"The Carter-Baker Commission on Voter I.D.: Bauer and Gerken Respond"

Heather Gerken and Bob Bauer have posted this reponse to Thursday's comments by Bob Pastor regarding Crawford's reliance on the Carter-Baker Commission Report. Here are a couple highlights:

We remain convinced that the public deserved something better than what the Carter-Baker Commission produced on the photo i.d. question. The main source of disagreement between us and Pastor turns on the difference between a bipartisan compromise and a nonpartisan decision. There are many issues for which a bipartisan compromise will be a satisfactory, even superior alternative. This is not one of them.

.... The Supreme Court didn't have much to cite for its views that fraud is a problem. So it cited the Carter-Baker Commission, which in turn didn't have much to cite. The Supreme Court had no evidence to cite for its intuition that people won't trust a system that lacks an i.d. requirement. So it cited the Carter-Baker Commission, which in turn had no evidence to cite for its claim. It's turtles all the way down.

Right on target, if you ask me -- though I confess that I had to look up "turtles all the way down" on Wikipedia.

Posted by tokajid at June 1, 2008 06:34 AM