By DAVE DEWITT
In its decision to overturn North Carolina’s voter identification law last week, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals cited numerous legal precedents and hundreds of pages of testimony.
In addition, the decision also cited a comedy show.
In 2013, after North Carolina passed its voter ID law, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart ran a piece that included parts of an interview with Don Yelton. He was a Buncombe County Republican precinct captain and member of the party’s executive committee.
In the piece, Yelton justified the Voter ID law this way:
“If it hurts the whites, so be it. If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.”
Three years later, the Fourth Circuit cited that exact line from Yelton in its decision to overturn the law. On page 47, the decision read:
“These statements do not prove that any member of the General Assembly necessarily acted with discriminatory intent. But the sheer outrageousness of these public statements by a party leader does provide some evidence of the racial and partisan political environment in which the General Assembly enacted the law.”
Late last week, Governor Pat McCrory said the state would appeal the decision.