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More Page One WaPo News on Bush DoJ’s Dismantling of the Voting Rights Act…
Dan Eggen Continues His Series of Reports on Adminstration Political Appointees Overruling the Opinions of Career Voting Rights Attorneys…
Last month, we reported how the George W. Bush administration has effectively gutted the beloved, 40-year old Voting Rights Act. He has done so by allowing political appointees in the…

Last month, we reported how the George W. Bush administration has effectively gutted the beloved, 40-year old Voting Rights Act. He has done so by allowing political appointees in the Department of Justice to override the recommendations of career attorneys in the Voting Rights division who had recommended against the Georgia Photo ID Requirement Law and Tom Delay’s Texas Congressional Redistricting Scheme.

In both cases, the career attorneys at DoJ had written lengthy memos opposing the new laws — 4 out of 5 of them in the GA case, 8 out of 8 in the TX case — only to be overruled by Bush’s political cronies. Dan Eggen of The Washington Post broke both of those stories, with some exemplary reporting, after obtaining the leaked memos.

Later, the DoJ mandated that no such written opinions would be allowed in the future.

Eggen, on Page A1 of Monday’s WaPo, now has more on the fallout and allegations of politics being played with the VRA within DoJ, as Bush continues to dismantle as many American Values as he can before leaving office…Here’s some highlights (or lowlights, as the case may be)…

The Justice Department’s voting section, a small and usually obscure unit that enforces the Voting Rights Act and other federal election laws, has been thrust into the center of a growing debate over recent departures and controversial decisions in the Civil Rights Division as a whole.

Many current and former lawyers in the section charge that senior officials have exerted undue political influence in many of the sensitive voting-rights cases the unit handles. Most of the department’s major voting-related actions over the past five years have been beneficial to the GOP, they say, including two in Georgia, one in Mississippi and a Texas redistricting plan orchestrated by Rep. Tom DeLay (R) in 2003.

The section also has lost about a third of its three dozen lawyers over the past nine months. Those who remain have been barred from offering recommendations in major voting-rights cases and have little input in the section’s decisions on hiring and policy.

“If the Department of Justice and the Civil Rights Division is viewed as political, there is no doubt that credibility is lost,” former voting-section chief Joe Rich said at a recent panel discussion in Washington. He added: “The voting section is always subject to political pressure and tension. But I never thought it would come to this.”

The Georgia case was eventually found to be unconstitutional by two federal courts who deemed the law a “Jim Crow-era poll tax”. But not before it was approved by Hans von Spakovsky, who was recently recess appointed to the Federal Election Commission just after New Years.

Georgia provided Justice with information on Aug. 26 suggesting that tens of thousands of voters may not have driver’s licenses or other identification required to vote, according to officials and records. That added to the concerns of a team of voting-section employees who had concluded that the Georgia plan would hurt black voters.

But higher-ranking officials disagreed, and approved the plan later that day. They said that as many as 200,000 of those without ID cards were felons and illegal immigrants and that they would not be eligible to vote anyway.

One of the officials involved in the decision was Hans von Spakovsky, a former head of the Fulton County GOP in Atlanta, who had long advocated a voter-identification law for the state and oversaw many voting issues at Justice. Justice spokesman Eric W. Holland said von Spakovsky’s previous activities did not require a recusal and had no impact on his actions in the Georgia case.

Holland denied a request to interview von Spakovsky, saying that department policy “does not authorize the media to conduct interviews with staff attorneys.” Von Spakovsky has since been named to the Federal Election Commission in a recess appointment by President Bush.

The Bush Administration, Eggen continues, has apparently been dismal in their efforts to uphold the VRA’s important Section 2:

The Bush administration has also initiated relatively few cases under Section 2, the main anti-discrimination provision of the Voting Rights Act, filing seven lawsuits over the past five years — including the department’s first reverse-discrimination complaint on behalf of white voters. The only case involving black voters was begun under the previous administration and formally filed by transitional leadership in early 2001.

By comparison, department records show, 14 Section 2 lawsuits were filed during the last two years of Bill Clinton’s presidency alone.

And finally, Eggen reveals yet another case, this one in Mississippi, also previously unreported (at least as far as we know), in which the DoJ failed to uphold the spirit of the VRA, which mandates that states with a history of disenfranchising minority voters must receive pre-approval from the DoJ for any new election laws that might effect such voters:

In Mississippi in 2002, Justice political appointees rejected a recommendation from career lawyers to approve a redistricting plan favorable to Democrats. While Justice delayed issuing a final decision, a panel of three GOP federal judges approved a plan favorable to a Republican congressman.

The division has also issued unusually detailed legal opinions favoring Republicans in at least two states, contrary to what former staff members describe as a dictum to avoid unnecessary involvement in partisan disputes. The practice embarrassed the department in Arizona in 2005, when Justice officials had to rescind a letter that wrongly endorsed the legality of a GOP bill limiting provisional ballots.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 23rd, 2006 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Election Fraud. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.