Live shot of Kris Kobach contemplating the can of whup-ass that has been opened upon him. (Photo by Christopher Smith/ For the Washington Post)
The irony is not lost on me. Kris Kobach has built his entire fame on making false and wild accusations about voter “fraud.” And now in the trial to determine the veracity of any of his claims, he has exposed himself as a fraud of a lawyer, over and over again. If “karma” is a thing, this is what the bitch looks like.
The trial has already been an idiotic embarrassment for Kobach. He decided to represent himself (really his office) in an action brought by the ACLU over Kobach’s attempts to toughen voter ID laws. The court is trying to find Kobach’s evidence of “fraud” that he says justifies enhanced ID laws. He doesn’t have any, and the trial has already been termed a rebuke of Kobach’s life’s work.
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And that was before today. Today, Huffington Post voting rights reporter Sam Levine found this:
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and his lawyers appear to have forgotten to delete a section of a document they filed in federal court that a point of law "probably isn't worth arguing." pic.twitter.com/c7JV8544Cv
— Sam Levine (@srl) April 24, 2018
I will pause for righteous, judgmental laughter.
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Now, this is the kind of gaffe that the non-lawyer press will have a field day with, because it’s HILARIOUS and easy to understand. But, you know, anybody who has worked on a brief knows that one often makes points “PROBABLY NOT WORTH ARGUING.” You kind of throw everything at the wall and hope something sticks. And you should really read Sam Levine’s full document dump of a thread, because the arguments Kobach and his team decided were worth making are just as bad and faulty and laughable as the one they weren’t sure about.
I don’t have any defense for Kobach and his team leaving in the word “CITE” in the above section. I mean… that just makes it look like they have no idea what they’re doing.
But what the gaffe does reveal is an inherent sloppiness to Kobach’s work. And that is a material concern here. Remember Kobach is trying to make it harder for people to vote. It’s the most important right we have in a democracy, and Kobach wants to raise the barriers around it for some people. Given the seriousness of the issue, the fact that Kobach and his office are sloppy lawyers who evidently can’t be bothered to double-check their own work should matter. It should mean that we take their claims and so-called evidence less seriously, as we know they are operating out of a place where details don’t matter and arguments that probably shouldn’t be made are advanced.
Kris Kobach should not have the power to make it harder for you to vote. Everything he has done in this trial proves why. He’s simply not good enough at his job to be allowed to do this.
Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at [email protected]. He will resist.