As McClatchy's Greg Gordon and Margaret Talev are reporting, the House and Senate Judiciary Committees are set to open investigations into hiring practices in the Voting Section of the U.S. Department of Justice, and in particular, into Bradley Schlozman's role in politicizing voting rights enforcement:
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 [Monica] 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.
As Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe earlier reported:
In a recent Regent law school newsletter, a 2004 graduate described being interviewed for a job as a trial attorney at the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division in October 2003. Asked to name the Supreme Court decision from the past 20 years with which he most disagreed, he cited Lawrence v. Texas, the ruling striking down a law against sodomy because it violated gay people's civil rights.
He got the job.
Just this morning, Savage reported:
Half of the 14 career lawyers hired under Schlozman were members of the conservative Federalist Society or the Republican National Lawyers Association, up from none among the eight career hires in the previous two years, according to a review of resumes. The average US News & World Report ranking of the law school attended by new career lawyers plunged from 15 to 65.
The results of the politicization of the Voting Section are well known: the preclearance of the 2003 DeLay Texas re-redistricting and the 2005 Georgia photo ID law, preclearance of a similar law in Arizona, the botching of the investigation into lines in Ohio, reverse discrimination suits to "protect" the voting rights of whites in Mississippi, the perversion of voting rights enforcement into trying to make states purge thousands of voters from their rolls, and an overall "aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout in key battleground states in ways that favor Republican political candidates," as McClatchy earlier reported, that has centered on suppressing, not protecting, the minority vote, a perversion of the historical mandate of the Voting Section, which was created after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
It is high time, Senator Leahy and Congressman Conyers, that hiring in the Voting Section was examined. But your examination should not stop there. The real story is the politicization of the electoral machinery through the decimation of the Voting Rights Act.