Dismantling Voting Rights Enforcement | A collaborative effort by ePluribus Staff Writers: Publius Revolts, Cho, Standingup, Aaron Barlow & Roxy | 11 May 2007
As ePluribus Media recently reported, since the replacement of long-time Voting Rights Section Chief Joseph D. Rich by John K. Tanner (promoted by former Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights R. Alexander Acosta) there has been an
exodus of unprecedented proportions of experienced voting rights personnel from DoJ's Civil Rights Division. TPM Muckraker's Paul Kiel has referred to this exodus as a purge, and it has stretched from the top to the bottom of the Voting Section's ranks. Acosta has been implicated in the plummeting number of voting rights cases filed to protect the rights of African-Americans. Since then, he has received three interim appointments from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida prior to being confirmed by the Senate. Tanner, however, remains Voting Section chief.
...
The attorney staff has been similarly dismantled. At least 17 attorneys, nearly half the staff, have departed just since Tanner's elevation to the section chief position in April of 2005, representing over 150 years of civil rights experience, employees who left the Section report. Many of their replacements have been
members of the
Republican National Lawyers Association or the ultra-conservative Federalist Society. This turnaround in the composition of the Section's staff has coincided with a shift,
noted by McClatchy,
from traditional voting rights enforcement to litigation aimed at suppressing the minority vote. ...
Former Section Chief Rich noted, in testimony before a House Judiciary subcommittee in March of this year, that:
[...] of the five persons in section leadership at the beginning of 2005 (the chief and four deputy chiefs), only one deputy chief remains in the section today.
The most striking feature of the exodus has been the hue of the professional staff members who have left and the hue and political affiliations of the individuals who have replaced them. Since mid-2004, when political appointees began the purge by forcing career staff to downgrade the performance appraisals of employees who did not toe the Bush line, knowledgeable sources tell ePluribus Media,
nine of 13 African-American professional staff members (attorneys and analysts) have left __ eight of them on Tanner's watch __ while
only one African-American professional staff member has been
hired.
The Section, which has already come under fire for filing
only two lawsuits on behalf of African-American voters during the Bush years (one of which was prepared under the Clinton administration) and filing the first reverse discrimination suit against African-Americans ever filed by the Federal Government under the Voting Rights Act, which had been passed specifically to protect African-American voting rights, does not seem to be any more attuned to the needs of its own African-American staff members than it is to the rights of African-American voters.
Sources have reported that
two Equal Employment Opportunity claims are currently pending in the Voting Section alleging racially discriminatory treatment and/or hiring practices against African-Americans by Tanner and Acting Section 5 Deputy Chief Yvette Rivera. ... Indeed, four highly experienced African-American Section 5 analysts, including the Section 5 supervisor, representing approximately 100 years of Section 5 enforcement experience, have left since Rivera became acting deputy chief, one
accusing the Section of having become a "plantation" in an email sent to the entire Voting Section upon her departure, former employees report.
...
The lack of diversity may be startling, but it is only one aspect of the problem. The Section 5 unit, responsible for reviewing changes in states with the worst histories of racial discrimination in voting, has been completely gutted. Former Voting Section Chief Joseph D. Rich, who was forced out of the Section in 2005, when Tanner assumed the position, noted in testimony before a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee in March that:
[... ] by 2001 __ the year that the new round of redistricting submissions began __ approximately 40% of Section staff was assigned to this work, including a Deputy Section Chief, Robert Berman, who oversaw the Section 5 work; 26 civil rights analysts (including 8 supervisory or senior analysts) responsible for reviewing, gathering facts, and making recommendations on over 4,000 Section 5 submissions received every year; and over six attorneys who spent their full-time reviewing the work of the analysts. Since then, and especially since the transfer of Deputy Chief Berman from the Section in late 2005 [after Tanner's arrival], this staff dropped by almost two-thirds. There are now only ten civil rights analysts (none of whom hold supervisory jobs and only three of whom are senior) and two full-time attorney reviewers. ...
