Obama's see-no-evil, do-nothing Justice Department ignores voting rights
By: J. Christian Adams
Op-Ed Contributor
12/15/10 8:05 PM
One thing worse than a hypocrite is a hypocrite in government office. The Obama Department of Justice has plenty of hypocrites. Nowhere are they more apparent than when they attack the voting rights record of the Bush Justice Department.
Civil Rights Division Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez has become the Department's lead bamboozler. "During the prior administration, civil rights was closed for business," he told a Pittsburgh crowd last week. The Obama presidential campaign elevated the purported inactivity of the Bush DOJ voting section to a priority campaign issue, promising to "reinvigorate the enforcement activities" of the section.
Attorney General Eric Holder now travels the country trumpeting a phony "reopening" of civil rights enforcement. Perez speaks dreamily of "restoration and transformation" of the Civil Rights Division. Compliant news reporters publish this spin without a whiff of skepticism.
But after two years in power, the Obama administration has been pitifully inactive enforcing voting rights. Numbers don't lie.
During his presidential campaign, Obama bewailed the number of vote-dilution lawsuits filed by the Bush DOJ under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to protect racial minorities. Yet how many lawsuits did his DOJ bring? Exactly one.
Even the investigation of that single case, which I personally filed in March 2009, was approved during the last year of the Bush administration.
The Perez-run division is hardly "open for business" when it comes to protecting racial minorities under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Instead they've been on a two-year coffee break.
The Bush administration, in contrast, aggressively brought Section 2 cases against the city council in Euclid, Ohio, the school board in Euclid, Georgetown, S.C., Osceola County, Fla, and Port Chester, N.Y., among many others.
The contrast between the Bush and Obama DOJ is more dramatic when enforcing the foreign language provisions of the Voting Rights Act. In some parts of the country, ballots must be in Spanish, Chinese or Vietnamese under federal law. The Bush administration brought 27 lawsuits to protect language minorities. They also entered into agreements in many other jurisdictions, including some cases that have strangely vanished from the DOJ Web site -- such as a settlement I reached in Broward County, Fla. The Obama DOJ has brought only three foreign language voting lawsuits. And all three were started during the Bush DOJ.
The Bush administration filed 10 cases to enforce the very important voter assistance requirements of Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act. Only one such case had ever been filed by any prior administration and the Obama DOJ has filed nary a one.
False rhetoric and airbrushing the Justice Department Web site are the only ways you can make the Obama voting section look more productive than the Bush version.
And the lower Obama enforcement numbers don't even tell the whole story. While the lawsuit numbers are low, the rank politicization is sky-high.
Take Middlesex County, N.J.. The Obama DOJ rejected a lawsuit to protect Spanish-speaking voters in Middlesex even though, for two decades, Middlesex completely failed to comply with federal law. Election materials there have never been in Spanish and the Bush DOJ would have filed an immediate lawsuit had this circumstance been known.
So why didn't the "reopened" voting section sue Middlesex County? Simply because Democrats hold all seven seats on the Middlesex County Board and, according to sources with direct knowledge, this DOJ wasn't going to sue Democrats for failing to provide Spanish language ballots.
Perhaps the Obama DOJ is just setting sail and they deserve more time to get their sea legs, right? Wrong.
In the first two years of the Bush administration, seven cases were brought to protect the voting rights of racial or language minorities. During the same time frame, Obama's DOJ has brought just four lawsuits.
Teddy Roosevelt called hypocrisy "a particularly revolting vice." It is doubly so when the hypocrisy involves presidential campaign rhetoric fused with racial invective.
Instead of bringing voting rights cases, the voting section is busy dismissing them. The New Black Panther Party voter-intimidation case and a lawsuit against Missouri for dead voters on the rolls were both spiked by the Holder DOJ.
Though accomplishing next to nothing, the voting section has added dozens of new lawyers and support staff. How do these highly paid bureaucrats spend days with such a lifeless caseload? According to multiple sources with direct knowledge, by watching movies, surfing the web, and reading novels behind closed doors.
Other work-starved employees in the voting section have adopted banker's hours, or a Ferris Bueller-style attitude toward showing up at all. Offices and desks sit empty throughout the day.
Perez recently told the leftist American Constitution Society, "As we rebuild our ranks, we will be smarter and work more efficiently to ensure that we maximize our new resources. We will hold people accountable."
Sure he will. Either Perez suffers from that "particularly revolting vice," or an acute detachment from the reality of what is happening in his own voting section.
J. Christian Adams is an election lawyer who served in the Voting Rights Section at the U.S. Department of Justice. His Web site is www.electionlawcenter.com.
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