Al Sharpton Reveals Details Of His Meeting With Obama, Holder On Plan To Go After Voter ID States

by Noah Rothman | 11:43 am, July 30th, 2013 video

This week, MSNBC host Rev. Al Sharpton joined a number of civil rights leaders in the White House to discuss the future enforcement of the Voting Rights Act with President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. Sharpton revealed that the Department of Justice and the White House intend to vigorously enforce the VRA, particularly against states instituting questionable voter ID laws. He added that Texas and North Carolina were two specific states in the DOJ’s crosshairs.

“It was one meeting – it was unprecedented – the attorney general and the president in the Roosevelt Room of the White House,” Sharpton began. “I talked to the attorney general for an hour and the president for 40 minutes.”

Sharpton said that the DOJ will aggressively combat efforts to disenfranchise voters at the state level and that the Supreme Court decision striking down portions of the VRA as unconstitutional does not prohibit the enforcement of most of the provisions in that law.

Sharpton and MSNBC anchor Thomas Roberts identified new changes to voting laws proposed for North Carolina and identified those as threats to minority enfranchisement. Sharpton called them a “real, blatant effort to suppress the vote.”

Watch the segment below via MSNBC:

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