Watergate Without the Break-In
By Marie Cocco
Truthdig
Wednesday 16 May 2007
Washington - It is time to stop referring to the "fired U.S
attorneys scandal" by that misnomer, and call it what it is: a White
House-coordinated effort to use the vast powers of the Justice
Department to swing elections to Republicans.
This is no botched personnel switch. It is not even a political
spat between the fired U.S. attorneys and Bush administration
officials who deemed some of them insufficiently zealous in promoting
the department's law enforcement priorities. Connect the dots and you
see an insidious effort to corrupt the American electoral system.
It's Watergate without the break-in or the bagmen.
The emerging picture is one in which widespread Republican claims
of "voter fraud"-unsubstantiated in virtually every case examined
closely by law enforcement officials, local journalists, state
elections officials and academics-were used to stymie
Democratic-leaning voter registration groups and create a taint
around Democrats. The Justice Department's own statistics show that
only a handful of people were convicted of voting illegally since it
began a "voter integrity" initiative in 2002. Its top election crimes
official, a career prosecutor, has told the U.S. Election Assistance
Commission that the proportion of "legitimate to illegitimate claims
of fraud" hasn't changed.
The "voter fraud" claims that White House political adviser Karl
Rove promoted before last year's congressional elections were in
battleground states such as New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin
with closely contested races. He also has complained about alleged
fraud in hotly competitive states such as Washington, Florida and
Missouri. Curiously, states where elections often are decided by wide
margins-New York, for instance-don't turn up on his lists.
According to McClatchy Newspapers, Rove pressed Justice officials
about voter fraud probes in October. Complaints from Republican
activists wound up in the hands of Kyle Sampson, former chief of
staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and a key figure in the
imbroglio. Five of the 12 U.S. attorneys who were canned or targeted
for removal were singled out for alleged laxity in pursuing
voter-fraud prosecutions, The Washington Post has reported.
The Justice Department's power to prosecute was expected to be
put to use in carrying out a partisan witch hunt. Yet even this
picture is incomplete.
The shenanigans involving U.S. attorneys must be seen alongside
the parallel campaign to turn the department's voting-rights section
into a rubber stamp for Republican efforts to enhance the voting
power of their loyalists while diminishing that of Democrats.
Toby Moore, a former redistricting expert in the voting rights
section and now project manager for American University's Commission
on Federal Election Reform, says he believed that when the Bush
administration began, ideological differences-a suspicion that
liberals held too much sway-were at the root of chronic disagreements
between political appointees and career lawyers. But he says he was
wrong. "It now appears that what they were doing was not
ideologically motivated but partisan motivated," Moore says. "They
came in 2001 with the idea of changing the rules of elections to
benefit the Republican Party."
The voting-rights section began producing rulings that would have
the effect of crimping participation by Democratic-leaning voters.
The department's backing of state photo identification laws, notably
in Georgia, was one such case. Moore notes that the Georgia law,
which was struck down in court, did not only burden minorities, the
elderly and the disabled. It loosened rules for early and absentee
voting, ballots typically used more often by the educated and
affluent-and more likely to be cast by Republicans. A new fervor for
forcing states to purge registration rolls of invalid names, a
process that often deletes names of eligible voters, also seized the
voting-rights section.
The most vivid nexus between the "U.S. attorneys scandal" and the
subjugation of the voting-rights section to partisan pursuits comes
in Missouri, where the abrupt resignation of U.S. Attorney Todd
Graves in March 2006 was followed quickly by the interim appointment
of Bradley Schlozman, who'd helped to recast the voting rights
section in the Bush administration's image. Schlozman soon announced
indictments of four workers for a liberal voter-registration
group-the group itself had brought evidence of suspicious activity to
the authorities. He did so just before November's election.
No set of coincidences could possibly result in this pattern. It
suggests a scheme to use the levers of government to shape the pool
of voters in favor of the ruling party. In a fledgling democracy, we
would consider this shocking corruption. The chilling truth is that
it can happen here-and apparently it did.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051807B.shtml
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get real. like jesus would ever own a gun or vote republican.
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