewise, in Kansas, there were far more reports of U.F.O. sightings than allegations of voter fraud in the past decade. These theories of systematic fraud are really unfounded fears being exploited to threaten the franchise. 

In Georgia, Florida, Ohio and other states, legislatures have significantly reduced opportunities to cast ballots before Election Day — an option that was disproportionately used by African-American voters in 2008. In this case the justification is often fiscal: Republicans in North Carolina attempted to eliminate early voting, claiming it would save money. Fortunately, the effort failed after the State Election Board demonstrated that cuts to early voting would actually be more expensive because new election precincts and additional voting machines would be required to handle the surge of voters on Election Day.

Voters in other states weren’t so lucky. Florida has cut its early voting period by half, from 96 mandated hours over 14 days to a minimum of 48 hours over just eight days, and has severely restricted voter registration drives, prompting the venerable League of Women Voters to cease registering voters in the state altogether. Again, this affects very specific types of voters: according to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, African-Americans and Latinos were more than twice as likely as white voters to register through a voter registration drive.

These restrictions purportedly apply to all citizens equally. In reality, we know that they will disproportionately burden African Americans and other racial minorities, yet again. They are poll taxes by another name.

The King Memorial reminds us that out of a mountain of despair we may hew a stone of hope. Forty-eight years after the March on Washington, we must continue our work with hope that all citizens will have an unfettered right to vote. Second-class citizenship is not citizenship at all.

We’ve come some distance and have made great progress, but Dr. King’s dream has not been realized in full. New restraints on the right to vote do not merely slow us down. They turn us backward, setting us in the wrong direction on a course where we have already traveled too far and sacrificed too much.