Von Spakovsky and Schlozman, The Tweedledee and Tweedledum of Republican Voter Suppression

Next week, unless he decides to quit, (my bet) there will be a confirmation hearing for Hans Von Spakovsky to the Federal Election Commission.

This afternoon the Brennen Center for Justice and the Lawyers Committee sponsored a press conference providing background information about Von Spakovsky's role in the Republican voter suppression campaign. The presser was held at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. The questions were answered by Joseph Rich, former chief of the Voting Rights Division, of the Civil Rights Division of the USDoJ's Professional Staff.

Unfortunately, I live a thousand miles away. As much as I would like I just couldn't attend. Because Von Spakovsky is the next big name on the voter suppression hit parade, I am looking for a complete transcript. We will hear a lot about Hans during the coming week.

Because they office in DC and they have a real budget, ThinkProgress was able to send a reporter. (Blue girl, you need to do something about that.)

The press conference took a 1/2 step away from Von Spakovsky when one of the reporters ask Rich questions about Bradley Schlozman and the ACORN indictments. You will recall that Schlozman is adamant that Craig Donsanto, the director of the Election Crimes branch in the Public Integrity section, ordered him to go forward with the indictments in the face of express directions published the manual Donsanto wrote. ThinkProgress is reporting this evening that Rich believes

“Schlozman’s the person who recommended those lawsuits, he pushed to get them, and I suspect [Schlozman] pressured Donsanto.”

According to ThinkProgress, Rich said, “I’ve heard that Schlozman talked to [Michael] Elston, which indicated he may have gone over Donsanto’s head to get approval.”

That kind of pressure might explain why Schlozman was so sure Donsanto would back him up even though everyone agrees the indictments flew in the face of Donsanto's own manual, DoJ rules and long standing tradition.

Whatever rock you turn over in this voter suppression mess you find Von Spakovsky and Schlozman. They are virtually Tweedledee and Tweedledum. I wonder how high up the food chain we have to go to find their master?

This has been an interesting exercise. I have learned how to spell some funny sounding German names.

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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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Just Us instead of Justice is Injustice

Both my paralegal and my associate tell me I have been grumpy today. I know they are right. Since lunch my encounters with them and with a couple of clients have been tense.

I have been wondering why I have been so grumpy. Nothing any of them have done. Then it struck me, just after lunch I read two very important articles on the net. The first is a Boston Globe article about a speech Ted Kennedy made yesterday in which he

accused President Bush of using the Department of Justice to further his administration's "right-wing ideology," saying that veteran prosecutors were replaced by political operatives in key states to ensure that "reliable partisans" are in place in time for the 2008 presidential election.

The second is an LA Times OP-Ed by Joseph Rich in which he points out that

At least two of the recently fired U.S. attorneys, John McKay in Seattle and David C. Iglesias in New Mexico, were targeted largely because they refused to prosecute voting fraud cases that implicated Democrats or voters likely to vote for Democrats.

So far none of this is news to me or readers of this blog. What Rich really drives home is what makes me so grumpy.

This pattern also extended to hiring. In March 2006, Bradley Schlozman was appointed interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo. Two weeks earlier, the administration was granted the authority to make such indefinite appointments without Senate confirmation. That was too bad: A Senate hearing might have uncovered Schlozman's central role in politicizing the civil rights division during his three-year tenure.

Schlozman, for instance, was part of the team of political appointees that approved then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's plan to redraw congressional districts in Texas, which in 2004 increased the number of Republicans elected to the House. Similarly, Schlozman was acting assistant attorney general in charge of the division when the Justice Department OKd a Georgia law requiring voters to show photo IDs at the polls. These decisions went against the recommendations of career staff, who asserted that such rulings discriminated against minority voters. The warnings were prescient: Both proposals were struck down by federal courts.

Schlozman continued to influence elections as an interim U.S. attorney. Missouri had one of the closest Senate races in the country last November, and a week before the election, Schlozman brought four voter fraud indictments against members of an organization representing poor and minority people. This blatantly contradicted the department's long-standing policy to wait until after an election to bring such indictments because a federal criminal investigation might affect the outcome of the vote. The timing of the Missouri indictments could not have made the administration's aims more transparent.

That is what has made me so grumpy. I can't be sure Democrats who might be charged in the Western District of Missouri are receiving justice or a Just Us from the local US Attorney. His background puts a whole new cast on the recent charge filed against well known Democrat Katherine Shields during her run for mayor of Kansas City. I will never be able to have much confidence in the winner, Blue Girl's candidate, closet Republican Mark Funkhouser. Sometimes reading an op-ed makes you grumpy.

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