Washington Times: “Republicans have ramped up attacks on President Obama’s pick to head the Labor Department, releasing a scathing report that says Thomas E. Perez abused his power and negotiated a dubious deal while serving as head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.”

Today I testified to the House Judiciary Committee on the Voting Section, Civil Rights Divison and more.  My testimony is here.  Getting ready for the hearing has resulted in slower blogging.  Hopefully that changes soon.  Some highlights:

*Tragically, the Civil Rights Division has also pursued abusive and meritless cases against Americans who are exercising free speech rights, as well as states enacting voter integrity measures – so meritless that courts have imposed cost sanctions against the Division.  The Division has once again returned to the unsavory practice criticized by federal courts over the years by acting as advocates and partners of outside interest groups instead of behaving as a neutral and detached law enforcement agency.

* The Inspector General omitted entirely from the IG Report a second and far more serious instance of Mr. Perez’s inaccurate testimony – namely his false testimony under oath about an open and pervasive hostility toward race neutral enforcement of the law throughout the Civil Rights Division.

* AAG Perez has taken no steps, as far as I know, to terminate or otherwise discipline the wrongdoers described in the IG Report. 
The Division is woefully lacking in enforcement of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.  Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is the broad prohibition on discrimination in elections, and frequently manifests as lawsuits against at-large electoral systems.  While the prior administration vigorously enforced Section 2, enforcement under the current administration has been essentially dormant.  . . . The enforcement record three years removed from Perez’s 2009 bravado at ACS paints a very embarrassing portrait of the Division’s voting rights enforcement record. In response to criticism for failing to enforce Section 2, last year the Division adopted a curious new public position – that it is conducting a “record number” of Section 2 investigations. 

* Current Division Housing Section Chief Steven H. Rosenbaum directly supervised the conduct of the employee who committed the wrongdoing, and Rosenbaum is supervised by AAG Perez.  Rosenbaum retained his position throughout this scandal.  Even after this scandal was on the front page of the Washington Times, the Department saw fit to give Steven Rosenbaum one of the highest possible DOJ awards, the John Marshall Award in October 2012. . . . Steven Rosenbaum remains employed by the Division.  His Senior Executive Service status permits him to be reassigned anywhere in the country to any federal agency.  Such flexibility gives the administration the opportunity to distance attorneys from future decisions which may manifest his hostility toward enforcing civil rights laws in a race neutral fashion.  

* Rather than confronting the racialist grievances of these political appointees and instructing them that it would be inappropriate, and potentially illegal, to target Coates for removal because of his willingness to protect Americans of all races from discrimination, the IG Report says Holder charged his subordinates to use their best judgment when it came to removing Coates. IG Report at 167-168.   Instead of snuffing out the effort, the Attorney General gave it oxygen.    

 Fox.

For American service members overseas, trying to vote can be more of an exercise in bureaucracy than in democracy.  “I witnessed service members receiving ballots days after the election had ended,” former Navy Lt. Emily Trudeau, a Connecticut resident who worked as a voting assistance officer in Iraq and Japan, told a legislative panel in February.

Link to story.

Ed Whelan has the story.  It’s pretty hard to lose a controversial case 9-0 before the Supreme Court, but Perez and the Civil Rights Division managed to do just that.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is once again not proving satisfactory to the New York Times, precipitating another stale attack on Republicans.

…this is the F.E.C., one of the sorrier federal agencies, where
standoffs engineered by the three Republican commissioners on the
six-seat panel have stymied efforts to write regulations and enforce
them.

…“Everything gets objected to,” Ellen Weintraub, a Democratic
commissioner, told the journal CQ Roll Call. “Everything requires a
lengthy discussion.”

Well, after 10+ years on the FEC, maybe she should stop objecting. 

“Under the guise of modernizing the elections processes and increasing voter turnout, Democrats have submitted a bill that will leave the state wide open to fraud.”  Washington Times.

A history lesson on absentee ballot fraud in North Carolina from Observer.com as absentee ballot reform is considered by Republicans in the North Carolina legislature to require absentee voters provide their social security number of drivers license number.

For decades the Democratic organizations that ruled North Carolina
would ship thousands of absentee ballots to machine-controlled mountain
counties that would provide as many votes as were needed.

The 1920
governor’s race was almost certainly stolen that way. The
machine-backed candidate, Cameron Morrison, finished second when the
voting was completed on Election Day. But after 11 days of counting
absentee votes trickling in from the mountain counties, he was declared
winner of the Democratic nomination by 87 votes. That was at a time when
North Carolina was a one-party state and Democratic factions stole
elections from each other.

During the 1936 Democratic primary for
governor, the state Board of Elections, controlled by the Democratic
machine, sent out 108,250 absentee ballots in a runoff in which 480,000
votes were cast. Most were sent to mountain counties. A 1944 study found
that the statewide percentage of absentee ballots cast was 6.7 percent,
but in hard-fought mountain counties such as Clay it was as high as 26
percent.

Typically when absentee voting started, both parties
contacted certain voters to see if they wanted to vote absentee. One
label for these voters was “floating voters.” According to one mountain
Democrat, whoever obtained the majority of those voters usually won.

Old mountain pols say the tradition of using absentee ballots to help steal elections continued into modern times.

 Link.

 Link:

Elections law attorney Christian Adams said the groups had pledged more than $100 million to three procedural issues: restricting spending on political advertisements, expanding voter rolls while blocking voter ID laws, and reforming Senate rules to curb the filibuster.