Dave Weigel, reporting on the right-wing politicization of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and its efforts to draw attention to the New Black Panther Party vote suppression case, gets an astonishing quote from career vote-suppression advocate Hans von Spakovsky:
“That's not relevant here,” said Hans von Spakovsky, a lawyer was Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights during the Bush administration. “When I worked at the [Justice Department], we would never look at election results as a way of determining whether we needed to be involved.”
During the Bush administration, they didn't like waiting for election results before determining whether or not to get involved. Instead, they just fired U.S. attorneys who refused to bring trumped up charges for partisan reasons, or in von Spakovsky's case, blocked investigations of vote suppression cases affecting minorities, because they don't, you know, vote Republican.
On the NBPP case, Weigel writes:
One problem with comparing the Philadelphia incident to the infamous crimes of the 1960s is that it didn't effectively target potential McCain voters. Rather than targeting white voters, or going to a predominantly Republican district, the NBP went to a largely African-American precinct close to downtown Philadelphia. Obama carried the precinct by a landslide, with 596 votes to only 13 votes for McCain. The Republican candidate fared worse than George W. Bush in 2004, when he won 24 votes there, but better than Bush in 2000, when he won only eight votes. In a race that Obama won by 620,478 votes statewide, the New Black Panther incident was a blip.
Republicans have tried to paint this case as an example of "reverse racism," that what the NBPP did was similar to what the KKK was doing back in the day. But the truth is that the NBPP probably wasn't trying to suppress white votes--they could have gone to a white district for that. They most likely imagined themselves as protecting black voters from evil whites who might try to keep blacks from voting. Instead, they embarrassed themselves and caught a case, providing another example of the utter uselessness of the NBPP.
But the Commission on Civil Right's obsession with this case is absurd, given that these same folks couldn't care less about say--Republicans hiring private detectives to intimidate Latino voters registered by ACORN and demand to see evidence of their citizenship. They haven't suddenly developed a reverence for the right to vote, you won't see the commission arguing for universal voter registration or an end to using social security databases that purge eligible voters. Hating the NBPP is about as far as this incarnation of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is going to go in protecting the right to vote.
UPDATE: I feel obligated to put this in perspective. Flawed Social Security databases used to check voter registrations probably disenfranchised millions of eligible voters last year. The U.S. Comission on Civil Rights is worried about the New Black Panther Party.
-- A. Serwer
