He's Baaaack: Civil Rights Commission Hires Spakovsky to Work on Voting Rights

[babylonsister]

He's Baaaack: Civil Rights Commission Hires Spakovsky to Work on Voting Rights
By Kate Klonick - August 21, 2008, 12:14PM


It looks like Hans von Spakovsky, an old TPM favorite, is back in business. The former Justice Department official, whose nomination to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) was thwarted when Democrats objected to his long record of support for restrictions on voting rights, has been hired as a "consultant and temporary full-time employee" at the ostensibly bi-partisan U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) the agency confirmed to TPMmuckraker.

If Spakovsky's history of backing efforts to make voting more difficult strikes you as a poor fit with the Commission's mission of defending voter rights, consider that of the eight current commissioners at the agency, only two are registered Democrats, a politicization that the New York Times Charlie Savage brought to light last year.

Among Spakovsky's duties will be overseeing the USCCR's report on the Justice Department's monitoring of the 2008 presidential elections, a source inside the USCCR told TPMmuckraker.

Spakovsky's hiring is at the request of Commissioner Todd Gaziano, who works for the conservative Heritage Foundation on FEC issues and has defended Spakovsky in the press before. According to a federal government source, Gaziano has recommended Spakovsky at the government's highest payscale -- which would work out to about $124,010 annually if Spakovsky was to stay for an entire year.

And it seems that Gaziano may not have been exactly excited to make his selection of Spakovsky public knowledge. At a July 28th meeting (pdf) where the commissioners approved the hiring of the "special assistants," the new hires identities were kept confidential. According to the transcript of the meeting, when one of the commissioners asked for more information on the identity of who was being hired, the question was never answered.

more...

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/08/civil_rights_commission_hires.php

[mod mom]

1. and who is von Spatkovsky? (major player in "vote suppression agenda" says McClatchy))

Meet Hans von Spakovsky, yet another major player in what McClatchy straightforwardly calls the administration's "vote-suppression agenda."

We've spent a lot of time introducing you to one of von Spakovsky's closest peers, Bradley Schlozman. Schlozman, you'll remember, presided over the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division with an iron hand, making sure that the division was stocked with hard-line Republicans and that career staff in the voting rights section in particular were punished when they stepped out of line. Schlozman was rewarded for his tenure there with an appointment as the U.S. attorney for Kansas City in 2006 -- he proved reliable there too, delivering voter-fraud indictments just days before the election. Schlozman will be appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in two weeks, alongside Todd Graves, the fired U.S. attorney he replaced.

Well, Von Spakovsky was Tweedledee to Schlozman's Tweedledum at the Civil Rights Division. The two worked together in overseeing the voting rights section, and in particular in ensuring that the section, which is tasked with stopping the implementation of voting laws that might impinge on the rights of minorities, did not block voter ID laws. As I reported last month, the two teamed up to make life hell for one section analyst who had had the temerity to object to Georgia's voter ID law (the one ultimately blocked by a federal judge who compared it to a Jim Crow-era poll tax).

But as McClatchy reports this morning, von Spakovsky did not confine his activities to the Justice Department. He was also busy making sure that the Election Assistance Commission, a tiny agency that serves as the government's election information clearinghouse, stayed in line. And that meant making sure that whatever research it published conformed to the voter-fraud orthodoxy. But unfortunately for von Spakovsky, the commission's chairman Paul DiGregorio was hard to control:

After the commission hired both liberal and conservative consultants to work on the studies in 2005, e-mails show that von Spakovsky tried to persuade panel members that the research was flawed.
-snip
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2007/05/todays_must_read_92.php

[galloglas]

7. Can someone do a double check??

When the names of Schlozman and von Spakovsky keep coming up (with the sour, biting taste of wretched bile in one's throat, on a morning after some night that shouldn't have happened), I keep thinking to myself,

"Something's wrong here. These names should already be processed. Why are we doing these names again? Didn't we take these guys down at Nuremberg?"


Could someone please double-check all the bad places and see if these two haven't slipped their leashes at some point?

I mean, if they haven't been written into some Eternal Sentence, someplace, can't we do something about it? Get them out of Government and get them into, oh, say, Literature, maybe?

Put them on the Devil's jury in the "Devil and Daniel Webster"? Recurring parts as Cap'n Jack Straw's special "Soulless Pits" or "Pitiless Souls"? Maybe Grendl's "conjoined twins, linked at their shared Ethical Void?"

Can't we just, somehow, move them to some area that is non-political? Perhaps trade them for Berzerkistani athletes?

Even the phrase, "von Spakosky", sounds more like a Death Rattle each day.

[mod mom]

2. Sen Obama on von Spatkovsky: he amassed a record of undermining voting rights, creating restrictions

"he amassed a record of undermining voting rights, creating restrictions that would make it harder for poor and minority communities to vote, and putting partisan politics above upholding our civil rights. "



Op-ed By Barack Obama: In Opposition to Hans von Spakovsky
Monday, October 8, 2007


Chicago Defender: In Opposition to Hans von Spakovsky
By Barack Obama


More than 40 years ago, John Lewis and Hosea Williams, along with hundreds of everyday Americans, left their homes and churches to brave the blows of Billy clubs and join a march for freedom across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Thousands of anonymous foot soldiers – Blacks and Whites, the young and the elderly – summoned the courage to march for justice and demand freedom. A few months later, the Voting Rights Act was signed into law.

It's because of the sacrifice of these American heroes that we've come so far today. But there's more work to be done. Recent elections have shown unprecedented intimidation of African-American, Native American, low income and elderly voters at the polls. We've seen political operatives purge voters from registration rolls for no legitimate reason, distribute polling equipment unevenly, and deceive voters about the time, location and rules of elections.

So today more than ever we need to have confidence that those in government responsible for overseeing our voting system will uphold the right to vote for every single American.

This is what's at stake in the United States Senate today. President Bush has recently nominated Hans von Spakovsky to serve on the Federal Election Commission (FEC). It's the job of the FEC to regulate elections and disclose campaign finance contributions. So it goes without saying that the FEC needs strong, impartial leadership that will promote integrity in our election system.

Hans von Spakovsky is not the right person for this job, and I strongly oppose his nomination. From 2001 to 2005, von Spakovsky served as an official at the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division where he amassed a record of undermining voting rights, creating restrictions that would make it harder for poor and minority communities to vote, and putting partisan politics above upholding our civil rights.

-snip

http://obama.senate.gov/news/071008-oped_by_barack/

[tbyg52]

3. Oh good grief - it's Whack-a-Mole. nt

[barbtries]

4. this is really terrible

i feel as if a million votes for obama just flew out the window. is there anything to be done?

[mod mom]

5. I think Obama should bring this up now since he already went on record w strong opposition.

then the whole Dem Party should come out with strong opposition and bring this issue to light (right now it's an insider issue)

[Triana]

6. Since when has the "whole Dem party" (or any of them) come out against suppression of...

..voter rights?

If they HAD this might not have happened.

They're a bunch of damn jellyfish on the issue. :mad: