The New Black Panther Party case is being given new life after Inspector General Glenn Fine told two Republican congressmen that he was opening a "review" into the Civil Rights Division's enforcement of civil-rights laws in response to Rep. Lamar Smith's and Rep. Frank Wolf's inquiries into the NBPP case.
This review will examine, among other issues, the types of cases brought by the Voting Section and any changes in these types of cases over time; any changes in Voting Section enforcement policies or procedures over time; whether the Voting Section has enforced the civil rights laws in a non-discriminatory manner; and whether any Voting Section employees have been harassed for participating in the investigation or prosecution of particular matters.
This is really somewhat extraordinary. There's literally no evidence that the Voting Section has not "enforced the civil rights laws in a non-discriminatory matter." Despite conservative complaints, the Voting Section has intervened on behalf of white voters in Mississippi. The notion that the Voting Section is politicized rests on the discredited case of a former Republican activist who was hired during an era in which the Bush administration was only hiring lawyers with conservative credentials.
While the conservative allegations about the Voting Section rest on a single voting intimidation case in which no voters came forward and said they were intimidated, we have actual numbers that quantify the extent of the politicization of civil-rights enforcement during the Bush era. Last year, a Government Accountability Office Report found a "significant drop in the enforcement of several major antidiscrimination and voting rights laws," as well as a " a sharp decline in enforcement," of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. During the same period, the division pursued a nationwide hunt for voter fraud that found next to nothing. For some reason, Fine never saw fit to investigate, during the eight years of Bush's term he spent as inspector general, whether civil rights laws were "being enforced in a non-discriminatory manner."
Not only that, but while OIG and the Office of Professional Responsibility did investigate allegations of politicized hiring in the Civil Rights Division, it wasn't until 2007. Even then, that probe occurred in relation to an investigation into the U.S. attorney firings; OIG didn't seem all that interested in investigating before that despite the fact that the division was bleeding attorneys, having lost 236 out of 350 in the entire division between 2003 and 2007. The extent of the politicization of the hiring process had already been laid out by Charlie Savage in the Boston Globe in July of 2006. It was public knowledge, but OIG/OPR didn't act until after the Democratic takeover of Congress, which came along with pledges to investigate the Civil Rights Division.
My question is, why is OIG's threshold so much lower this time around?
