Link to story.

Abbott, after a decade as attorney general and seven years as a Texas Supreme Court justice, will be reintroducing himself to voters starting Sunday in a five-day, 10-city tour.  Abbott is known among tea party and Republican activists as a mentor of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and the co-pilot in Perry’s anti-Washington crusade. He’s raised more than $20 million so far for this campaign, with big chunks coming from conservative businessmen and investors who like his low-regulation mantra.

…In recent years, Abbott has repeatedly sued the federal government on topics ranging from the Affordable Care Act, insurance coverage for contraceptives, pollution emission standards, endangered species habitats and enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.

Broward and Miami-Dade elections officials are reorganizing hundreds of voting precincts with the goal of reducing the long lines of voters that plagued last November’s presidential elections and embarrassed the state

…Miami-Dade had planned on reorganizing its precincts before the 2012 election, but delayed it out of a concern that voters assigned to new precincts would be confused on a presidential election day. Instead, voters at many precincts stood in line for several hours to wait to vote.

Both counties, which have more than 1 million voters each, have about 800 precincts. Some are combined in the same location.

An opinion piece in the Baltimore Sun by former Governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.

Nevertheless, the court’s decision to recognize that the racial climate
in the South has undergone substantial change over the past 60 years has
leading Democrats and the breathless left wing pundits on MSNBC (the Rev. Al Sharpton most especially) out there torching the Supreme Court and predicting the return of George Wallace and Bull Connor.

The Washington Post reports on the power struggle over what role the bureaucracy should play at the Federal Election Commission (FEC).  The Post found some space in the article for Commissioner McGahn to explain the type of activity that needs to be reigned in.  Withholding information from Commissioners on interagency cooperation with the Holder Department of Justice is concerning and indicative of more problems with the bureaucracy.

In a wide-ranging interview, McGahn said the proposed policy is aimed
at reining in the general counsel’s office, which he accused of
exceeding its authority by sharing records with the Justice Department
and then withholding information about interagency cooperation from
commissioners. The most recent head of the office, Anthony Herman, ended
his tenure Friday after submitting his resignation last month.

“This isn’t a power grab,” McGahn said. “It’s a question of who’s responsible and who’s accountable.”

McGahn
invoked the recent scandal at the Internal Revenue Service, whose
employees singled out groups with certain words in their names for extra
scrutiny. “You just can’t have an agency where the staff is sort
of left to their own devices to come up with lists and do their own
thing, because it creates such an opportunity for people to accuse the
place of playing political games,” McGahn said.

The Blaze reports on the FEC struggle:

Seeking to prevent another IRS-type political scandal, outgoing Federal
Elections Commission commissioner Donald McGahn is spending his final
days in office trying to reign in the FEC’s burgeoning bureaucracy. But,
according to Kimberly Strassel at the Wall Street Journal, the
political left is fighting McGahn’s oversight and is “determined to keep power in the hands of unaccountable staff.”

The Wall Street Journal reports on Commissioner Donald McGahn is showing leadership in taking on overzealous Federal Election Commission (FEC) staff.  The Commissioners are considering guidance that would prevent the bureaucracy from picking and choosing information on pending civil investigations and giving that information to
the Department
of Justice without authorization: 

…over the years staff have come to ignore the law, and routinely
initiate their own inquiries—often on little more than accusations they
find on blogs or Facebook. For a sense of how these investigations can go off the rails,
consider that Lois Lerner—before serving as the center of today’s IRS
scandal—was the senior enforcement officer at the FEC. A Christian
Coalition lawyer has testified that during a (sanctioned) FEC
investigation in the 1990s—in addition to generating endless subpoenas,
depositions and document requests, Ms. Lerner’s staff demanded to know
what Coalition members discussed at their prayer meetings and what
churches they belonged to. Once staff gets rolling, there is little to
stop them.

More troubling to some
FEC commissioners has been the staff’s unsanctioned and growing ties to
the Obama Justice Department. In September 2011, Tony Herman was named
FEC general counsel. Mr. Herman in early 2012 brought in Dan Petalas, a
Justice prosecutor, as head of the agency’s enforcement section. FECA is
clear that a bipartisan majority of commissioners must vote to report
unlawful conduct to law enforcement. Yet FEC staff have increasingly
been sending agency content to Justice without informing the commission.

In essence, the FEC bureaucracy wants to continue using selected “google and blog searches” for unofficial information targeting candidates and committees and then silently working with the overzealous Department of Justice.  Does this sound familiar?  Yes, the same type of collusion and out-of-control bureaucracy that resulted in the biggest IRS scandal in history.  

This time, a majority the FEC Commissioners will put an end to it and protect the American people.

National Review link:

“From top to bottom, the handling of the Zimmerman case was marinated in racial political correctness. Lee, the former Sanford police chief, told CNN this week that he faced severe pressure from outside forces to conduct his investigation in an unprofessional way so as to placate the public. “It was [relayed] to me that they just wanted an arrest. They didn’t care if it got dismissed later,” he said. “You don’t do that.”  Lee told CNN that arresting Zimmerman based on the evidence he had collected would have violated Zimmerman’s Fourth Amendment rights. But he said political influence “forced a change in the course of the normal criminal-justice process. . . . That investigation was taken away from us. We weren’t able to complete it.”

It looks as if the trial of George Zimmerman on second-degree-murder charges will go to the jury today, but regardless of the verdict, the Justice Department has some questions to answer about its role in the pressure campaign leading up to his indictment.”

The Alaska Dispatch reports on the drawing of new redistricting maps without federal Section 5 veto review.

After
being sent back to the drawing board by the Alaska Supreme Court last
winter, the Alaska Redistricting Board released a new plan this week
that did away with some creative groupings, especially for southeast
Alaska

…Until recently, the Alaska Redistricting Board
was contending with both state and federal mandates, but a recent
decision by the U.S. Supreme Court deeming part of the federal Voting
Rights Act unconstitutional freed Alaska from federal oversight of its
voting districts, at least temporarily. Alaska was one of a handful of
states required by law to submit to federal oversight of its voting
practices because of past findings that Alaska Native voter rights were
infringed upon with the use of English language tests to determine voter
eligibility.

Now freed of the federal oversight, the
redistricting board can offer up a plan that meets Alaska’s
constitutional requirements primarily, requirements that are often in
contrast to federal mandates, some Alaska Supreme Court judges noted.

“This decision by the Supreme Court is reasoned and long-overdue. For too long the Justice Department has held certain states like Texas hostage to their political whims by using a legal bar that is impossible to clear. The bottom line is that voting rights are important and should be applied equally to all states, which the Supreme Court has confirmed.”