Disenfranchisement is the Republican way

Can you imagine if a Democratic president had used the Justice Department to use its power to systematically disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of likely Republican voters? Can you imagine the hue and cry from Bill O'Reilly and Michelle Malkin and the newsbots at Faux News? Can you imagine Chris Matthews and Tucker Carlson and Joe Scarborough if Janet Reno had fired a bunch of U.S. attorneys and replaced them with political hacks who were putting together caging lists of soldiers serving overseas to take away their right to vote?

And yet, that's exactly what the Bush Administration has been doing with the Justice Department, and outside of the politically-active people who blog and read blogs, no one I know seems to give a shit.

If we had media in this country that were as concerned with the law and with the Constitution as they are about how Paris Hilton is doing in jail, or about Alex Rodriguez' marriage, or about how JonBenet Ramsey's father is dating Natalee Holloway's mother, perhaps Americans might realize what their president is doing. Whether they would care is another story.

But the inescapable fact is that the Administration and its Republican party henchmen set out to try to prevent the Democratic takeover of Congress last year by disenfranchising likely Democratic voters, and more importantly, to make sure that Republicans would win in 2008:

Saying it was out to combat widespread voter fraud, the Justice Department in recent years has stepped up enforcement of election laws to ease the purging of ineligible voters from state registration rolls.

Since 2005, department civil rights lawyers have sued election officials in seven states - Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Maine, Missouri, New Jersey and New York - and sent threatening letters to others, in some cases demanding copies of voter registration data.

Former lawyers in the Civil Rights Division, however, said the voter fraud campaign is a partisan effort to disqualify legitimate voters, as occurred in Florida before the 2000 presidential election.

The former department officials note that researchers have found no evidence of widespread voter fraud and that no lawsuits have targeted states whose elections were managed solely by Republican officials.

At the same time, the department has done little to enforce the core provisions of a 1993 law that requires public assistance agencies to help register the mostly Democratic-leaning, poor and minority voters they serve despite complaints from a national group, Project Vote.

The partisan nature of the Justice Department's election activity will be a focus of a congressional inquiry Tuesday. Former acting Justice Department civil rights chief, Bradley Schlozman, is due to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee to respond to allegations of partisanship in the division's hiring and enforcement policies.