Gonzales overruled staff to approve Georgia's new Jim Crow

Via an appalled Laura Rozen, this Atlanta Journal-Constitution piece makes one want to shower.

The chief sponsor of Georgia's voter identification law told the Justice Department that if black people in her district "are not paid to vote, they don't go to the polls," and that if fewer blacks vote as a result of the new law, it is only because it would end such voting fraud.

This was contained in a Justice Department memo that also included data determining that Georgia's disgusting voter identification law would disproportionately affect black citizens, before recommending that the Attorney General object to the law.

However, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in August approved the law. Last month, a judge suspended the photo ID requirement after finding the law imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and will not effectively combat voter fraud. A lawsuit in the case continues.

See this. Georgia state rep Sue Burmeister's racist comments go to show how the Fourteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act was being subverted by Georgia Republicans, and with the collusion of the Bush Administration.  Meanwhile, the state didn't meet its burden to demonstrate that the law wouldn't have a "retrogressive" effect, so that it would not decrease black voter turnout; while the Justice lawyers concluded it most likely would.

Susan Laccetti Meyers, the staff adviser for the Georgia House of Representatives, told the Justice Department "the Legislature did not conduct any statistical analysis of the effect of the photo ID requirement on minority voters."

So don't buy the canard that this boils down to "pro-ID" versus "anti-ID," as Burmeister and Governor Perdues' demagoguery implies. It makes sense that the integrity of the vote partially relies on knowing who is voting. However, this September op-ed by Jim Baker and President Carter -- who argue for national voter ID standards, and explicitly call Georgia's law "discriminatory" -- undermines that false dichotomy.

The Washington Post got a look at the documents, showing that Gonzales' overruled the memo the next day, and then went on to portray Justice's approval of the Georgia law as representing consensus between the staff lawyers and the political leadership. Which, as Styg Feed perusers will recall, exists within the context of their killing-it-softly approach to the Civil Rights Division.

Now, the Justice Department is playing down the memo, by saying it was only an early draft. This translates as, We turned it down before rewriting it to conform to our political needs. From the AJC piece:

A Justice Department spokesman, Eric Holland, on Thursday said the memo was only "a draft that did not include data and analysis from other voting section career attorneys," and that Georgia's law was approved because the department determined that it would not adversely affect minorities. The draft, he said, "was subsequently corrected by the state, and also contains a number of factual errors," though those corrections did not include the statements made by Burmeister and Meyers. [Styg. emph.]

Comments

[tdcompic]

send to give more information info@tdcompic.ru
http://tdcompic.ru - this is very cool online shop
http://tdcompic.ru>http://tdcompic.ru - this shop namber one in world
If you want buy anything http://tdcompic.ru>WELCOME