Hans von Spakovsky, a Bush political appointee in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and career vote-supression advocate, has long argued that the career attorneys in the Voting Rights Section resisted filing voter suppression cases against black plaintiffs in Noxubee, Mississippi and in the infamous New Black Panther Case.
As I've explained before, the use of Justice Department resources to prosecute the New Black Panther case would have been an unusual use of federal resources given the lack of "pattern and practice" -- in other words, a widespread systemic effort to suppress votes.
The Noxubee case however, is regarded by many civil rights vets to be legitimate. So it's interesting that von Spakovsky claims that the career attorneys at the Justice Department resisted filing the case.
The former Voting Section chief even deleted the recommendation to file suit from the memo sent up to the Bush political appointees running the division. Other partisan career lawyers refused to work on the case. One who went to Noxubee County as an observer admitted to another lawyer that if he had seen the same type of illegal behavior being committed against black voters, he would have been outraged. But he wanted nothing to do with a suit filed on behalf of white voters.
Von Spakovsky doesn't name the former Voting Section Chief, Joe Rich, in his first column, but he did in his most recent one, where a similar claim is repeated:
I discovered that the chief of the Voting Section, Joe Rich, actually deleted from Coates's initial memorandum to the Front Office the recommendation that an official investigation be opened. Rich’s blatant political activism dumbfounded Bush’s political appointees. Ironically, Rich later became one of the most prominent critics of the supposed “politicization” of the CRD during the Bush administration.
That would be the "politicization" scandal that von Spakovsky was at the center of.
At any rate, von Spakovsky seems unable to get his story straight. You'll notice that in the first paragraph, he claims that Rich "deleted the recommendation to file suit." In the second, he claims that Rich deleted "the recommendation that an official investigation be opened." These are two entirely different things.
Rich initially had to sign off on the recommendation to investigate voter suppression in Noxubee County, and then he had to sign off on filing the suit. Von Spakovsky accuses Rich of deleting one, and then the other.
I spoke to Rich, and he claims he didn't "delete" any memorandum. Instead, in the fall of 2003, he recommended that the Criminal Division of the Justice Department look into the Noxubee case. Months later, after the case was sent back to the Voting Rights Section, Rich himself signed the complaint Coates had filed.
A key detail in von Spakovsky's example of left-wing lawyers conspiring to sabotage a legit voting rights case against a black plaintiff appears to be untrue, or at the very least a case of projection. A recent Government Accountability Report found a "sharp decline" in the enforcement of voting rights protections designed to protect minority voters while von Spakovsky and his buddies were running things.
-- A. Serwer
