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Dismantling voting rights enforcement
May. 1st, 2007 08:39 amA little while ago I posted about perceptions of voter fraud and pointed out that to some extent, the administration's behavior in selective pursuit of fraud cases might be traced to a sincere (if, in my opinion, mistaken) view of the reality of threats to the integrity of the system.
That was the bending-over-backwards-to-be-sympathetic reading. Here is the unsympathetic reading, and it comes from someone who was actually there, in the Voting Rights Section of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division:
All this is, of course, conditional on whether we can actually believe Kengle. But everything he says is certainly perfectly consistent with the other revelations concerning goings-on at DOJ.
That was the bending-over-backwards-to-be-sympathetic reading. Here is the unsympathetic reading, and it comes from someone who was actually there, in the Voting Rights Section of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division:
From 2001 on there were repeated occasions on which I discovered after the fact that front office personnel (that is, the political appointees) had directly contacted attorneys I was supervising without first advising me or the section chief. Before this Administration such contacts were extremely rare and generally only occurred under exigent circumstances.[...]It goes on. Notice what Kengle does not say: he is very careful to insist that this is not what always goes on, that "everybody does it" is not a valid response here. Before 2001, Kengle says, the Voting Section was cautious to separate attorneys and hiring decisions from partisan pressure from the administration; now this no longer happens. It's easy in these situations to fall into a kind of lazy universal cynicism, to assume that this sort of garbage has gone on since time immemorial and the only difference is that this time somebody got caught. But it actually isn't true, and realizing that it isn't true is part of understanding the true outrage here. This is in the section of the Justice Department devoted to protecting the integrity of the vote from discriminatory meddling, and there seems to have been a particular effort to erode those protections for partisan gain. This is a strike at the heart of democracy.
Worse, such contacts could be less than well-intentioned, often seeming to occur after the front office had obtained some piece of information, or received a question or "helpful suggestion" from Republican officials or attorneys. This was a particular problem in a highprofile redistricting case involving the State of Georgia that we litigated from 2001-2003. I felt that it took every bit of my abilities to prevent the Voting Section from being hijacked in that case by pressure from the Georgia Republican Party. While I believe that with the unwavering support of my section chief Joe Rich I was successful in doing so, by late 2004 I became convinced that we no longer would be able to intercede in the same way.[...]
To put it bluntly, before 2004 the desire to politicize the Voting Section's work was evident, but it was tempered by a recognition that there were limits to doing so. That such constraints diminished over time is evidenced by the well-known and ham-fisted handling of decisions involving Texas' congressional redistricting plan in late 2003 and Georgia's voter ID law in 2005. My concerns also were greatly magnified by the evident intention of the political appointees to replace Joe Rich after the 2004 election with a new section chief who would be a willing "team player".[...]
All this is, of course, conditional on whether we can actually believe Kengle. But everything he says is certainly perfectly consistent with the other revelations concerning goings-on at DOJ.