by Steve Timmer

Jun 25, 2012, 2:00 PM

JLew mails it in

You would be amazed at how many photos in a “Jason Lewis” Google image search are not our boy Jason. I found one, but it was so small I had to posterize it to keep it from falling apart when I super-sized it for the website. By contrast, when you do a search for Katherine Kersten, there are like a zillion.

But I digress.

Kersten’s poisonous stablemate had a column in the Strib this weekend about photo voter ID. Jason’s central point:

The poor, the elderly, the homeless, students, the disabled, the military, and people who moved recently are all like pole dancers.

Yes, Jason, I see your point. Thank you; without you, I never would have noticed that. Jason think that a woman who lost her job because she was a stripper is just like a person losing her vote because she is, for example, in Afghanistan serving in the Army.

He’s a really a humbling intellect, isn’t he?

For those of you keeping a constitutional score at home, the case that Lewis cites, Griggs v. Duke Power Co., was a Supreme Court case that held that occupational requirements unrelated to the performance of a job were discriminatory under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Rather far afield from voting rights, but Lewis can carry a grudge with the best of them, and this one has been sticking in his craw since it was decided in 1971.

Lewis will undoubtedly be disappointed to learn that pole dancers can vote.

The Indiana photo voter ID case that went to the Supreme Court that Lewis refers to, but does not cite, does not stand for the proposition that Lewis claims: that the Supreme Court said that photo voter ID laws were blanketly okay. Since the Indiana law being challenged was new, there was no court record at the time of its unconstitutional effects. By a 6 – 3 majority, the Indiana law survived a “facial” challenge.

Voters in Minnesota, however, do not need a court record in front of them to recognize the groups who will be denied the right to vote. When the amendment has champions like Lewis and Kersten, and ALEC, what else do you need to know?