Bradley J. Schlozman was appointed to serve as the United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri under an Attorney General Appointment on March 23, 2006.
According to the website "prior to assuming his current post, Mr. Schlozman served as the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division at the United States Department of Justice. In this capacity, Mr. Schlozman supervised all activities of the Civil Rights Division, which is comprised of over 700 employees, including 356 attorneys. The Civil Rights Division is responsible for enforcing federal civil rights statutes, including those statutes that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, sex, disability, religion, and national origin in education, employment, credit, housing, public accommodations and facilities, voting, and certain federally funded and conducted programs."
Mr. Schlozman is in the news this morning because his hometown newspaper is the Kansas City Star. The Star is a McClatchy paper. In an article published this morning by Greg Gordon, Margaret Talev and Marisa Taylor entitled "New U.S. attorneys seem to have partisan records" it is reported that:
Since 2005, McClatchy Newspapers has found, Bush has appointed at least three U.S. attorneys who had worked in the Justice Department's civil rights division when it was rolling back longstanding voting-rights policies aimed at protecting predominantly poor, minority voters
One of those lawyers was Bradley Schlozman, who as the civil rights division's deputy chief, "agreed in 2005 to reverse the career staff's recommendations to challenge a Georgia law that would have required voters to pay $20 for photo IDs and in some cases travel as far as 30 miles to obtain the ID card." Later a federal judge threw out the Georgia law, calling it an unconstitutional, Jim Crow-era poll tax.
In an interview Mr. Schlozman was asked if it was true that he drove out long time professionals from his department. He denied the allegation saying that "what I tried to do was to depoliticize the hiring process." He went on to say that "We hired people across the political spectrum."
David Kurtz at TPMmuckraker asks "how exactly did Schlozman know he was hiring people from across the political spectrum? . . . . Schlozman says he made a concerted effort to "depoliticize the hiring process" by hiring "people from across the political spectrum." That certainly seems to suggest that political affiliation was indeed taken into account."
Kurtz suggests that since we are talking about career people in the civil rights division, a division of the Justice Department the Republicans have long considered to be a hotbed of liberal activism (In this instance the basic loyal Bushie definition of liberal activism is insuring poor white people, blacks and Hispanics have the vote.)
So any alleged politicization that existed in the division before Bush arrived on the scene is code for too many perceived Democrats (again, DOJ would have no way of directly knowing the political affiliations of its career prosecutors) enforcing the nation's civil rights laws too vigorously.
Missouri is light blue. I wonder if, as the McClatchy article suggests, the loyal Bushie in the Western District of Missouri has orders to take steps to aggressively prosecute Democratic get out the vote efforts under the Voter Fraud umbrella. If his anti-voter fraud efforts focus on very, very blue Kansas City, we will know. Anyway Blue Girl, you ought to know your local interim US Attorney appointee.
