Constitutional Law

Civil Rights Commission Hires Controversial Former DOJ Official

A former Department of Justice official, whose critics charge has pushed policy to limit voting rights, is going to work as a “consultant and temporary full-time employee,” for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, reports TPM Muckraker.

As Dahlia Lithwick reported in Slate last September, Hans von Spakovsky’s tenure at the DOJ was marked by several civil-rights related controversies. He led the fight within the Civil Rights Division to approve the 2003 Texas redistricting plan, which the Supreme Court later found violated sections of the Voting Rights Act. He blocked a 2004 investigation into potential violations of Native Americans’ voting rights by the state of Minnesota, the LA Times reported. 

According to The Washington Post, he played a leading role in the Justice Department’s approval of Georgia’s voter identification law, over the objections of career attorneys at the DOJ who feared that the measure would disproportionately harm minority voters. Earlier that year, he authored an anonymous law review article in support of the measure before it was submitted to the DOJ for review, prompting widespread outcry from voting rights advocacy organizations. Spakovsky, The New Yorker reported, has also argued that state election officials should pursue aggressive campaigns to “purge” the voting rolls of felons.

For almost two-and-a-half years, the Senate held-up Spakovsky’s nomination to the Federal Election Commission, until he withdrew last May, citing financial pressures in a letter to President George W. Bush. In opposing the nomination, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) warned that Spakovsky’s appointment “could potentially turn back the clock on 50 years of progress in voting rights.”   Six former career DOJ attorneys also urged the Senate to reject the nomination, stating in a letter to the Rules Committee, that Spakovsky played a leading role in steering  the Civil Rights Division “from its historic mission to enforce the nation’s civil rights laws without regard to politics, to pursuing an agenda which placed the highest priority on the partisan political goals of the political appointees who supervised the Section.”

Full post as published by ACS Blog on August 22, 2008 (boomark / email).