Is the Justice Department Conducting Latino Outreach on Behalf of the GOP?

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Is the Justice Department Conducting Latino Outreach on Behalf of the GOP?

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted October 22, 2007.


Civil rights attorneys say the DOJ has turned away from suing on behalf of minority voters that tend to support Democrats.

Earlier this month, the Department of Justice's top official overseeing voting rights, John Tanner, made some insensitive comments about elderly and minority voters at a Latino forum in Los Angeles, raising eyebrows in the voting rights community and prompting Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama to call for his ouster on Friday.

But the greater outrage, according to civil rights lawyers across the country, is how the Department's Voting Section has turned away from defending minorities that are seen as supporting Democrats -- African Americans and Native Americans -- while instead focusing on another minority that is seen as a Republican swing vote -- Latinos.

"It may be cynical, but it may also be true," said Julie Fernandez, senior policy analyst and special counsel for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, "that the enforcement for Latinos has been more vigorous because they see it as more in their political interest -- their partisan interest."

Next week, the House Judiciary Committee will hold an oversight hearing on the Voting Section, whose duty is to implement the nation's voting rights laws. While the firing of several federal prosecutors who did not pursue partisan voter fraud cases has garnered national headlines, the Voting Section's enforcement record has had far less scrutiny.

The Voting Section "did not file any cases on behalf of African-American voters during a five-year period between 2001 and 2006, and no cases have been brought on behalf of Native-American voters for the entire administration," Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights told the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on June 21, 2007.

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