What Has Become Of The Civil Rights Division Under The Bush Administration?

Well, today is the 50th birthday of the Civl Rights Division, and as one of the local constitutionalists here, Blue Girl has asked me to write my thoughts.

That reminds me of a joke about a lottery in Bombay. Thousands of people in the square, listening for their number to be called. The crier calls out winning numbers, gives out money, cars, vacation cruises, etc. working up the top prize.

Gets to 1st prize (the one just -below- the grand prize), and after congratulating the winner, announces the prize as dinner with Indira Gandhi.

The incredulous winner shouts "What?! These other people get cars, week-long paid cruise, homes ... and I get a dinner date with Gandhi?! FUCK Gandhi!!"

Comes back the crier ... "Oh no ... that's the GRAND prize."

And what in the world does that have to do with the 50th birthday of the Civil Rights Division? Everythng; because under the seven years of Bush Administration rule, the Civil Rights Division has become a hollow shell of what it was, what it is supposed to be. It has become a pathetic joke. Heckuva job Bushie.

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Schlozman out at Department of "Just Us"

Bradley Schlozman has resigned, sneaking out last week, his exit unannounced. An exit like that is truly an embarrassment for such a high-profile Loyal Bushie. That is called leaving not with a bang, but with the proverbial whimper. Schlozman skulks away a pariah in the legal community, an abject failure, having seen his grand voter suppression schemes blow up in his face, revealing to the entire world that he is nothing more than a gormless cheat. (Rather like the much ballyhooed and terribly overestimated Karl Rove.)

I take personal the truncation of the Department of Justice. The feckless Schlozman was the U.S. Attorney in my city, installed without a Senate confirmation after Todd Graves was wrongly fired. From that position, Schlozman abused his power to derail the political career of Katherine Shields, a prominent Kansas City Democrat. He replaced the ninth fired U.S. Attorney, Todd Graves, who was very much John Ashcroft’s man, and had a sense of right and wrong, and refused to tamper with elections. Schlozman had no such qualms of conscience. He came to us from the Voting Rights Division, where his purpose was to suppress the rights of groups that were likely to vote for Democrats. One of the most revolting schemes he cooked up was the caging strategy that was used to deny African American members of the armed services their Constitutional right to vote. He and fellow political operative Hans Von Spakovsky schemed to politicize the hiring process for career Justice Department officials and eviscerate the Voting Rights Division. They were successful in doing so, but at steep cost. Throughout the Justice Department, positions remain unfilled. People simply do not want to work for the Department in this politicized environment, feeling that any connection with the Gonzalez Department of Just Us would be a kiss of death to a career they want to see continue past January 2009.

Schlozman is merely the latest perjuring rat to desert the sinking ship that is the Gonzalez Just Us Department. He is the latest hack to leave, joining Goodling, Sampson, Taylor, McNulty, Elston, and Mercer…just off the top of my head.

Like the others, he will not be missed. This is just more good riddance to bad rubbish.

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Schlozman Didn't Just Want Republicans, He Wanted The Right Kind Of Republicans

This morning The Washington Post's Carol D. Leonnig takes an in depth look at the staffing practices of our old buddy Bradley Schlozman during his time as head of the civil rights division. Her article begins

Karen Stevens, Tovah Calderon and Teresa Kwong had a lot in common. They had good performance ratings as career lawyers in the Justice Department's civil rights division. And they were minority women transferred out of their jobs two years ago -- over the objections of their immediate supervisors -- by Bradley Schlozman, then the acting assistant attorney general for civil rights.

Schlozman ordered supervisors to tell the women that they had performance problems or that the office was overstaffed. But one lawyer, Conor Dugan, told colleagues that the recent Bush appointee had confided that his real motive was to "make room for some good Americans" in that high-impact office, according to four lawyers who said they heard the account from Dugan.

Leonnig further reports that "Schlozman asked a supervisor if a career lawyer who had voted for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a onetime political rival of President Bush, could still be trusted."

"When he said he didn't engage in political hiring, most of us thought that was just laughable," said one lawyer in the section, referring to Schlozman's June 5 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Everything Schlozman did was political. And he said so."

It seems Schlozman was and remains a loyal Bushie to the core. Less than a year and an half until the next election. I guess then he will turn into a pumpkin, because even if he stays out of prison he won't have much future as a lawyer.

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Is Hans von Spakovsky a Jerk?

I was chatting with a friend last weekend and he mentioned, not at all off-handedly, that he sat beside Hans von Spakovsky during a recent luncheon. My friend is a lawyer who regularly does election law for his big corporate overlords. I will refer to him as Corpulent Juris. For those of you who need a refresher, von Spakovsky is the Civil Rights Division muck up who was up in front of the Senate on Wednesday trying to win approval to serve on the Federal Election Commission.

CJ said that Hans "is even more dislikable in person than his picture, or his name, suggests."

Really? Go on...

"He was a smug, I'm smarter that you, sanctimonious puke."

Is this true? I have no doubt that he is smarter than my friend. Being the 'smartest guy in the room' in a room that includes CJ is (as the old phrase says) like being the world's tallest midget. But is Hans von Spicklehammer a dislikable sanctimonious puke?

Mike Pitts says "Yes!" Rick Hansen posted a letter from Pitts over at Election Law Blog on Thursday. Pitts, who is now an assistant professor of law at Indiana University, is also a former DOJ civil rights attorney who worked under von Spastic. He writes that he hadn't really opposed Hans' nomination until he watched the hearings and read the letter his former colleagues had sent in opposition to von Spittakes' nomination to a full term.

Pitts says that there are three reasons to "question Hans' fitness to serve on the Federal Election Commission": his lack of open-mindedness, his "needlessly antagonistic" managerial style, and his "targeting" of those who disagree with him.

Describing the antagonistic managerial style, Pitts says:

If one were to subpoena the e-mails Hans sent to career lawyers it would be clear...that he was typically an advocate for a particular viewpoint, actively worked to convince his superiors (to the extent they needed to be convinced) of his viewpoint, and did this in a very hostile, adversarial, and slash-and-burn manner. When Senator Feinstein asked Hans why so many career lawyers had signed a letter opposing his nomination...in my opinion, a truthful answer would have been: Because I was a real jerk to a lot of career people."

But, then, Pitts also says that Hans' antagonism "stood in contrast to his affability on a more personal level". Which now just makes me question Corpulent Juris' entire characterization of his discussion with the man.

CJ said that he asked von Spksvmelijy about the controversy surrounding his tenure at the DOJ. Hans' response was that "it's very typical of Democrats to criticize the voting rights policy of a Republican administration."

What a puke.

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Wink, Wink, Nod, Nod

There are a lot of folks don't take the time to read the outstanding work of McClatchy Washington Bureau's Greg Gordon. Sadly, many of you may be forced to read abridged versions of his stories. I know that Fired Up Missouri routinely criticizes the Kansas City Star for making Gordon's stories more GOP friendly. Gordon is the kind of reporter who doesn't pull any punches. He is really focused on the Justice Department.

Today's story entitled Complaints abound over enforcement of voter registration law is no exception. In 1993, the Congress passed the "National Voter Registration Act," requiring state public assistance agencies to simultaneously offer applicants an opportunity to register to vote. Initial compliance was pretty good. During the period 1995-1996 state agencies registered 2.6 million voters.

Somebody figured out that poor people vote Democratic. Fast forward to 2003-2004 and compliance with the law, especially in red state America, had fallen dramatically. During that two year period just about a million voters were registered under the program. The United States Department of Justice has enforcement responsibilities. They are supposed to encourage states to comply. States have lots of reasons not to comply. Especially red states.

Gordon reports that in 2004 representatives of three public interest groups, Project Vote, Demos, a New York-based think tank, and People for the American Way, a civil rights group, met with Joseph Rich, former chief of the Justice Department's voting rights section, Alexander Acosta, the civil rights chief, and Hans von Spakovsky, then Acosta's voting counsel.

The groups' representatives told the Justice Department officials: "Look, we have physical hard evidence that states aren't doing this (enforcing the law.) They're taking their eye off the ball. We want to see some enforcement." . . .

Acosta and von Spakovsky listened quietly and then made comments to the effect of "hmmm" and "that's interesting," but took no action.

Despite claims to the contrary there has been very little enforcement during the Bush administration. Compliance in many states is still woefully inadequate. For example, Gordon reports that Missouri recently advised the federal Election Assistance Commission that its agencies took 15,568 applications in 2005-2006, down from 143,135 in 1995-1996.

When an investigator for Project Vote crisscrossed Missouri last spring, however, the picture wasn't so bright.

Nyana Miller said she went to 14 public-assistance agencies in the St. Louis and Kansas City metropolitan areas in early May and asked for benefit applications.

"Nobody ever asked me, `Would you also like to register to vote?'" as required by the law, she said.

I have focused on Missouri to make sure our Missouri readers have an opportunity to read what Gordon has discovered about their home state.

Republicans don't want the good people in the DoJ to work very hard enforcing the law. They are engaged in a campaign to suppress the Democratic vote. Republicans don't offer poor people much hope so they tend to vote Democratic. Gordon reports that according to Joseph Rich

without enforcement of the registration requirement of the 1993 law, which a Democratic Congress passed, fewer Democrats are signed up to vote. Similarly, he said, purges aimed at ineligible voters hurt Democrats by knocking poor voters off the rolls even though they're legitimately registered because they frequently change addresses.

To maximize their program to purge voter rolls, Republicans need to make sure state agencies aren't re-registering poor voters.

Gordon does go on to report improvement in some states such as North Carolina, Tennessee, Colorado and Maryland. Here is a link if you want to read a detailed report on the subject entitled Ten Years Later The National Voter Registration Act in Public Assistance Agencies, 1995-2005,A Promise Unfulfilled.

Oh, Hans von Spakovsky is currently a Federal Elections Commissioner. He is scheduled for a confirmation hearing on June 13, 2007. Bet that will be fun.

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So Who Is Hans von Spakovsky, Anyway

Hans von Spakovsky's name has come up as one of the loyal Bushies who, along with Brad Schlozman, made sure that only the "right kind of people" were hired by the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division. What is known about Hans.

Currently he is a member of the Federal Elections Commission. According to his official FEC bio

prior to his appointment, Commissioner von Spakovsky served as Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Justice, where he provided expertise and advice on voting and election issues, including of the Help America Vote Act of 2002. . . . (before) entering public service, Commissioner von Spakovsky worked as a government affairs consultant, in a corporate legal department, and in private practice. He received a J.D. from the Vanderbilt University School of Law in 1984 and a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981. He is a member of the Georgia and Tennessee bars. He is a first-generation American whose parents immigrated to the United States in 1951. They met in a refugee camp as displaced persons after the end of World War II. He is originally from Huntsville, Alabama.

Boring stuff but his official bio hides much. Source Watch says Von Spakovsky was orignially appointed to the Commission on January 4, 2006, by President Bush as a recess appointment. A recess appointment? That's unusual. I wonder why?

Well it seems the administration probably thought he couldn't be confirmed by the Senate. His problems all go back to his ground breaking voter suppression work.

The Associated Press's Deb Reichmann reported January 5, 2006 that Senatory Ted Kennedy

"said von Spakovsky, a Justice Department lawyer who was Republican Party chairman in Fulton County, Ga., worked toward requiring Georgia voters to have a photo identification - a requirement critics said would harm black voters. Kennedy also contended that von Spakovsky was involved in a decision that rejected a recommendation of career Justice Department lawyers in a Texas redistricting case. Those lawyers had concluded that the redistricting plan violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because it eliminated several districts where minorities had substantial voting power and illegally diluted black and Hispanic voting power."

VoteTrustUSA's Warren Stewart wrote in December, 2005,

Most of the attention has focused on Republican Hans von Spakovsky, a lawyer in the Department of Justice Voting Section. Von Spakovsky has supported state programs to require voters to have photo identification and was one of the two Department of Justice lawyers who overruled the DOJ experts recommendation that the DOJ file a formal objection to Rep. Tom DeLay’s Texas redistricting plan under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Senator Ted Kennedy has said that von Spakovsky "may be at the heart of the political interference that is undermining the [Justice] Department's enforcement of federal civil laws."

On April 19, 2007 Digby wrote authoritatively about von Spakovsky in a piece entitled Hans Across America .

Von Spakovsky is not just another Atlanta lawyer. He had for years been involved with a GOP front group called the "Voter Integrity Project" (VIP) which was run by none other than Helen Blackwell, wife of notorious conservative operative Morton Blackwell. (Many of you will remember him as the guy who handed out the "purple heart" bandages at the 2004 GOP convention but he's actually much better known for years of running the dirty tricks school "The Leadership Institute" and is even credited with coining the name "Moral Majority." Let's just say he's been a playah in GOP circles for a long time --- and the VIP is one of his projects.

Digby's long article continues:

I'm sure everyone is aware by now that the recent study by the NY Times pretty much takes voter fraud off the table as anything but a partisan Republican tool for suppressing the Democratic vote:

Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

Frankly you had to be something of an historical illiterate not to recognize from the beginning that these folks are up to the same tricks they've been using for decades. They tried mightily, with everything they had, the federal government, the Republican Lawyers Association, the country awash in patriotic paranoia, and they still couldn't prove this case --- even crookedly they couldn't do it. In fact, their insistence on finding it where there was none is what has caused their whole edifice to crumble.

He concludes by quoting J.Gerald Herbert's February 10, 2007, article entitled So exactly where were you, Hans von Spakovsky, on the nights in question?

But even putting aside his controversial tenure at DOJ, von Spakovsky’s performance at the FEC over the last year independently raises questions of whether he is worthy of Senate confirmation. His comments at FEC meetings have often been caustic and extraneous to the issue at hand. He has consistently scoffed at the spirit of campaign finance laws, thumbing his nose at the law as he seeks to help create routes of circumvention. He even accuses those reformers who seek regulation of the role of money in our political process as attempting to take us back to the days of the Alien and Sedition Acts. This is an easy accusation to make, and von Spakovsky has employed it a number of times, and it certainly is easier to attack those he disagrees with rather than to explain principled reasons for his own actions.

The Senate Rules Committee hearings will begin soon. When they do, the American people have the right to know all the details of von Spakovsky’s roles in both the Texas and Georgia matters, and his handling of FEC matters as a recess appointee. That record, if compiled, will make the vote on his confirmation quite easy.

If you want to learn more about Hans service to the Bush Administration and Republican Voter Suppression read Herbert's entire article. It is a sorry tale, indeed. Then again, what do you expect from a loyal Bushie.

Note: Recess appointments don't last forever. As the Herbert quote indicates, he has now been nominated for a permanent appointment, his nomination is being considered by the Senate's Committee on Rules and Administration for a term expiring April 30, 2011. I wonder how his nomination is going to be received.

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Congress Beginning To Take Notice of Bradley Schlozman

McClatchy's Greg Gordon and Margaret Talev are reporting this morning that

Congressional investigators are beginning to focus on accusations that a top civil rights official at the Justice Department illegally hired lawyers based on their political affiliations, especially for sensitive voting rights jobs. . . . .

A congressional aide, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that the House and Senate Judiciary Committees want to look beyond Goodling to see whether other department officials may have skewed recruiting and hiring to favor Republican applicants. Investigators have heard allegations that Schlozman showed a political bias in hiring and hope the department will permit him to be interviewed voluntarily, the aide said.

The story indicates that Claire McCaskill really wants to put Schlozman under oath.

UPDATE: Paul Kiel at TPMMuckraker is reporting that since 2003 not a single black has been hired by the criminal section of Civil Rights Division. As a result there are only 2 black attorneys out of 50 in the criminal section.

As Richard Ugelow, the former deputy section chief of the employment section in the Civil Rights Division puts it, "We would sue employers for having numbers like that." Ugelow, you might have guessed, is one of the dozens of career lawyers who have left the division in the past six years.

ABC's Washington D.C. affiliate WJLA-TV deserves credit for crunching the numbers. Kiel notes:

The Justice Department responded to WJLA-TV's story by saying that the Civil Rights Division as a whole is the most diverse office in the Department of Justice.

I guess they just don't want black lawyers charging and trying white businessmen. That could be bad for Republican fundraising.

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