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October 20, 2009

The Obama administration's Department of (In)Justice

Topics: Political News and commentaries

Kathryn Jean Lopez points to Hans A. von Spakovsky's must-read September 28 piece on Obama's politicized Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, "The Politics of (In)Justice," that has turned Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act into nothing less than a weapon to benefit the Democratic party. Since Obama's election and his appointment of Eric Holder as Attorney General, the DOJ has turned the use of the Act as a weapon into an art form - by cranking its use up several notches.

Spakovsky writes:

Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act may not look like a political weapon. But in the hands of certain government lawyers, that's exactly what it has become.

It requires certain (mostly Southern) states to get "pre-clearance" of their voting-rules changes from the Justice Department. The problem, as I have written before, is that the liberal career lawyers in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division have converted the statute over the years into a weapon designed primarily to benefit the Democratic party.

These highly partisan bureaucrats have no compunction about ignoring the actual requirements of the law. And they typically exhibit a disturbingly patronizing attitude towards African-Americans.

The latest example of this transparent political mischief has, unfortunately, gone largely unreported by the media. It's an outrageous objection by the Civil Rights Division to a voting change in the small town of Kinston, N.C. The case involved a referendum by the residents of Kinston to change the elections for city council from partisan to nonpartisan. The referendum passed overwhelmingly in November 2008. But the Justice Department recently refused to pre-clear it, claiming that it discriminates against minorities.

The department's decision is as offensive as it is inexplicable. Consider that, at the time of the November 2008 election, Kinston had about 15,000 registered voters, of whom 65 percent were black. This is actually a higher registration rate than one would expect, since the 2000 census showed that the black voting-age population is just 58.8 percent of the total population. Moreover, on the town's five-member city council (elected at large), two of the councilmen are black and all five are Democrats. Although the current mayor is white, the longtime prior mayor was black.

Thus, there no evidence whatsoever that blacks face any barriers to registration and voting. And in an election in which blacks comprised the majority of registered voters and turned out in droves to support Barack Obama's candidacy, the referendum passed with a two-to-one margin (although you would never know that from reading the Justice Department's objection).

But none of these facts could dissuade the career ideologues in the Voting Section. They demonstrate a disturbing and paternalistic distrust of the capability of voters to understand the impact of the referendum vote.

The attorneys in the Voting Section also increasingly use the Voting Rights Act as primarily a political bludgeon to protect and enhance the electoral successes of the Democratic party. Thus, in the Kinston objection letter, the Department stated that "it is the partisan makeup of the general electorate" that allows the winner of the Democratic primary to win in the general election. But of course, the VRA is supposed to protect voters, not majority parties. The fact that blacks are a controlling majority in the city is essentially deemed irrelevant.

Disturbingly, the Civil Rights Division attorneys' action rests on the presumption that blacks simply cannot be trusted to make their own decisions as to which individual candidates to support, and will be presumed to vote against their own self-interest unless candidates on the ballot have the "right" party label. This approach to enforcement stands the Voting Rights Act on its head and is anathema to all of our constitutional requirements for fair elections. (More)

As Spakovsky goes on to point out in his piece, the Voting Rights Act is designed to break down racial barriers to voting in order to ensure equal opportunity for all voters, regardless of race or politics. But when enforcement is left in the hands of the militant left-wing partisans who dominate the ranks of the Civil Rights Division, the statute becomes simply another political tool, and one that is all too easily abused. This is indeed the sad reality evidenced in the division's recent objection in Kinston and its rejection of Georgia's system of using social security numbers and driver's license data to check whether prospective voters are citizens.

Posted by Abdul at October 20, 2009 8:18 AM

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