Over at the Washington Examiner, J.P. Friere's provides the conservative brief for continuing to investigate the New Black Panther case. Friere writes, "Refusing to prosecute the Black Panthers case...seems itself an egregious omission when it comes to lax enforcement" and quotes small paragraph from a piece where I explain exactly why it isn't, before quoting four paragraphs from Bush-era attorney Hans Von Spakovsky, the former lieutenant of disgraced Bush-era Civil Rights Division Head Bradley Schlozman.
The problem is not that the New Black Panther case involves "reverse racism," although that partially explains conservative obsession with the story. It's not that the case was filed by conservative ideologues who were hired or whose stock rose during a period of politicization, although it is related to that. It's that the section of the Voting Rights Act under which the New Black Panther case was filed had only been used once before the Bush administration, to prevent a statewide voter caging effort aimed at black people by then-South Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms. Using it on a couple of hapless dudes in berets standing outside a polling station in a mostly black precinct, one holding a baton and all imagining themselves the guardians of the black vote against evil white man, is the equivalent of using a tactical nuclear weapon against a mosquito--or, in geek terms, using a lightsaber to lance a boil.
Prosecuting this case would be a colossal waste of federal government resources, and it's the reason why Abigail Thernstrom, a Republican appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights who wants to dismantle the 1965 Voting Rights Act, thinks the case is a waste of the comission's time. (Thernstrom is guilty only of consistency here -- if you believe the NVRA allows an unwarranted intrusion of federal power, you'd also be bothered by its capricious use.) Now if the original case was a waste of the Justice Department's resources, and investigating its dismissal is a waste of the commission's resources, why exactly should the Justice Department waste even more time on the case by helping the commission keep the investigation going? Because conservatives want to get together on the taxpayer's dime and show videos of black people getting sprayed with firehoses and attacked by dogs in some farcical attempt to convince themselves that being a white person today is like being a black person in America in the 1960s?
Again, these kinds of priorities explain why the Bush administration's Civil Rights Division was such a politicized place. The Bush-era DoJ was perfectly willing to deploy the full resources of the federal government in instances in which they perceived anti-white racism, but simply didn't feel like enforcing the law when voters of black and Latino descent were being intimidated. The question of lax enforcement during this period isn't a matter of anecdotes; it's a matter of numbers, and the numbers speak for themselves.
Also, not to cremate a dead horse, but conservative obsession with this case is another example of the phenomenon of conservative epistemic closure. Thernstrom is the only Republican appointee on the commission with a background in voting-rights issues. The rest are mostly affirmative-action opponents who are reliant on the deranged writings of von Spakovsky, a man who was both at the center of the politicization scandal in the Justice Department and who thinks the Obama DoJ is racist against white people, to understand the issues at stake in the case.
-- A. Serwer
