(WSJ)
Democrats and the NAACP want Senator Thad Cochran to “show some reciprocity” for their support in the primary this week. An estimated 25,000 to 35,000 Democrats turned out to vote for Cochran in the Republican primary this week.
The Huffington Post reported, via Free Republic:
Black voters played a huge role in helping Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) fend off tea party challenger Chris McDaniel in a runoff election Tuesday, and now the state NAACP is asking the six-term senator to return the favor.
In an interview with HuffPost Live, Derrick Johnson, president of the Mississippi NAACP, said that Cochran could thank black voters by supporting efforts to re-establish protections in the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Courtstruck down last year.
“Our advocacy towards his office is to support amending the Voting Rights Act, free of any conditions such as voter ID,” Johnson said. “I think this is an opportunity for him to show some reciprocity for African-Americans providing a strong level of support for him.”
Johnson said that there are currently no Republicans who support re-establishing the formula eliminated by the Supreme Court last year, though Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and a handful of other Republicans have expressed support for restoring protections. Under the formula, states like Mississippi needed to receive federal clearance before making changes to the way that elections were held. Johnson added that other priorities for the Mississippi NAACP included getting more support for the state’s black colleges and universities as well as getting more federal allocations for communities represented by black elected officials.
Black voters were essential in helping Cochran win a runoff election against McDaniel, who beat Cochran in a June 3 primary but failed to get 50 percent of the vote.
The McDaniel campaign says there may be enough invalidated voters to overturn the Cochran victory.
Related: Outside groups spent $23 million to crush the Tea Party in the GOP primaries this year.
More… Ace of Spades has had enough of the cronyism.
Apparently the parties have decided the great ideological struggle of our time is whether the new social services building shall be called the John Murtha Social Wellness Center or the Thad Cochran Freedom & Independence Pavilion.
This is inevitable. And the solution is as inevitable as well. The professional political class must be displaced in favor of an amateur political class, which — for its first several years, at least — will in fact be more interested in revolution than racket.
As I’ve written several times, amateurs have their own weaknesses. But this process of renewal — the replacement of old, complacent, self-interested spirits with fresh ones — is vital.
Without it, a movement dies.
