Congressman opens investigation into Tea Party group suspected of voter suppression. Well it's about damn time!

Courtesy of the LA Times:  

A Maryland congressman has opened an investigation of a group that has tried to remove thousands of voters from registration rolls across the nation in advance of the presidential election. 

The inquiry by Rep. Elijah E. Cummings , a Democrat, is being started a week after Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) urged the Justice Department to enforce voting rights laws, citing a Los Angeles Times article detailing attempts by an Ohio offshoot of the group, True the Vote, to strike hundreds of students and others from voting rolls. 

“At some point, an effort to challenge voter registrations by the thousands without any legitimate basis may be evidence of illegal voter suppression,” Cummings told True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht in a letter on Thursday. “If these efforts are intentional, politically motivated and widespread across multiple states, they could amount to a criminal conspiracy to deny legitimate voters their constitutional rights.” 

Cummings is the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. 

Engelbrecht, a Texas tea party leader, has described True the Vote as an effort to prevent election fraud and clean up voter registration rolls. The group recruits volunteers, largely through tea party networks, to scour voter lists, challenge the registration of those they believe are dead or do not live at their listed address, and monitor the polls on election day. 

The Times article described efforts by the Ohio Voter Integrity Project, a spinoff of True the Vote, to remove more than 2,100 names from voter rolls. Hundreds of them were college students the group tried to strike from the rolls for failure to specify their dorm room numbers. Local election boards declined to remove any of them. 

The Ohio group also challenged the rights of eight members of an African American family to vote from an address it identified as a vacant lot outside Cincinnati. But the address was actually the house where the family had lived for nearly three decades. The family suspected race was the group’s motive. The white tea party activist who challenged the family said she had made a mistake and apologized.

College students?

African American voters? 

Come on. even a blind man could see this for what it is, a naked attempt to keep potential Obama supporters from having the opportunity to exercise their Constitutionally guaranteed right to vote!

And the sad thing is that it is only one example among many that the Republicans have NO desire to preserve our Constitutional rights if in fact it interferes with their ability to hold onto, or attain, power.

Personally I hope that they find these assholes guilty of treason, throw the whole lot of them in Federal prisons, and then start to go after every OTHER GOP driven attempt to take away our freedoms as Americans citizens.

I don't think that it is too much to ask that, at the very least, we protect the right to vote in this country. It seems like something that every American, regardless of their party affiliation,  could agree on, don't you think?