Hans von Spakovsky, as a top political appointee in Bush’s Justice Department, was a leading player in what has been labeled the administration’s “vote-suppression agenda.”
When it came to voter disenfranchisement , von Spakovsky was a reliable member of Team Bush. And as a reward, Bush tried to promote von Spakovsky to a six-year term on the Federal Election Commission, which touched off a major fight with Senate Democrats, and in turn, effectively shut down the FEC for months.
In May, Dems won when Spakovsky withdrew from consideration. In August
, Americans lost, as Spakovsky was hired as a “consultant” to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
If Spakovsky’s history of backing efforts to make voting more difficult strikes you as a poor fit with the Commission’s mission of defending voter rights, consider that of the eight current commissioners at the agency, only two are registered Democrats, a politicization that the New York Times Charlie Savage brought to light last year.
Among Spakovsky’s duties will be overseeing the USCCR’s report on the Justice Department’s monitoring of the 2008 presidential elections, a source inside the USCCR told TPMmuckraker.
Spakovsky’s hiring is at the request of Commissioner Todd Gaziano
, who works for the conservative Heritage Foundation on FEC issues and has defended Spakovsky in the press before. According to a federal government source, Gaziano has recommended Spakovsky at the government’s highest payscale — which would work out to about $124,010 annually if Spakovsky was to stay for an entire year.
This is crazy. The guy who was accused of voter-suppression tactics has no business “helping” monitor to the elections on behalf of the Justice Department and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Given all the scandalous players in the Bush administration, it’s easy to get lost remembering which hack did what to whom, but in this case, Spakovsky is one of the less honorable people in Bush World.
Von Spakovsky’s Senate confirmation hearing last June was noteworthy for many oddities, not the least of which was a letter sent to the rules committee by six former career professionals in the voting rights section of the Justice Department; folks who had worked under both Republican and Democratic administrations for a period that spanned 36 years. The letter urged the committee to reject von Spakovsky on the grounds that while at DoJ, he was one of the architects of a transformation in the voting rights section 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.” The authors named him as the “point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to protect voting rights.”
Von Spakovsky’s response to these charges at his confirmation hearings? “I was not the decision maker,” he claimed. “I don’t remember that complaint at all,” he demurred. “It’s privileged,” he insisted. That’s the kind of bobbing and weaving that likely cost Alberto Gonzales his job. That the same absurd testimony from von Spakovsky might be rewarded with a professional upgrade is unfathomable.
And what was von Spakovsky trying to hide at his hearing? Why is the nation’s largest civil rights coalition urging that his confirmation be rejected? Because this man was one of the generals in a years-long campaign to use what we now know to be bogus claims of runaway “vote fraud” in America to suppress minority votes. Von Spakovsky was one of the people who helped melt down and then reshape the Justice Department into an instrument aimed at diminishing voter participation for partisan ends.
The point to remember here is that Spakovsky has been at the heart of the indefensible
, right-wing effort to prevent eligible voters from participating in elections. Tom DeLay’s re-redistricting scheme that violated the Voting Rights Act? Spakovsky approved it. Georgia’s re-redistricting scheme to disenfranchise black voters? Spakovsky approved that
, too. The conservative campaign to fabricate an epidemic of voter fraud? Spakovsky helped create the scheme and execute it. When a U.S. Attorney in Minnesota discovered that Native American voters were being disenfranchised? It was Spakovsky who shut down the investigation.
Only 151 days to go.