President Donald Trump like to credit himself with coming up with lots of ideas. He claims he came up with the term “fake news,” and the centuries-old phrase “priming the pump.” In truth, this American president has relatively few original ideas, and that would be OK if his advisors were good people. They’re not.
Much has been written about the moral calibre of Trump’s Cabinet members and senior staff, but for reasons unknown the background of one of Trump’s trusted advisors never seems to get the attention it deserves.
It could be because he’s a sitting Secretary of State and running to be that state’s next Republican governor.
By now, you probably have heard his name: Kris Kobach. He’s the Secretary of State for the State of Kansas.
He’s also “of counsel,” meaning, an attorney of record for the lobbying arm of a group that appears on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s page of anti-immigrant hate groups.
Kobach served as the vice-chair of Trump’s highly controversial voter fraud commission. It was a thinly-veiled attempt to establish a federal database of voters which could then be forced off the rolls based on Kobach’s flawed software that purportedly identifies people who have voted more than once in the same election. In reality, it merely finds people with the same or even similar names and concludes they have committed voter fraud. It has a 99% failure rate.
Secretary Kobach is an attorney of record for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal and lobbying arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. The Southern Poverty Law Center says “FAIR leaders have ties to white supremacist groups and eugenicists and have made many racist statements. Its advertisements have been rejected because of racist content. FAIR’s founder, John Tanton, has expressed his wish that America remain a majority-white population: a goal to be achieved, presumably, by limiting the number of nonwhites who enter the country. One of the group’s main goals is upending the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended a decades-long, racist quota system that limited immigration mostly to northern Europeans. FAIR President Dan Stein has called the Act a ‘mistake.'”
On Tuesday The Kansas City Star reported Kobach bragged that the highly-controversial question Trump is adding to the U.S. Census was his idea.
Adding the question is guaranteed to reduce the number of people – especially immigrants – who will respond to the Census, mostly out of fear. The Census is not merely a count of the number of people who live in any given area, it is also used to determine federal funding for those areas, and even affects congressional districts. In theory, a state – say, California – could lose one or more congressional districts if enough people don’t respond.
“I won’t go into exact detail, but I raised the issue with the president shortly after he was inaugurated,” Kobach said. “I wanted to make sure the president was well aware.”