Hans von Spakovsky, a former counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and Bush-era official at the heart of the politicized hiring scandal at the Department of Justice, has taken to the pages of National Review to excoriate the Justice Department for the transfer of former Voting Rights Section head Christopher Coates to the U.S. Attorney’s office in South Carolina.
Von Spakovsky, a conservative ideologue with a history of agitating for voting restrictions that disproportionately harm minorities, defends the roles that Coates and voting section attorney J. Christian Adams played in the New Black Panther Case, complaining that the Division’s “sneering liberal majority” ostracized them.
Like Coates, Adams and the entire New Black Panther party trial team are consummate professionals who seek to enforce the laws without political or ideological considerations. Unfortunately, such lawyers are a rarity within the Civil Rights Division, which is without doubt one of the most insidiously partisan places I have ever worked, inside or outside of government.
Coates, who von Spakovsky’s disgraced former boss Bradley Schlozman described as a “true member of the team” (by team, he meant “conservatives”) and J. Christian Adams, a conservative ideologue who has written for Pajamas Media and compared the president to Nazi appeasers at The American Spectator. These men are, in von Spakovsky’s mind, simply “professionals who try to enforce the law”.
The law in question is a section of the Voting Rights Act that, prior to the Bush administration, was only used once in 1992 to prevent a statewide voter caging scheme targeting at black voters that was initiated by then Senator Jesse Helms. Coates wanted to use the same section to go after a few New Black Panthers standing outside a voting booth in a black neighborhood. At the same time, the Division was ignoring reports of minority voter intimidation. This rabid pursuit of “reverse racism” is something von Spakovsky imagines is “non-ideological.”
Let’s be clear what’s happening here: Von Spakovsky, along with Schlozman and former Voting Section Chief John Tanner spent years ensuring that instead of “civil rights people,” the Civil Rights Division would be staffed with “real Americans” rather than people they referred to as”big libs” and “adherents to Mao’s Little Red Book.” I’m not making that up, that’s in the joint Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility Report that found Schlozman had violated civil service laws with his hiring practices. During that time, enforcement of civil rights protections that didn’t coincide with the GOP’s immediate political interests plummeted. Now that the Division has back to doing what it was meant to do, Republicans are crying “politicization”.
“Over the past year, all hiring within the CRD has been done on a purely partisan, ideological basis,” von Spakovsky complains, echoing exactly what the joint Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility report said about him and his colleages. “Doubtless that will continue to happen over the next three years.”
Tell you what, while von Spakovsky is clearly an expert on politicized hiring, I think I’ll just wait and see.
— A. Serwer
