Ryan J. Reilly takes a look at J. Christian Adams, the conservative partisan hired during an era of right wing politicization in the Civil Rights Division of The Justice Department who is at the center of the infamous Black Panther case conservatives are using as a cudgel against the Obama DoJ:
As a Virginia lawyer, he once filed an ethics complaint in Florida against the brother of Hillary Clinton, and later helped edit a book that questions the usefulness of the Voting Rights Act that he is now tasked with enforcing.
More recently, Adams asked a question at a meeting of the conservative Federalist Society in Washington that appeared skeptical of affirmative action, wrote a piece for the American Spectator that likened President Barack Obama’s world view to that of Nazi appeasers and argued on a conservative blogging network that health care reform is a threat to liberty.
Reilly also makes the extremely relevant point that the section of the Voting Rights Act invoked in the Black Panther case is one that is rarely used--the last time in 1992 against then-Senator Jesse Helms for what was a massive statewide effort to disenfranchise black voters. The Bush Justice Department invoked the section twice on behalf of white voters--and in the Black Panther case, against two foolish men who stood outside a polling place in a black precinct, one of them holding a baton, both imagining themselves the guardians of the black vote.
It's a rather perfect example of the conservative obsession with "reverse racism", and a reminder just how corrupted the Civil Rights Division under Bush really was.
-- A. Serwer
