By Ashton Ellis National Journal
Question: When is a lawsuit also a campaign tool?
Answer: Whenever losing enrages a voting bloc and winning rewards them at the ballot box.
On Monday the Obama Administration participated in oral arguments before the Supreme Court in
Perry v. Perez a lawsuit over a Texas redistricting map that has been litigated and appealed but never held to be illegal in any way.
When the 2010 Census revealed that Texas had gained enough new population to justify four new seats in the U.S. House of Representatives the state legislature controlled by the GOP drew a map that made all four additions likely to vote Republican. Before the map could go into effect Texas had to submit its plan either to the U.S. Department of Justice or to a panel of three federal judges in Washington D.C. to get it pre-cleared to comply with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Texas opted for the trial before the three-judge panel no doubt because the state was probably skeptical it could get a fair hearing from Eric Holders biased Justice Department. Holders tenure justifies the move.
Since being sworn in as the nations top law enforcement officer Holder has repeatedly undermined state sovereignty and the rule of law. He refused to enforce federal laws policing illegal immigration prompting Arizona to do it for him. Instead of thanks Holders response was to sue Arizona for doing his job. The Supreme Court has accepted the case for a hearing and looks poised to schedule it sometime in April.
The Court will also be considering a fast-track appeal from Holders decision to deny South Carolinas new Voter ID law. The Justice Departments reasoning rests on a specious claim that requiring a person to produce a photo ID before voting disproportionately affects minorities.
Yet the evidence DOJ cites is a disparity of 1.6 percent between whites and blacks meaning that 1.6 percent of blacks are more likely than whites not to have a photo
ID.
South Carolina is trying to prevent voter fraud and offers free government IDs to any citizen who cant afford one. But Holder and Obama dont value clarity; they like results. And the easiest way to get the results they like is to remove barriers for unregistered voters to decide an election.
In the Arizona case Holder and Obama are using the states law as a wedge between rule-of-law conservatives and Americas growing Latino population. With South Carolinas Voter ID law and similar measures in other states the administration is casting a policy to ensure electoral integrity as a modern day equivalent to Jim Crow-style disenfranchisement.
No wonder Texas opted to bypass Holder and take its chances with a three-judge panel.
But radical Latino rights groups didnt want to wait for the preclearance process to unfold so they sued in a San Antonio federal court where two of three judges threw out the legislatures map and created a new one mandating Texas use the judge-made map in the 2012 election. The key problem was that the judges found
no violation of law in the legislatures map! Nevertheless they did award all four new seats to the Democrats. Glad to see the judges got politics out of redistricting.
With Texas fighting on two fronts in D.C. to prove the legislatures map isnt discriminatory and in San Antonio to prove the judges dont have authority to rewrite the law Eric Holders Justice Department parachuted in to take the side of the challengers. The reason is simple: All four judge-created districts are stacked with a majority of minority communities. Holder wants to show minority voters especially Latinos that the Obama Administration supports judicial activism and race-based districts.
If Holder loses Obama can argue he needs another term to nominate more race-conscious Supreme Court justices. But if the liberal rewrite of Texas congressional district prevails Democrats just netted four new seats in the House of Representatives out of thin air.
Not a slight trick to pull for two radical lawyers pretending to be ethical statesmen.
