Conservatives have made copious use of the term "race-neutral enforcement" to refer to how the Civil Rights Division should conduct business and to accuse the Obama Justice Department of doing the opposite. Bush-era Voting Section Chief Christopher Coates said today in his testimony before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission that Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Julie Fernandes stated flatly that the voting section was only going to bring "traditional voting-rights cases" on behalf of "racial and language minorities."
Conservatives have bolstered their narrative with the support of mere anecdotes like these. The problem is that the Obama Justice Department intervened on behalf of white voters in Mississippi some weeks ago, in relation to a case both conservative activist and former voting-section attorney J. Christian Adams and Coates said was received with hostility from lawyers in the division when it was originally filed.
So we know that, despite the rumors of an Obama administration "policy" of not intervening on behalf of white voters, it's a fact that this isn't the case. Second, Coates' spirited defense of the Bush-era leadership violating civil-service laws calls into question his judgment about his definition of "neutrality."
Third, as a matter of mere numbers, we know that enforcement of civil-rights laws on behalf of minorities, with the exception of voting-section cases on behalf of language minorities, plummeted during the Bush administration. We know that not as a result of speculation or sensational anecdotes but as a matter of numbers, thanks to a Government Accountability Office report released last year. Not only that, but civil-rights groups point out that the Bush-era voting section didn't file any Section 11(b) voter-intimidation cases on behalf of minority voters, just in favor of whites.
In his testimony before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission today, Coates couldn't offer a good explanation for why the Justice Department spent years investigating a 2006 voter-intimidation case in Pima, Arizona, involving armed members of the anti-immigrant Minutemen standing outside a polling place videotaping Hispanic voters but never filed a case. He said the NBPP case was easier because of the video, and that the Minutemen weren't as close to the polling place.
“If the pistol had been drawn, that would be a different set of facts, and those facts would militate in favor of a Section 11(b) investigation,” said Coates, who said he hadn't worked on that particular case. So the NBPP members' baton, uniforms, and boots, cited in the NBPP complaint, were sufficiently intimidating to file a case, but the Minutemen would have been intimidating only if one of them actually drew their gun.
What conservatives really mean when they talk about "race-neutral enforcement" isn't actually race-neutral. What they mean is that the Civil Rights Division should prioritize cases involving white voters at the expense of others. That's not deliberate; it's just that the cases involving white voters happen to be the ones that resonate with them.
