Authors: John Fund
Holder and Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) make the absurd claim that these election reform efforts by states like Texas and North Carolina are “a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions” of minority and other voters from going to the polls. But the actual experience of states with voter ID laws shows that such claims are merely the product of paranoid fantasies of the left that have infected the attorney general and his entire department. Voter ID laws have been in place in states like Georgia and Indiana for many years and none of the hysterical claims made by opponents have materialized. Turnout of minority voters in those states has not decreasedâit has increased, within each state, and in comparison to similar states without voter ID. Voters certainly disagree with Holderâpolls show overwhelming support for voter ID across racial, ethnic, and party lines. Apparently, Holder does not see the hypocrisy that at his own Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, D.C., a government-issued photo ID is required to enter the building, a requirement that he claims is discriminatory when imposed by state governments.
But Holder has launched lawsuits against Texas and North Carolina to stop their voter ID laws, even though the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Indiana's voter ID requirement in 2008 as a constitutional and reasonable requirement. In 2012 Holder's target was South Carolina. Prior to the Supreme Court's decision in 2013 in
Shelby County v. Holder
, part of the Voting Rights Act required a small number of states, including South Carolina, to get approval from the Department of Justice or a federal court for any changes in their voting laws. The Justice Department objected to South Carolina's voter ID law and South Carolina was forced to file a federal lawsuit in 2012 to overturn the objection, spending more than $3.5 million to defend itself. Though the state won, Holder succeeded in delaying the implementation of the voter ID law until after the reelection of his boss in the 2012 election. The South Carolina decision came out so close to the election that the Court did not think South Carolina could implement the voter ID law in time. Since then, the law has been in effect for local and state elections with no problemsânone of the supposed “discriminatory” effects that Holder claimed have occurred.
Similarly, Holder has refused to enforce the requirement in the National Voter Registration Act that mandates states clean up their registration lists to remove ineligible voters who have died or moved away. Not a single such lawsuit has been filed since the beginning of the Obama administration, despite the fact that there are many jurisdictions all over the United States where the number of registered voters is larger than the voting age population, according to the Census Bureau. In fact, the Justice Department dismissed with no explanation a pending NVRA lawsuit filed against the state of Missouri by the Bush administration shortly after Obama came into office. However, former employees within the division have made it clear that Holder imposed a policy of nonenforcement of this requirement because liberals believe maintaining accurate voter rolls is a “voter suppression” tactic and because this provision of the law does nothing to help get more minority voters to the polls to vote for and support Democratic candidates.
One of the most disturbing and troubling problems in the Civil Rights Division, however, is the marked hostility toward race-neutral enforcement of federal discrimination laws. There is no legal question, for example, that the Voting Rights Act, by its very terms, protects all Americans regardless of their race, from discrimination in voting. When the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was investigating the division's inexplicable dismissal of the New Black Panther voter intimidation case, Perez told the commission in sworn testimony in a hearing on May 14, 2010, that he believes in the race-neutral enforcement of federal voting rights laws.
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But according to the 2013 IG report, he told the inspector general that he did
not
believe that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act protected white voters even when they are a racial minority in a particular jurisdiction.
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The division applied this racialist theory in rejecting a voting change in Kinston, North Carolina, in 2009. Although white voters are the racial minority in Kinston (black voters make up 65 percent of registered voters), the division blocked a 2008 referendum that changed town elections from partisan to nonpartisan. Despite the fact that black voters overwhelmingly approved the change, the division filed a patronizing objection that, in essence, claimed that the black voters didn't know what they were doing when they voted for the change and wouldn't know whom to vote for if the Democratic Party label wasn't next to the candidate's name on the ballot. The division withdrew its objection based on supposedly “changed circumstances” just two weeks before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was set to hear a lawsuit by Kinston residents challenging the objection and the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, mooting the case and leading to its dismissal.
But the only “changed” circumstance was a tiny change in the black voter registration level from 65 to 65.4 percent. The real reason Holder withdrew the division's objection was that the facts in this case made the Justice Department look so bad, he didn't want it going to the Supreme Court.
In 2005 the division for the first time successfully brought a Voting Rights Act case against black defendants for discrimination against white voters, in
U.S. v. Brown
, a case arising out of Mississippi. However, from the first moment this matter was raised in the division, liberal career lawyers demonstrated their hostility not only to the concept of suing blacks for discrimination but also to the staff within the division who supported or who worked on the case. And outside civil rights organizations were furious that the case had been filed. They would take their revenge when they took control of the division during the Obama administration.
The 2013 inspector general's report on the mismanagement of the division details the extensive harassment and ostracism of employees who believe in the race-neutral enforcement of the Voting Rights Act or who worked on the
Brown
case. For example, the report describes in great detail the nasty postings and comments made by career staff on “widely read liberal websites concerning Voting Section work and personnel.” These postings
included a wide array of inappropriate remarks, ranging from petty and juvenile personal attacks to highly offensive and potentially threatening statements. The comments were directed at fellow career Voting Section employees because of their conservative political views, their willingness to carry out the policies of the CRT division leadership, or their views on the Voting Rights Act. The highly offensive comments included suggestions that the parents of one former career Section attorney were Nazis. . . .
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Although the IG report does not identify who the Nazi comments were directed at, they were directed at the parents of the coauthor, Hans von Spakovsky, who worked in the division as a career lawyer during the Bush administration. He was shocked at the hostility with which he was greeted when he was hired. The liberal staff that occupied the division made it clear that solely because of his conservative political views, and regardless of his professional work as an experienced election law attorney, he was considered unqualified to be a career lawyer in the division.
Von Spakovsky is a first-generation American. His mother grew up in Nazi Germany and his father was a Russian who fled the Soviet Union when the communists took control. His father was part of the resistance movement against the Nazis in Yugoslavia during World War II. His parents met in a refugee camp in the American-occupied sector of Germany in 1946 and immigrated to the United States in 1951. Von Spakovsky's mother was arrested by the Gestapo in 1945 when she was a teenager and the fact that she was not killed but survived is a testament to her courage and the grace of God.
Given his parents' terrible experiences, the offensive comments by liberal lawyers about von Spakovsky's parents were especially cruel. And they were made by his fellow employees simply because of his personal political views, his involvement in recommending going forward with the
U.S. v. Brown
reverse discrimination case and approving Georgia's voter ID law, and his publicly expressed belief that the Voting Rights Act protects all voters from discrimination, no matter what their race. Believing in equal enforcement of the law makes you a pariah in the Civil Rights Division, particularly under Eric Holder.
One individual who still works in the division boasted of being part of a “cyber-gang” that was engaged in “cyber-bullying” of conservative employees (the few that exist in the division). Although he admitted that some of his statements “crossed the line” because they included “racist” and “intimidating language,” he told the IG that “he did not regret posting the comments.”
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The viciousness, pettiness, meanness, and unprofessionalism of employees within the division are also shown in the experience of another lawyer in the division. Identified under the alias Arnold Everett in the IG report, the attorney was a former clerk for the chief justice of a state supreme court. Because he was willing to work on disfavored cases, other staff members called him a “hand-picked Vichyite.” Because his legal opinions on particular cases differed from those of the radical, liberal lawyers involved in the cases, he was subjected to unremitting hostility. Those same lawyers broke into his computer system and snooped through his work. He was harassed by liberal employees for his Christian religious beliefs (so much for religious freedom). As the IG report concluded, other employees made “unprofessional and disparaging remarks about Everett to each other and to other employees in the Section, mocking his intelligence, his legal acumen, and his personal beliefs.”
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The terrible conditions and the hostile environment in which Everett was forced to work affected his health and his family. The harassment was limited during the Bush administration because the leadership of the division did its best to stop it. But it resumed with greater intensity during the Obama administration because the political appointees in the division made it clear they also did not like him because of his political views and they had no interest in stopping the harassment. The hostile work environment finally drove him out of the division.
The same thing happened to Bob Popper, the former deputy chief of the Voting Section. He told one of the authors in an interview that “starting in early 2009, his investigations were systematically shut down” because he was perceived as untrustworthy since he was a conservative, despite his extensive experience in voting cases. Popper was hired in December 2005 because of his extensive trial experience and background in voting rights. In his first three years he worked on and appeared in court in numerous cases on behalf of the division, including the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case. But that changed completely in the Obama administration, whose political managers and their liberal allies in the career staff refused to allow him to appear in court or to work on any substantive matters. As he says, they would not “let [him] anywhere near a courtroom” and gave him “the least substantial and least desired cases available.” He was excluded from management decisions and meetings.
Employees who participated in the harassment of conservative employees and whose identities were discovered by the inspector general during the Obama administration were not disciplined in any way. For example, another employee, identified under the alias of Karen Lorrie, actually an employee named Stephanie Celandine Gyamfi, denied under oath that she had publicly posted comments on websites “concerning Voting Section personnel or matters.” She did not admit she was responsible until the IG investigators confronted her with evidence that she had done so, but she told the IG that “she did not regret posting comments online, except to the extent that it resulted in questioning from the OIG.”
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So, rather than being disciplined for her outrageous behavior, she was treated as a hero inside the Voting Section, according to sources inside the division. After Mississippi passed a voter ID statute, she posted on Facebook that the residents there were “disgusting and shameful.” Even so, the Obama administration defended her and refused to remove her from cases involving Mississippi or voter ID despite her plain bias, which would bring into question the impartiality of any decision made by the division in cases in which she was involved. That is because the Holder Justice Department had no intention of being impartial and it approved of Gyamfi's behavior toward the few conservatives who work in the division.
The hostility toward staff who favored race-neutral enforcement of civil rights laws culminated in the mistreatment by the Obama administration and Eric Holder of Christopher Coates. He was the most experienced voting rights trial attorney in the entire division and the former chief of the Voting Section. He had received numerous awards for his outstanding work during his career, including from the NAACP. Coates had been instrumental in filing and prosecuting the
Brown
case in Mississippi, and was promoted to head the Voting Section in 2008. He approved filing a complaint against black defendants for voter intimidation in Philadelphia after the 2008 election, the case that came to be known as the “New Black Panther” case. In other words, unlike Eric Holder and other lawyers and Obama political appointees inside the division, he did not believe that some individuals who violate federal law should be given a free pass because of their race. As a result, he was subjected to “overt hostility” and slurs, even being called a “Klansman,” according to the IG report.
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