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This next election is in trouble
Resurrecting Jim Crow: The Erratic Resume of the Voting Section Chief
A collaborative effort by ePluribus Staff Writers: Cho, Standingup, wanderindiana, Aaron Barlow & Roxy
07 May 2007
When John K. Tanner replaced Joe Rich as section chief of the Justice Department's Voting Section in 2005, a breathtaking politicization -- already under way after Alex Acosta was put in charge of the Civil Rights Division -- accelerated sharply. The exodus of talent, expertise, and knowledge of civil rights law in the two years under Tanner's stewardship is numbing. Roughly 50% of the staff1 -- attorneys, including many of the top litigators, researchers and analysts -- have left, and Tanner has waged an aggressive effort to remake the section in his own image -- not an image that most people who promote the core mission of the Voting Rights Act, which the Section is primarily responsible for enforcing, would support.
Why it matters
Forty years ago, black and white Americans were murdered for trying to stop Jim Crow. Thugs, drunken good old boys and miscreants pulled the trigger, lit the torch, yanked the rope.
Courageous men and women like Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and Viola Liuzzo fought and lost their lives to get rid of the Jim Crow laws that deprived African-Americans of the right to vote.
Eventually, with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the voting rights of every American citizen were secured.
But Jim Crow, like the Dark Lord in the popular Harry Potter children's books, never completely died. And the resurrection, assisted by the seeding of political appointees and agreeable new hires within the very government institutions designed to protect the civil rights of Americans, is now dangerously close at hand.
Tanner, the new Section Chief, who received his law degree by attending American University night school, cites his early civil rights bona fides in a recent FLA-Law piece "'I would go into the projects and knock on doors and take people to the federal registrars,' explained Tanner, who met [Martin Luther] King during this time."
Yet according to many insiders, Tanner -- who was born and spent his early years in Alabama, graduating in 1967 from Indian Springs School near Birmingham -- has in just a little over 2 years essentially gutted the ability of the Voting Section to protect the voting rights of these most vulnerable members of our society.
Partisan Politics in the DoJ Civil Rights Division
Bob Kengle, in an May 1st interview, "Former DoJ Official: I left Due to Institutional Sabotage," reports that:
[...] by late 2004, I did not believe that I could ensure that following the law and facts would remain a higher priority than partisan favoritism. This was based partly upon my expectation that the Administration, if returned to office, would feel less constraint against heavy-handed management and biased enforcement than had been the case in the aftermath of the controversial 2000 election. To put it bluntly, before 2004 the desire to politicize the Voting Section's work was evident, but it was tempered by a recognition that there were limits to doing so. That such constraints diminished over time is evidenced by the well-known and ham-fisted handling of decisions involving Texas' congressional redistricting plan in late 2003 and Georgia's voter ID law in 2005.
Critics point to both of these widely-known instances (the 2003 Texas congressional redistricting plan and the Georgia voter ID law in 2005) as evidence that the political appointees or "front office" and their all too obliging protégés were using redistricting and voter suppression to manipulate elections.
This next election is in trouble
Resurrecting Jim Crow: The Erratic Resume of the Voting Section Chief
A collaborative effort by ePluribus Staff Writers: Cho, Standingup, wanderindiana, Aaron Barlow & Roxy
07 May 2007
When John K. Tanner replaced Joe Rich as section chief of the Justice Department's Voting Section in 2005, a breathtaking politicization -- already under way after Alex Acosta was put in charge of the Civil Rights Division -- accelerated sharply. The exodus of talent, expertise, and knowledge of civil rights law in the two years under Tanner's stewardship is numbing. Roughly 50% of the staff1 -- attorneys, including many of the top litigators, researchers and analysts -- have left, and Tanner has waged an aggressive effort to remake the section in his own image -- not an image that most people who promote the core mission of the Voting Rights Act, which the Section is primarily responsible for enforcing, would support.
Why it matters
Forty years ago, black and white Americans were murdered for trying to stop Jim Crow. Thugs, drunken good old boys and miscreants pulled the trigger, lit the torch, yanked the rope.
Courageous men and women like Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and Viola Liuzzo fought and lost their lives to get rid of the Jim Crow laws that deprived African-Americans of the right to vote.
Eventually, with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the voting rights of every American citizen were secured.
But Jim Crow, like the Dark Lord in the popular Harry Potter children's books, never completely died. And the resurrection, assisted by the seeding of political appointees and agreeable new hires within the very government institutions designed to protect the civil rights of Americans, is now dangerously close at hand.
Tanner, the new Section Chief, who received his law degree by attending American University night school, cites his early civil rights bona fides in a recent FLA-Law piece "'I would go into the projects and knock on doors and take people to the federal registrars,' explained Tanner, who met [Martin Luther] King during this time."
Yet according to many insiders, Tanner -- who was born and spent his early years in Alabama, graduating in 1967 from Indian Springs School near Birmingham -- has in just a little over 2 years essentially gutted the ability of the Voting Section to protect the voting rights of these most vulnerable members of our society.
Partisan Politics in the DoJ Civil Rights Division
Bob Kengle, in an May 1st interview, "Former DoJ Official: I left Due to Institutional Sabotage," reports that:
[...] by late 2004, I did not believe that I could ensure that following the law and facts would remain a higher priority than partisan favoritism. This was based partly upon my expectation that the Administration, if returned to office, would feel less constraint against heavy-handed management and biased enforcement than had been the case in the aftermath of the controversial 2000 election. To put it bluntly, before 2004 the desire to politicize the Voting Section's work was evident, but it was tempered by a recognition that there were limits to doing so. That such constraints diminished over time is evidenced by the well-known and ham-fisted handling of decisions involving Texas' congressional redistricting plan in late 2003 and Georgia's voter ID law in 2005.
Critics point to both of these widely-known instances (the 2003 Texas congressional redistricting plan and the Georgia voter ID law in 2005) as evidence that the political appointees or "front office" and their all too obliging protégés were using redistricting and voter suppression to manipulate elections.
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