Pelosi: Republican attack on Holder payback for voter protection efforts

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Reuters) House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has strong suspicions about what's really behind the Republicans' efforts to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress.

'It's really important to note how this is connected with some of their other decisions. It is no accident. It is no coincidence that the Attorney General of the United States is the person responsible for making sure that voter suppression does not happen in our country, that issues that relate to the civil liberties of the American people are upheld,' Pelosi said.

'These very same people holding in contempt are part of a nationwide scheme to suppress a vote. They are closely aligned with those who are suffocating the system, special interests, secret money, and they are poisoning the debate.

There's certainly precedent by Republicans taking extreme action to forward voter suppression. Remember the Prosecutor Purge in the Bush administration that eventually resulted in Alberto Gonzales's resignation? That was entirely about voter suppression, which has morphed from a semi-secret, behind-the-scenes effort in the Bush Justice Department to a very public effort in multiple Republican state legislatures.

The Justice Department under Barack Obama and Eric Holder has aggressively fought back against those efforts, suing Texas, South Carolina and Florida over those states' new voting laws. The attack on Holder could certainly, at least in part, be payback.