During the debate last week on termination of the EAC (here is the YouTube link), there were some notable quotes, particularly from Representative Todd Rokita, that didn’t quite make it into the newspaper headlines. 

EAC bureaucrats do not make elections fair; in fact, EAC makes it less fair by producing biased inaccurate reports on the state of elections in our nation and offering recommendations based on these junk studies.

EAC bureaucrats do not enfranchise voters.  States and individuals do that, as our federal constitution dictates.

….giving unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats in Washington more power over elections does not lead to more just election outcomes, if anything it interferes with a just outcome because these bureaucrats, many with ideological axe to grind, face little or no accountability for their actions, and they know it… 

Here is a bit from the press release on the House floor vote.

While serving as Indiana Secretary of State, I served as President of the National Association of Secretaries of State and co-authored a successful resolution advocating for the elimination of the EAC. We recognized, on a bipartisan basis, that the EAC cannot be justified on the grounds of fairness, justice, opportunity or necessity.

Voting is fundamental to our system and the legitimacy of our government. Ensuring qualified American citizens have an opportunity to vote is essential. The Constitution tasks the states with execution and maintenance of elections, not federal bureaucrats. I believe states do an excellent job of fairly and justly administering elections, and by managing elections closest to the voters, at the state and local level, we stand the best chance of ensuring opportunity for all and correcting injustice in the voting process,” Rokita said.

Here. The article at the link is an example of the media offensive the civil rights group push to coincide with decision points within the Department of Justice.  The groups carefully time their push with their media allies to parallel this direct lobbying of the Civil Rights Division at DOJ.  In this case, the NAACP is furiously lobbying the Perez Civil Rights Division to formally object to the South Carolina voter ID law and halt its use in the January 21, Republican presidential preference primary.

As ELC pointed out here,  Perez is going to Austin, Texas with a bit of media fanfare and civil rights groups expect to hear from him that the Voting Section will continue to dutifully ignore the Supreme Court and object to any photo ID law that comes across their desk.  South Carolina and Texas better dust off the AG offices in preparation for litigation throughout 2012.   

The Holder-Perez Civil Rights Division has not yet seen a voter ID law that would pass muster with its new holistic review and ever-evolving discrimination standards.  This despite the Supreme Court endorsing photo identification as not a burden and non-discriminatory toward voters.  Remember, Perez has told states there is no magic numeric formula to preclearance; it is simply a feeling that shifts as the winds shift.

DOJ has already delayed the process by requesting more information from South Carolina, and stand poised to object so deep into the election cycle that South Carolina won’t be able to obtain relief with the federal courts until after the 2012 Presidential Election. 

 A strange case out of Maryland is covered at NPR. 

A little-noticed trial in Maryland could affect how many dirty tricks voters will see in the upcoming elections — things like anonymous fliers or phone calls telling people to vote on the wrong day, or in the wrong precinct, or that they can’t vote at all if they have an outstanding parking ticket. . . .

Two hours later, Schurick gave Henson the go-ahead to start making robocalls to about 110,000 registered Democrats in and around Baltimore. An unidentified female caller essentially said the election was over.

At PolitiFact, DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s multiple screeds on voter ID and Jim Crow now officially ranks as one of the 10 biggest lies of the year.  

Because of more restrictive voting laws, Republicans “want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws.” — U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., in an interview with Roland Martin on June 5, 2011.

While discussing a slew of new voting laws advocated by Republicans this year with Roland Martin, an African American political commentator, Wasserman Schultz — the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee — compared the proposed restrictions to the Jim Crow laws that impeded African Americans’ ability to vote in the early 20th century.

“You have the Republicans, who want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws and literally — and very transparently — block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates than Republican candidates. And it’s nothing short of that blatant,” Wasserman Schultz said, adding that the DNC considers the photo ID laws proposed by states to be “very similar to a poll tax.”

Several states — such as Kansas, Rhode Island, Alabama, South Carolina, Texas, Tennessee and Wisconsin — will require voters to show a photo ID before they cast their ballots for the 2012 elections. Democrats have largely opposed these requirements, mainly because some minorities do not possess a single photo ID — for instance, one 2006 report from the Brennan Center for Justice as New York University found that 25 percent of voting-age African Americans do not have a government-issued photo ID.

Republicans pounced on Wasserman Schultlz for her comparison to Jim Crow Laws and she later apologized for using that analogy. Although she retracted her statement, PolitiFact still rated it as false, concluding that while several media outlets used the same comparison, the Jim Crow laws originated from a sense of collective racism that is not similar to the voting ID law requirements.

@ the link, Representative Barton discusses the fact that the federal panel described as a runaway court by the dissent drew his Arlington home out of his district and placed him in Dallas County with new constituents making up over 50% of his new district electorate.

“At some point, I think the Supreme Court will fix it,” Barton said. The judges at the appellate level, he said, “went way beyond their authority and drew a political map.”

“The judges just decided they were the Texas Legislature,” he said.

The interim map adds much of Hispanic-dominated southwest Dallas County to Barton’s district, making it majority-minority. But Barton said that the number of likely voters would benefit him — or any other Republican. 

Holder is speaking next week.  MSNBC is on the case, and perhaps offering a clue for what Texas and/or South Carolina has in store for Voter ID laws.  A coordinated objection with an AG speech would really ramp up the politics of the issue. 

“Advocates of broader voting rights are looking forward to a speech on voting next week by Attorney General Eric Holder. “We’ve been pushing him hard to do that because we think it is a national crisis,” said Laura Murphy, the director of the Washington Legislative Office of the American Civil Liberties Union. “The big question is what will the Justice Department do – and that’s why we’re so excited about the attorney general’s upcoming speech.”

 Injustice just was discounted by Amazon because it popped into the Top 100 books for sale about government.  The only thing better than Injustice as a stocking stuffer is Injustice as a stocking stuffer which Santa got at a discount.

According to sources who describe ever decreasing morale inside the DOJ Voting Section, this year the Voting Section gave not a single performance award to any DOJ Voting Section lawyer.  

Only some support staff received awards, including one particular person who was highlighted in my book Injustice for refusing to work on voting cases when the victims were white.  As one person familiar with this award told me, “you should collect a commission from this person because the person never received a performance award in decades at DOJ until you called out the behavior in your book.”   

Performance awards are actually useful ways to encourage those who work hard inside DOJ, and find and bring cases.  They can range from $1,000 to sometimes $3,500.  Of course since the DOJ Voting Section has all but shut down litigation in a number of statutory areas, as I also describe in my book, perhaps there wasn’t much to reward this year.  Nevertheless, the base instincts of some managers to use positions to punish rather than reward seems to have won out over the policies of previous years, across all administrations, and that is to reward hard work.  And this wasn’t a question of funds.  Other attorneys in other DOJ components received performance awards.  Expect it to be like this for the next few years, with morale lower than anything experienced during the Bush administration, with platitudes and half-truths for public consumption, and some managers more comfortable with vinegar and bitterness, than with honey.

 USA today reports on the same story covered weeks ago everywhere else.