An eyewitness account of the hearing in Laroque v. Holder last Friday.  ELC first reported on the email that went out to every employee inviting them to skip work and go watch the hearings. The National Review story notes:

” . . . One half of the courtroom was occupied by lawyers and staff from the Voting Section of the Justice Department on a taxpayer-paid field trip. Even Julie Fernandes, the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights under an ethical cloud for her role in the New Black Panther Party scandal, was there. She apparently didn’t see the irony of her having an announced, race-based policy for enforcing the Voting Rights Act, on one hand, and her presence as the DOJ argued for the continued constitutionality of Section 5 on the other.

If where you sit is a sign of where you stand, it was probably appropriate that the DOJ staff were all sitting on the left side of the courtroom. Of course, they may have been avoiding me, sitting on the right side.

The DOJ lawyer arguing the case, Richard Dellheim, had only uttered about two sentences when Judge Bates started peppering him with questions. Bates seemed somewhat taken aback by the government’s claim that nobody in Kinston had standing to contest the constitutionality of a federal statute like Section 5.”