Hans von Spakovsky, as a top political appointee in Bush’s Justice Department, was a leading player in what McClatchy straightforwardly calls the administration’s “vote-suppression agenda.” When it came to voter disenfranchisement, von Spakovsky was a reliable member of Team Bush. That’s not a compliment.
Now, of course, the president is anxious to give him a promotion, rewarding von Spakovsky with a six-year term on the Federal Election Commission. His fate will be decided today in the Senate. Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick makes a very powerful case that the nomination itself is insulting, and if senators have any sense, they’ll reject von Spakovsky out of hand.
Another one for you to file under “fox guards the henhouse”: The Senate rules committee votes tomorrow (Wednesday) on whether to give Hans A. von Spakovsky a full six-year term on the Federal Elections Commission. For Senate Democrats to even consider allowing someone with von Spakovsky’s background to sit on the independent agency tasked with protecting the integrity of federal elections is beyond incredible. If von Spakovsky is confirmed, it will be yet more evidence that Democrats have no more regard for the rule of law, or the integrity of the Justice Department, than Karl Rove does.
I can’t help but appreciate the double-edged irony here — von Spakovsky suppressed voters participating in an election, so Bush wants him on the Federal Election Commission. Von Spakovsky disenfranchised Democratic voters, but to get the job he wants, he’ll need Democrats to vote for him.
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, von 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.
I hope readers will take a couple of minutes to read Lithwick’s whole piece, but the point to remember here is that von 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? Von Spakovsky approved it. Georgia’s re-redistricting scheme to disenfranchise black voters? Von Spakovsky approved that, too. The conservative campaign to fabricate an epidemic of voter fraud? Von 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 Von Spakovsky who shut down the investigation.
Rumor has it that Senate Dems may approve von Spakovsky’s nomination in exchange for a Democrat joining him on the FEC. I realize that deals like this make Washington work, but Von Spakovsky is, for lack of a better word, dangerous. He no sooner belongs on the Federal Elections Commission than he does the board of the NAACP.
As Lithwick concluded, “More than almost anyone else — perhaps even including Alberto Gonzales — Hans von Spakovsky represents a Justice Department turned on its head for partisan purposes. Even if a seat on the FEC is merely symbolic, the last thing Democrats should be doing is confirming to that seat someone who symbolizes contempt for what it means to cast a vote.”