DeLayed Gratification

If you haven't read the skinny on how Tom DeLay's TRMPAC squad got all Rathered up with indictments today, skip my page and head straight to Charles Kuffner's house, since he's been following this story with extreme prejudice since the day it broke. See also Kuff's stuff on Richard Morisson, "the man who's giving Tom DeLay the race of his life." (I know this much: Were indulgences still fashionable, a contribution to Morisson's campaign would buy you a stairway to heaven.) I'd recommend that Texans and Texpatriates alike check out Texas Tuesdays weekly—every Tuesday, in fact—as it's the best resource on Texas politics on the Web. Made more important seeing as how Texas really has become Tammany Hall.

There's a lot of links there but I have one more for the stack: Jeffrey Toobin's nuanced piece on the evolution of the Voting Rights Act, published in last week's New Yorker. Delay is not the subject of the article, but you'd hardly expect a writer to leave him out of a piece on electioneering:

The Voting Section’s role in the controversial redistricting of Texas was more direct and, ultimately, more significant. After the 2000 census, Texas, like most states, put through a new redistricting plan. Then, after the midterm elections, Tom DeLay, the House Majority Leader, who is from Houston, engineered passage of a revised congressional redistricting plan through the state legislature, which may mean a shift of as many as seven seats from the Democrats to the Republicans. It was unprecedented for a state to make a second redistricting plan after a post-census plan had been adopted. When the DeLay plan was submitted to the Justice Department for approval, career officials in the Voting Section produced an internal legal opinion of seventy-three pages, with seventeen hundred and fifty pages of supporting documents, arguing that the plan should be rejected as a retrogression of minority rights. However, according to people familiar with the deliberations, the political staff of the Voting Section exercised its right to overrule that decision and approved the DeLay plan, which is now in effect for the 2004 elections.

Now that certainly is a detail I'd never heard. If that's true, there is someone well-placed within the Justice Department who is, in dereliction of his duty, working to grant the GOP election favors.

John Ashcroft? The chair of the Voting Section, R. Alexander Acosta (Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division)? Toobin describes the Voting Section as "three dozen or so lawyers who are responsible for enforcing the Voting Rights Act," but that assignment hardly boils down to (ahem) a black and white issue. As Toobin explains, the two vectors by which the Voting Rights Act works to ensure minority rights are protected are 1) voter access and 2) election integrity. The way John Ashcroft has interpreted this aspect of his job, the latter is given significant emphasis over the former—and John Ashcroft's election-integrity focus lends itself to the careful monitoring of Democratic districts for election fraud.

There is a voter uncertainty principle at work here: The way by which you measure the thing changes the thing that is measured, and efforts to curb election fraud have from time to time morphed into voter intimidation:

In the 1981 governor’s race in New Jersey, the Republican Party hired armed off-duty police officers to work in a self-described National Ballot Security Task Force, which posted signs at polling places in minority neighborhoods reading, "Warning, This Area Is Being Patrolled by the National Ballot Security Task Force. It Is a Crime to Falsify a Ballot or to Violate Election Laws."

As recently as last year’s gubernatorial election in Kentucky, Republicans placed "challengers," who may query a voter’s eligibility, in polling places in Louisville’s predominantly black neighborhoods, an act that many Democrats regarded as an attempt at racial intimidation. An emphasis on voting integrity, whatever the motivations behind it, often helps Republicans at the polls.

This is not to say that the Justice Department's voting section is planning to defraud the election (and I think Toobin's article qualifies for nonpartisan), but—to bring it back to Tom DeLay and company—why the hell should we have any confidence that the GOP does not intend to abuse the system recently tooled up by Ashcroft? Consider:

• Key aide to Tom DeLay (R-Sugarland), Jim Ellis: "We must stress that a [redistricted] map that returns [Democratic legislators] Frost, Edwards and Doggett is unacceptable and not worth all of the time invested into this project." (Todd Gillman)
  
• Michigan GOP state legislator, John Pappageorge: "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election." (Bob Herbert—I know, I can't believe it either.)
  
• Florida Dem state legislator, Les Miller: "I'm very happy [Florida] decided not to use this [racially flawed felon purge list]. My concern is, what's next? Does this mean this list will not be used anymore, period? Or is this something that they're going to look at next week, where we'll have to come up with a different definition of how they're going to try to purge people from that list?" (The St. Petersburg Times)

That's the question, and it's one that can be first addressed by locking Tom DeLay out of politics and polite company for life. Let's get this habitual offender off the streets, at least, and then look to the broader problems facing election oversight. Mark my word: We'll hear plenty more on the topic come November.

Posted by Kriston at September 22, 2004 12:53 AM