“Obviously we are disappointed by the ruling. Mr. Davis had argued that a citizen is injured when they are denied the right to fully participate in any political process. Even GovGuam did not find the ripeness argument to have enough merit to bring it in the first place. Mr. Davis will be appealing the ripeness ruling to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals where we are hopeful existing Supreme Court precedent will lead to a reversal and remand. Regardless, no plebiscite election will ever take place on Guam without the discriminatory problems being fully litigated.”
Statement on Guam Ruling in Davis v Guam
“Obviously we are disappointed by the ruling. Mr. Davis had argued that a citizen is injured when they are denied the right to fully participate in any political process. Even GovGuam did not find the ripeness argument to have enough merit to bring it in the first place. Mr. Davis will be appealing the ripeness ruling to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals where we are hopeful existing Supreme Court precedent will lead to a reversal and remand. Regardless, no plebiscite election will ever take place on Guam without the discriminatory problems being fully litigated.”
“DOJ Sends Lawyers to Monitor South Carolina Election With 186 Voters”
PJ Media. This may rank as the smallest election ever monitored by the DOJ voting Section. No doubt the election coverage memo had all of the usual fearsome stories of racial tension and complaints by civil rights groups to justify coverage. The money spent by the Justice Department to fly, feed, house and drive lawyers to Columbia or Charleston was no object. (Contract price airfare for both, $500-700 per). Voter ID is too big of a problem to worry about spending thousands of dollars to monitor an election with 186 voters.
If there has been an election monitored by the DOJ Voting Section which had fewer than 186 voters participate, email us here and we will post.
Voter ID: DOJ to Monitor Election in Branchville, SC
Branchville, South Carolina. Population 1,083. Voting age population, 806.
The Justice Department will send lawyers to monitor a special election. The reason is that this is the first election conducted with the new Voter ID requirement in the state. The Justice Department opposed voter ID and forced the state to spend $3,500,000 to obtain federal court approval. Justice Department career attorneys had recommended that the South Carolina voter ID law be precleared, but they were overruled by political appointees Tom Perez and Matt Colangelo. Convinced that voter ID is a “poll tax” (Holder’s words) or is a plot to disenfranchise voters, DOJ lawyers from Washington D.C. will be collecting evidence in Branchville for the election of a town council member.
Rep. Gilda Cobb Hunter has been a vocal opponent of voter ID and recently was called to testify to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Branchville is in Cobb-Hunter’s legislative district.
Alabama Stands With Shelby County
Alabama Stands With Shelby County
Do Any Law Profs have the Guts to Call out Karlan’s False Scholarship??
Today Stanford Law Professor Pam Karlan called out George Will on the pages of the Washington Post for using imprecise language about her writings. I noted, as I did in Injustice, that Karlan has published demonstrably false scholarship in the Duke Law Journal about the Bush Justice Department, deceptively misstating the record of enforcement under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. I posted details here. Karlan has never corrected her false statements in the Duke Law School journal.
So where are all the law professors who love to snipe at any statement made by a conservative with which they might quibble? Where are the guardians of precision and honesty when it comes to Karlan’s falsehoods? Maybe one of them will have the guts to call Karlan out on her false statements in the Duke Law piece. Will the Ivory Tower call out another professor for false scholarship? Don’t hold your breath. But if they do, we’ll make note of it.
Audacity: Pam Karlan Complains About Distortions
Takes one to know one. Pam Karlan, the scholar, has published outright demonstrable falsehoods about the Bush administration’s enforcement of voting rights laws. She should be embarrassed and ashamed for publishing false statements in the Duke University Law review. (Pamela S. Karlan, “Lessons Learned: Voting Rights and the Bush Administration,” 4 Duke J. Const. L. & Pub. Pol’y 17 (2009)). She has no room to criticize George Will for imprecise language. From my book Injustice (page 162):
“These arguments—that the Brown case was the first Section 2 case brought by the Bush DOJ, and that for five years no case was brought to protect minority voters—are common untruths told by critics of the Bush administration. Stanford Law professor Pam Karlan peddled this nonsense in a published law review article that falsely states ‘for five of the eight years of the Bush Administration, [they] brought no Voting Rights Act cases of its own except for one case protecting white voters.’ In a footnote, Karlan says she relied on Obama Voting Section chief Chris Herren for information for her article.”
The Brown case was not the first case to protect voters under Section 2 brought by the Bush DOJ. Nor was there ever a gap of five years where no case was brought to protect minority voters. Karlan is outright making things up. She entirely ignores multiple Section 2 cases. As far as I know, Karlan has never corrected her errors, and her “scholarship” is still taken seriously by some.
SC Voter ID: Awarding Failure at DOJ
The Foundry piece on the SC Voter ID case has this tidbit:
“This case illustrates two things. One is how expensive it can be to take on the U.S. Justice Department, even when the DOJ is wrong. Two is how additional facts show that ideology and politics drive the Holder Justice Department rather than the rule of law. This was aptly illustrated not just by the DOJ losing a very weak case where the facts and legal precedent were squarely against it, but by the Civil Rights Division then giving one of its highest awards, the Walter W. Barnett Memorial Award, on November 28 to the leading DOJ trial lawyer after he lost the South Carolina voter ID case.”
This is interesting. I wrote about such behavior in Injustice. The friendly birds are free to pass along more information on this.
“South Carolina Beats DOJ (Again) Over Voter ID Law”
The Foundry:
“The civil rights organizations tried to persuade the court to not award costs against them because “their participation should be encouraged and because they cannot afford to pay.” But such costs are “routinely” awarded against losing parties in civil rights litigation, and the court questioned the credibility of the organizations’ claims, saying that they had “failed to establish an inability to pay costs given their hefty expenditures throughout the litigation.”
In fact, the NAACP independent auditors’ report for 2011 shows almost $14 million in total assets, so the organization’s claim made to a federal court that it cannot pay such costs was highly questionable.”
If Section 5 survives, civil rights groups better be more careful in deciding to intervene in cases.