When Republicans in Georgia created a “voter-identification law” in 2005, they knew a key hurdle would be approval from Bush’s Justice Department. As written, the law forced Georgians without driver’s licenses (disproportionately poor, black and elderly citizens) to pay for a state ID card in order to vote. The city of Atlanta, with a large African-American population, did not have a single facility where the cards are sold. It seemed like a pretty obvious attempt to discourage likely Democratic voters from participating in elections. (Thankfully, a federal judge recognized this stunt for what it was, striking down the law in October 2005, comparing the measure to a Jim Crow-era poll tax.)
And how did the Georgia law get approval from the Justice Department? John Tanner, the chief of the Civil Rights Divisions’ voting rights section, overruled his own staff attorneys and gave the measure the green light. As Paul Kiel reports, Tanner argued over the weekend that the reality-based community has it all wrong — voter-ID requirements actually affect white people the most.
Tanner explained that “primarily elderly persons” are the ones affected by such laws, but “minorities don’t become elderly the way white people do: They die first.” So anything that “disproportionately impacts the elderly, has the opposite impact on minorities,” he added. “Just the math is such as that.” Video of Tanner’s remarks were posted yesterday by The Brad Blog. We’ve supplied a transcript below.
According to former Department employees, Tanner’s comments were not only wrong, but way off, and typical of the type of decision making in the section. “In trying to defend his decision in the Georgia case, he’s saying things that are frankly ludicrous,” Joe Rich, a forty-year veteran of the Department and Tanner’s predecessor in the voting rights section, told me.
“This is the kind of analysis that the voting section has been doing: seat of the pants generalizations and suppositions instead of hard numbers and analysis,” said Toby Moore, a redistricting expert who worked as an analyst for the section until the spring of 2006. “It’s false.” Tanner’s conclusions, he added, were “always in support of what his Republican appointee bosses wanted him to say, which is why he got to where he is.”
How is it, exactly, that this guy got to be the chief of the Civil Rights Divisions’ voting rights section?
By the way, as long as we’re on the subject, how did Tanner go about approving this discriminatory policy in the first place? Well, it’s a funny story.
A team of Justice Department lawyers and analysts who reviewed a Georgia voter-identification law recommended rejecting it because it was likely to discriminate against black voters, but they were overruled the next day by higher-ranking officials at Justice, according to department documents.
The Justice Department has characterized the “pre-clearance” of the controversial Georgia voter-identification program as a joint decision by career and political appointees in the Civil Rights Division…. But an Aug. 25 staff memo obtained by The Washington Post recommended blocking the program because Georgia failed to show that the measure would not dilute the votes of minority residents, as required under the Voting Rights Act.
The memo, endorsed by four of the team’s five members, also said the state had provided flawed and incomplete data. The team found significant evidence that the plan would be “retrogressive,” meaning that it would reduce blacks’ access to the polls.
A day later, on Aug. 26, the chief of the department’s voting rights section, John Tanner, told Georgia officials that the program could go forward. “The Attorney General does not interpose any objection to the specified changes,” he said in a letter to them.
In this case, career attorneys (i.e., those not hired by Bush) who specialize in civil rights law, found the Georgia law inadequate. They were overruled the next day by Tanner and Alberto Gonzales.