Georgia and Minnesota don’t share a border, but last week they came just a smidgen closer to each other.
Last Thursday, supporters of Lt. Gov. Burt Jones on the Senate Ethics Committee passed a resolution calling on Secretary Of State Brad Raffensperger to comply with a U.S. Justice Department demand for the states to turn over election data and records, including voter registration lists with the names, dates of birth, addresses, drivers license and Social Security numbers of every voter in the state.
Georgia is one of 23 states that have been sued by the U.S. Justice Department to obtain this information, ostensibly to find any irregularities in the 2020 presidential election. Raffensperger has refused to comply because it’s illegal under state law to release such personal information.
It was just a toothless resolution meant to stir the pot in the Republican gubernatorial primary, and as it soon turned out, a similar sort of lawsuit. On Friday, a federal judge tossed out the Justice Department’s case against Georgia on the grounds it had been filed in the Middle District in Macon, not the Northern District in Atlanta. The government’s lawsuits against California and Oregon were dismissed earlier this month. U.S. District Court Judge David Carter, in his ruling in the California case, called the Justice Department’s request “unprecedented and illegal.”
But just how determined the Justice Department is to get its hands on this information became clear the following day, hours after the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, when Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz received a letter from Attorney General Pam Bondi.
He and other Minnesota officials had been terribly irresponsible, she wrote at some length, but the state’s rift with the federal government could be repaired with three “simple steps.” The state must turn over records related to the recent Medicaid/SNAP scandal, repeal sanctuary city policies and — sticking out like a mismatched sock — “allow the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice to access voter rolls to confirm that Minnesota’s voter registration practices comply with federal law as authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1960.”
Some news stories have described the letter as a straightforward offer by the attorney general to pull ICE out of Minneapolis in exchange for the state’s voter records. The letter is worded more carefully than that, but it’s very striking how much prominence the voter records would be given at such a critical time in President Donald Trump’s second term.
There was also a touch of Minnesota in the Republican Senate primary campaign, thanks to U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter.
When this campaign year is over, it will be interesting to see if there’s another candidate in the country who goes as far as Carter in voicing support for what ICE and the Department of Homeland Security have been doing in Minneapolis. In a column written for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Savannah pharmacist not only supported what they’re doing, he invited them to do it in the biggest city in his state.
“We’ve seen the success of federal intervention in other Democratic-run cities,” Carter wrote. “Since President Donald Trump deployed ICE agents to Minneapolis as part of Operation Metro Surge, 3,000 illegal immigrants have been arrested — including murderers, rapists, gang members and perpetrators of fraud.”
Georgia has become a “newer destination state,” Carter wrote, and now has more than 500,000 illegal immigrants, including a lot of “bad actors.”
Carter’s enthusiasm for a project that is sinking steadily in national polls can be explained partially as an effort to show he’s more Trumpy than any of his opponents, even though Trump has endorsed Rep. Mike Collins in this race.
It’s safe to say Carter wasn’t planning to get a lot of votes from Atlanta, which has long been a punching bag in Republican primary races. But after wishing what’s happening in Minneapolis down on us, he should know he could be particularly unwelcome.
