My Front Page Magazine article from August 6, 2012:

Obama’s Drive to Disenfranchise Soldiers

By Matthew Vadum

U.S. military personnel tend to favor Republicans so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that President Obama’s reelection campaign has filed suit attacking an Ohio law that makes it easier for soldiers to vote.

This nickel-and-dime approach to disenfranchisement was used by then-presidential candidate Al Gore in 2000. The unsuccessful Democrat turned global warming hoaxer had his lawyers disqualify ballots from military personnel overseas. The new lawsuit is also an apparent acknowledgement that Obama is writing off the military vote this year.

It needs to be noted that for all the Left’s incessant whining about largely imaginary “voter suppression,” progressives have been silent about this real-life example of a political candidate trying to make it harder for those Americans who don’t support him to vote.

Obama’s campaign claims that Ohio election reforms aimed at reducing long lines and fixing various glitches in the balloting process amount to preferential treatment for military voters. Ohio allows registered voters covered by the federal Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voter Act to vote early in person up until the day before Election Day. The cutoff for voters not covered by the federal law to vote early is three days earlier.

The case was filed July 17 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio. It has been assigned to Judge Peter C. Economus, who was nominated for the post by President Clinton in 1995. One of Obama’s lawyers, Jennifer Katzman, is identified by the Orwellian title of “National Voter Protection Counsel” for the campaign. (Obama’s complaint may be read here; the state’s response may be read here.)

Presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney condemned the Obama campaign’s lawsuit.

“The brave men and women of our military make tremendous sacrifices to protect and defend our freedoms, and we should do everything we can to protect their fundamental right to vote,” Romney said.

“I stand with the 15 military groups that are defending the rights of military voters, and if I’m entrusted to be the commander-in-chief, I’ll work to protect the voting rights of our military, not undermine them.”

Obama has been sticking it to soldiers for some time. The president has been endangering national security and potentially making the military’s job much harder in the future by promising Russia to wipe out America’s nuclear arsenal when he has “more flexibility” after the election, abandoning Israel and all but cheering on Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, arming al-Qaida in Libya, supporting Islamists in Egypt, and taking countless other bizarre, inexplicable positions such as stabbing the United Kingdom in the back by supporting Argentina’s dubious claim over the Falkland Islands.

Obama has also been gutting the nation’s defenses, hollowing out the military, and literally bowing to America’s enemies abroad, so making soldiers jump a new hurdle to vote seems like an entirely logical next step for the president.

It is thought that American military personnel are more likely to vote for Republican than Democratic candidates. This is why the Democratic National Committee habitually tries to stop soldiers from voting. According to CNN exit polling data, those who had served in the military voted 54 percent for Republican John McCain and 44 percent for Obama in 2008.

Obama’s lead counsel in the new lawsuit is, predictably, pin-striped thug Robert F. Bauer of Perkins Coie.

Bauer is the bottom-feeding barrister who asked the Department of Justice to prosecute Obama critics and fine television stations for daring to carry an ad about Obama’s close personal friendship with Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. Bauer, Obama’s former White House Counsel, is married to Anita Dunn, the Mao-loving former director of communications in the Obama White House.

Bauer has been instrumental in whitewashing Obama’s radical roots by filing lawsuits keeping a bewildering array of the president’s personal papers hidden away.

In an effort to do damage control for Obama’s 2008 campaign Bauer asked the Department of Justice to probe John McCain’s presidential campaign. Bauer made the mind-bogglingly absurd claim that McCain was engaged in voter suppression by merely criticizing ACORN. “It’s clear nobody in this room could come up with anyone better positioned to scrub the links between President Obama and ACORN and all their affiliates,” Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) has said of Bauer. (Obama and ACORN, the seemingly immortal organized crime syndicate, was the subject of my book last year, Subversion Inc.)

Perkins Coie helped Obama hide his original birth certificate from the American public during the 2008 campaign. Obama’s war machine paid that firm more than $1.3 million to keep that document under lock and key.

As of June 30, Perkins Coie was the Obama reelection campaign’s ninth biggest vendor, raking in $2 million – a number that is bound to necessarily skyrocket as Obama’s legal warfare escalates between now and Election Day.

Bauer must have a lot more legal mischief in the works.