After a five-month standoff, Hans von Spakovsky has withdrawn his name as a nominee to the FEC. The move likely clears the way for the deadlock over the FEC to be resolved.

You can read his resignation here.

"It is with regret that I write to request that you withdraw my nomination," Spakovsky wrote in a letter to the President today. In his letter, Spakovsky explains that Democrats' opposition to his nomination has caused a battle that has been "extremely hard on my family and quite frankly, we do not have the financial resources to continue to wait until this matter is resolved."

Democrats have opposed Spakovsky's nomination ever since last year, but it was the opposition of Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Russ Feingold (D-WI), who refused to allow any vote on the nominees together, that ultimately led to his withdrawal. Republicans, on the other hand, refused to allow Spakovsky to be voted on separately.

To remind you of some of the lowlights of Spakovsky's career at the Justice Department: his attempt to disenfranchise thousands of voters in Arizona singlehandedly (and then his false testimony to Congress about that), his petty attempts to retaliate against Department employees who did not agree with his legal philosophy (and his contested testimony about that), and his advisory letters that led to restrictive voter roll policies in a number of states.

Update: Rick Hasen on where things go from here.

Later Update: Reid's response:

Read more »

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) responded to President Bush's uncompromising compromise from last week today with the obvious response. From Roll Call (sub. req.):

Senate Democrats have made their next move in the ongoing stalemate involving Federal Election Commission nominees, asking President Bush on Monday to either drop former Justice Department lawyer Hans von Spakovsky or begin persuading Senate Republicans to go along with individual votes to fill the five agency vacancies.

"Despite your commitment that you would accept and agree to individual votes on each of the pending nominations, including Mr. von Spakovsky's, Republican Senate leaders indicated last week that they intend to continue to block such votes," Reid wrote in a letter on Monday to White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten. "This continued obstructionism will prevent the FEC from its important work during this election season, including issuing advisory opinions, rulemakings, enforcement actions and certification of public financing."

As Reid notes, White House officials had whispered last week that Republicans would finally allow a vote on Spakovsky, but Senate Republicans quickly put the kibosh on that notion -- thus eliminating the only aspect of Bush's proposal that gave any ground. And so it goes.

Well, that was quick.

As I noted yesterday, the White House offered a "compromise" to the FEC deadlock -- except that they refused to withdraw the centerpiece of the conflict, Hans von Spakovsky. Oh, and the offer also included replacing the sitting Republican commissioner David Mason, who's been creating trouble for the McCain campaign. The only aspect of the offer that could be characterized as a compromise was the promise from White House officials that Senate Republicans would now agree to have a vote on Spakovsky separately from the other uncontroversial FEC nominees.

But now Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says they won't. It's either a vote on all the nominees together or nothing. So... no progress has been made. The FEC will remain shut down.

Nobody does compromise quite like the Bush administration.

If you're a regular reader of TPM, you're familiar with Hans von Spakovsky and in particular, Spakovsky's remarkable track record at the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. It is because of that record -- one of ignoring, marginalizing, and intimidating career lawyers in order to institute restrictive voting laws all over the country, a pattern amounting to "institutional sabotage" as one former career attorney there put it -- that Senate Democrats (Barack Obama and Russ Feingold in particular) opposed his nomination to the Federal Election Commission.

Spakovsky was one of four nominees -- two Dems and two GOPers -- to the commission. The other three were uncontroversial. Senate Republicans insisted that all nominees be voted on together, and the Democrats objected: Spakovsky would have to get his own vote. The Republicans refused, and there things have stood for more than four months. Without the necessary number of commissioners, the FEC has essentially shut down.

It is a problem that has a relatively simple solution: if the White House were to submit another nominee, that nominee would more than likely be quickly confirmed without much trouble.

Instead, the Bush administration proposed something different yesterday.

Spakovsky remains a nominee. Instead, the administration has submitted a new nominee to replace the current chairman, David Mason. Mason is one of the only two seated commissioners, and it just so happens that he's been creating a whole lot of trouble for John McCain lately.

In February, the McCain campaign notified the FEC that it was withdrawing from the public financing system for the primary. Although McCain had once opted in, his campaign said that it had never received public funds and so could opt out. The move meant that McCain would not be bound by the $54 million spending limit for the system.

But Mason balked. McCain couldn't just opt out -- the FEC had to approve his request before he could. And Mason also indicated that a tricky bank loan might mean that McCain had locked himself in to the system. That would be disastrous for the campaign, since the Dem nominee would have a tremendous spending advantage through August. So McCain's campaign has continued to spend away, far surpassing the limit already. The Democratic Party has filed a complaint with the FEC and has also taken the matter to court.

And now Mason is getting the boot.

So where's the compromise, exactly? A White House spokeswoman tells The New York Times that Republicans are now willing to have a separate vote for Spakovsky. Whether that actually is the case, we shall see. If so, that means Democrats will have the chance to actually vote down Spakovsky once and for all.

But there is no shortage of cynicism about the White House's move. As Fred Wertheimer of Democracy 21 put it: "The only apparent reason for President Bush to drop Commissioner David Mason at this stage, an FEC candidate he had twice proposed for the Commission, is to prevent him from casting an adverse vote against Senator McCain on important enforcement questions pending at the Commission. The questions deal with Senator McCain's request to withdraw from the presidential primary public financing system and the consequences of a loan the McCain campaign took out and the collateral provided for the loan."

In this morning's writeup of Supreme Court's decision on Indiana's voter ID law, The New York Times quoted someone familiar to TPM readers:

"This decision not only confirms the validity of photo ID laws, but it completely vindicates the Bush Justice Department and refutes those critics who claimed that the department somehow acted improperly when it approved Georgia's photo ID law in 2005," said Hans A. von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission and a former Justice Department official.

It's a reaction laden with a number of distortions. But the key one has to do with a crucial difference between Georgia's 2005 law and Indiana's law, as Joe Rich, the former chief of the voting section in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, told me. Rich, who last year opposed Spakovsky' nomination to the FEC along with a group of other former voting section professionals, called Spakovsky's contention that yesterday's ruling vindicated his actions "disingenuous."

"The Georgia law reviewed by the Justice Department required voters seeking the required voter ID to pay a fee that a federal court found created an unconstitutional poll tax," Rich said. "But in Indiana the Supreme Court explicitly noted that photo identification cards 'issued by Indiana's [Bureau of Motor Vehicles] are . . . free' and thus there was no issue of creating an unconstitutional poll tax."

Spakovsky and other political appointees overruled staff attorneys who'd recommended against approving Georgia's voter ID law, because of concerns that the law would discriminate against poor and minority voters. It was just a part of Spakovsky's legacy of ignoring and intimidating section employees, and generally doing what he could to effect policies that would disenfranchise voters.

Under the Voting Rights Act, parts of the country with a history of discrimination must demonstrate to the Justice Department that new legislation does not discriminate against minority voters. In the case of Georgia's law, supporters of the law didn't do much of anything to demonstrate that the law wouldn't discriminate against African-Americans.

In fact, quite the opposite. Georgia state Rep. Sue Burmeister, the sponsor of the bill, told voting section staff that "if there are fewer black voters because of this bill, it will only be because there is less opportunity for fraud," and that "when black voters in her black precincts are not paid to vote, they do not go to the polls."

Indiana's law had not required review by the Justice Department, Rich said. "Therefore, there was no issue in review of the Indiana law concerning whether the state could meet its burden of demonstrating that the law did not hurt minority voters, as is required by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. That was the only issue before Justice Department in its review of the Georgia law and career attorneys, in an in-depth memo, found that the law did hurt minority voters and accordingly recommended an objection to the law."

So I think it's fair to say that Spakovsky has yet to be "completely vindicated."

From Roll Call (sub. req.):

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) shipped to the White House on Tuesday a compromise plan on Federal Election Commission nominees, a deal that is likely dead on arrival because it does not meet GOP demands on Hans von Spakovsky.

"You are aware that Mr. von Spakovsky does not have majority support to win confirmation," Reid wrote Tuesday in a letter to White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten. "It is my understanding that you have two additional Republican FEC candidates cleared for nomination.

"One would fill Mr. von Spakovsky's seat should he be defeated or withdrawn, and the other would fill the vacant Republican seat," Reid continued. "You already have the non-controversial re-nomination of sitting commissioner David Mason pending."

You can read Reid's letter to White House chief of staff Josh Bolten here. But as Roll Call says, Republicans have thus far refused to budge on any deal that doesn't include Spakovsky getting packaged in a vote with the other less controversial nominees. And so the FEC remains officially dormant and the complaints against allegedly outlaw campaign activity continue to pile up.

Hans von Spakovsky's legacy is still being felt down in Florida. From the AP:

Florida can temporarily enforce a law that disqualifies any voter registration where the Social Security or driver license numbers on the application can't be matched with government databases, an appeals court ruled Thursday.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta said a lower court shouldn't have ordered a temporary injunction in December that prevented Florida from enforcing an anti-fraud law that dismissed applications when matches couldn't be made.

As we reported last year, one of Spakovsky's achievements while at the Justice Department was promoting this interpretation of the law: that states ought to reject voter applications if the data did not match driver's license or Social Security records. Civil rights groups, calling the measure "disenfranchisement-by-bureaucracy," sued to halt the law in an attempt to minimize the effect on the 2008 election. A newspaper investigation found that the measure resulted in tens of thousands of voters being rejected, the overwhelming majority of them minorities.

Back in December, a district court agreed with the argument by the groups -- the NAACP, the Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition, and Southwest Voter Registration Education Project -- that the law ought to be halted from going into effect while the lawsuit was decided. That decision was overturned yesterday.

"Yesterday's ruling by the appellate court represents a setback for all eligible Floridians, particularly voters of color, who wish to register to vote and participate in the upcoming presidential elections," said Elizabeth Westfall of Advancement Project, one of the attorneys for the groups. But Justin Levitt, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, said that the suit would go on and that "the trial court must now consider whether disenfranchising thousands of eligible citizens because of typos, is consistent with the U.S. Constitution."

Last time we checked in on Hans von Spakovsky, the vote suppression guru was doggedly making the case for voter ID laws.

Now Angelenos have a chance to sample his wisdom. On April 2nd, Spakovsky will be speaking to the Los Angeles chapter of the Federalist Society. The title of the lecture is "Litigating Elections: the Campaign Process in 2008" -- characteristic of a man who's shown a genius for using the law to affect elections.

While Spakovsky is spreading the gospel, the White House and Republicans have still refused to back down from his nomination to the Federal Election Commission. The Dems, meanwhile, refuse to allow him to be slipped through with the other FEC nominees. Which is why the FEC remains unable to act.

Thanks to TPM Reader KA for the tip.

OK, so Hans von Spakovsky's nomination to the Federal Election Commission has left the Senate hopelessly gridlocked, and the FEC crippled. And he packed his bags and left the building months ago. But the man is still keeping busy.

The vote suppression expert has just released his latest call-to-arms on the voter ID front at the Heritage Foundation. It's called "Stolen Identities, Stolen Votes: A Case Study in Voter Impersonation."

In it, Spakovsky takes on those liberal critics who claim that there's no voter fraud (like, say, The New York Times) by unearthing a 1984 grand jury investigation in Brooklyn, NY during which, he says, numerous episodes of voter fraud dating back to 1968 were uncovered.

Just because the case was 24 years ago and no indictments were issued shouldn't give us pause. The point is that it's evidence that fraud does occur. And therefore there's a strong case for requiring ID at the polls. And if the law disproportionately disenfranchises minority voters, I guess that's just collateral damage. The Supreme Court is expected to decide by late June whether Indiana's voter ID law is unconstitutional.

So you can see that Spakovsky is still on the case, though thankfully not still at the Justice Department, where he took a number of steps that had the effect of making it more difficult for minorities to vote. Bush put Spakovsky on the FEC by a recess appointment in December, 2005.

As voting law expert Rick Hasen points out, the piece is a brazen move for a guy who's been accused of being too partisan. Apparently Spakovsky is not holding out for winning Democrats over.

A recent report (pdf) by the Election Assistance Commission's inspector general served as a reminder for why Spakovsky is so controversial. In it, former Commissioner Paul DeGregorio, a Republican who frequently clashed with Spakovsky when he was at the Justice Department, is quoted as saying that "too many of [von Spakovsky's] decisions are clouded by his partisan thinking" and that Spakovsky thought that DeGregorio should use his position to advance the Republican Party's agenda.

From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Hans von Spakovsky threw in the towel on New Years Eve, in an e-mail sent out to supporters....

"Today was my last official day as a Commissioner on the Federal Election Commission," he wrote. "The Senate officially adjourned today without acting on my nomination... I wanted to thank everyone for their support over the past two years while I was going through this confirmation battle. All of the telephone calls, emails and notes I received from people were great encouragement for me."

Von Spakovsky attached an endorsement by the Wall Street Journal, though he added that "it did not help in the end in convincing the Democrats to vote to confirm me."

I'll guess he'll just have to intimidate federal employees and work to disenfranchise minorities from outside the government now.

Is it the end for Hans von Spakovsky?

From what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said on the Senate floor last night, it appears so. Given the ongoing opposition to Spakovsky by Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Russ Feingold (D-WI), Reid called for a vote on the individual nominees to the Federal Election Commission. But the Republican leadership, as they have from the beginning, insisted on voting on the four nominees, both Democratic and Republican, together, thus protecting Spakovsky from being voted down, but also preventing the confirmation of any of the other nominees.

At the end of the year, von Spakovsky's recess appointment to the commission will expire. Of course, that could lead to other problems, but our favorite vote-suppression guru wouldn't be one of them.

Reid's remarks are below.

Read more »

Jeez. Not only is Hans von Spakovsky's FEC nomination bound up in the Senate, but one of his pet causes, having states reject voter applications if the data does not match driver's license or Social Security records, has hit a snag in Florida.

Civil rights groups argued that the policy amounted to "disenfranchisement-by-bureaucracy." Now a federal judge has agreed:

U.S. District Judge Stephan Mickle on Tuesday sided with the NAACP's request for a preliminary injunction suspending Florida's 2-year-old "voter match" law while courts decide whether it violates federal laws protecting the right to vote....

Lawyers for Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning contended the matching process is required to prevent voter fraud....

But in his order Tuesday, Mickle wrote that Florida's match law "stands as an obstacle" to the objectives of the federal Help America Vote Act, by making it harder to vote.

"Though it is true that prevention of voter fraud and prevention of voter disenfranchisement were both goals of HAVA, the impetus for the Act was to respond to the millions of votes that went uncounted -- not the millions of incidents of voter registration fraud," Mickle wrote.

Ever since September, the nomination for accomplished vote suppression expert Hans von Spakovsky to be a member of the Federal Election Commission has been snagged, stopped by the public opposition of Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Russ Feingold (D-WI) and the somewhat more private opposition of Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH).

The Republican leadership countered the Democrats by insisting that von Spakovsky's nomination was all or nothing -- either von Spakovsky went through or none of the nominated commissioners did. That means that if no compromise is reached by the end of the year, the FEC, which makes rules governing election spending, might effectively shut down in an election year, since it would be left with only two commissioners out of six seats. As we reported back in October, that could create a situation where outside groups funded by millionaires (like the Swift Boat Vets) could run amok in a campaign year.

Roll Call gives (sub. req.) an update of sorts this morning. The short version: things are still at a standstill, but "various scenarios currently are circulating" to avoid a shutdown. One scenario: von Spakovsky could withdraw and the problem would go away. Another: the White House and Senate could join together to make a new round of nominations. Or another: "the deck of current commission recess appointees may be reshuffled and re-recess appointed, a complicated and likely unprecedented strategy." Stay tuned.

Earlier this month, we reported on a Florida law that requires the state to reject voter registration applications if the data does not match driver's license or Social Security records. The law, first implemented in January, 2006, was based on advice from Hans von Spakovsky -- yet another addition to his legacy of voter suppression at the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Civil rights groups, calling the measure "disenfranchisement-by-bureaucracy," have sued to halt the law in an attempt to minimize the effect on the 2008 election.

This weekend, Southwest Florida's News-Press ran an analysis of state records, and, well, the law seems to have had a predictable effect (enjoy the spin from election officials):

County election officials say the number of voters lost through Florida's central registration system is small -- 90 percent of applications get voter cards.

The result is applications from more than 43,000 Floridians hoping to become eligible voters over the past 21 months were rejected by state computer programs and kicked out for special review.

More than 14,000 initially rejected -- three-quarters of them minorities -- didn't make it through that last set of hoops.

Blacks were 6 1/2 times more likely than whites to be rejected at that step.

Hispanics were more than 7 times more likely to be failed.

As for von Spakovsky, his nomination to be a commissioner on the Federal Election Commission remains stuck in the Senate, due to the opposition of Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Russ Feingold (D-WI).

Ed. Note: Thanks to TPMm Reader KH for the catch.

Hans von Spakovsky, whose nomination for the Federal Election Commission is currently stalled in the Senate, may have left the Justice Department in 2005, but his influence remains. A prime example is in Florida, where the state legislature, evidently following von Spakovsky's advice, passed a law that could disenfranchise tens of thousands of legitimate voters. Now civil rights groups are trying to stop the law before it affects the 2008 elections.

The law, scheduled to go in effect in January, would require the state to reject voter registrations if the state cannot match the information on registration applications to driver's license or Social Security records. Because such records tend to be riddled with errors, tens of thousands of "perfectly eligible voters" will be knocked off the rolls, the NAACP and other groups charged in a lawsuit this September, resulting in "disenfranchisement-by-bureaucracy." Compounding the problem, the law shortened the number of days that rejected voters have to present evidence that they're a legitimate voter from three to two days.

Florida was just one of a number of states that adopted such a law after von Spakovsky, then a lawyer with the Civil Rights Division, issued a letter to Maryland's attorney general in 2003 advising that the Help American Vote Act required states to reject voter registrations that did not match databases.

Joe Rich, the 40-year veteran of the Civil Rights Division who was then the chief of the voting section, told me that von Spakovsky wrote the letter without consulting him. Rich called it a "very strict reading of the law" which would "disenfranchise a lot of people" and compared it to Florida's disastrous attempt to purge ex-felons from the voter rolls in 2000 (a purge that was also von Spakovsky's brain child.)

Read more »

For Democrats, the stakes are high for Hans von Spakovsky's nomination to the Federal Election Commission. They say that a man who politicized the Justice Department and worked to disenfranchise voters has no place on the body regulating election issues. But the stakes for the fallout from his confirmation battle may be even higher.

Right now, the fight over von Spakovsky's nomination is at a stalemate. Senate Republicans insist that if von Spakovsky isn't confirmed, then none of the other three nominees to the Federal Elections Commission will get a vote. But a select group of Senate Democrats, led by Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Russ Feingold (D-WI), say that they'll prevent any vote on von Spakovsky if his nomination is tied to the other nominees. For now, neither side is budging.

In holding the other three nominees hostage, the Republicans have a clear strategy. The commission typically has six members, three of them Republicans and three Democrats. If the Senate did not vote on any of the four nominees up for confirmation, then the commission would be down to only two members by the end of the year, which would effectively incapacitate it. The commission requires four members to operate. To prevent that from happening, President Bush could stock the commission with recess appointees while Congress was out of session.

Either one of those scenarios is "fraught with potential danger," Fred Wertheimer, the executive director of the nonpartisan watchdog Democracy 21, told me.

Read more »

From Roll Call (sub. req.):

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on Wednesday derailed a plan blessed by Senate leaders to vote on controversial Federal Election Commission White House nominee Hans von Spakovsky, a move giving Democrats time to breathe in the ongoing Senate stalemate on FEC nominees.

According to Democratic Senate aides, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) struck a deal mid-week to hotline four FEC slots that must be confirmed by the Senate before next year. As part of the proposed deal, a voice vote on fellow commission nominees only would take place if no Senators objected to von Spakovsky's nomination.

But a vote on the deal, which was expected to come to the floor as early as today, appeared to be off by mid-day Wednesday after Obama -- and unconfirmed others -- voiced concerns that von Spakovsky's nomination was too controversial not to go through regular floor proceedings.

A Democratic aide said Senate offices continue to explore "concerns with Mr. von Spakovsky, if they rise to the level of other objections, as well as where the caucus lies."

Obama earlier called von Spakovsky an "unacceptable nominee." For a rundown for why Dems would find von Spakovsky so objectionable, see here and here.

Rick Hasen has more on where things might go from here over at the Election Law Blog.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) on news that von Spakovsky will be heading to the full Senate for confirmation:

"I strongly oppose the nomination of Hans von Spakovsky to serve a full term at the Federal Election Commission. His record of poor management, divisiveness, and inappropriate partisanship makes him an unacceptable nominee to the FEC. I am particularly concerned with his efforts to undermine voting rights at the Civil Rights Division during his tenure at the Department of Justice. The FEC needs strong, impartial leadership that will promote integrity in our election system. Hans von Spakovsky is not the right person for the job, and I call on President Bush to send Congress a new nominee."

As I reported yesterday, the Senate Rules Committee met this morning about the nomination of Hans von Spakovsky to the Federal Elections Commission.

This morning's result: faced with the defection of a Democrat on the committee, later revealed to be Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) chose to agree to send all four nominees, two Democrats and two Republicans, to the floor without recommendation. In other words, the committee did not vote to approve von Spakovsky, but he got through nonetheless.

Read more »

Who, me? retaliate? No.

We've written frequently about the efforts of senior political appointees in the Civil Rights Division to undermine the traditional role of the voting rights section. One of the main techniques was to add negative remarks to the performance evaluations for career attorneys; the message invariably sent was that this was a punishment for stepping out of line with the Justice Department's new priorities (protecting the rights of African American voters wasn't one of them).

Hans von Spakovsky -- a former senior lawyer in the Division whose nomination for a spot on the Federal Election Commission is currently pending before the Senate Rules Committee -- was a master at the craft. Details from two former Justice Department attorneys show how far von Spakovsky went to punish career lawyers -- and call into question the veracity of his testimony to Congress.

Read more »

In April of 2005, Hans von Spakovsky, then a senior lawyer in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, almost singlehandedly disenfranchised thousands of voters. Without consulting career voting rights attorneys, Spakovsky wrote a letter that incorrectly advised Arizona's secretary of state that the state should prevent voters from receiving a provisional ballot if they did not have proper ID.

When von Spakovsky -- whose nomination as commissioner on the Federal Elections Commission is still pending -- testified before the Senate Rules Committee last month, he claimed that he'd consulted with lawyers in the voting rights section before drafting the letter. "This was not me acting by myself, "he testified. "You know, I would have been consulting with the other attorneys there [in the voting section] to do it."

But that wasn't true, as Joe Rich, the chief of the voting section at the time, told TPMmuckraker. Rich is one among six veterans of the section who wrote the committee to object to von Spakvosky's nomination, calling him "the point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division's mandate to protect voting rights" when he worked at the Justice Department. Calling von Spakovsky's testimony "a flat out misrepresentation," Rich said that none of the career attorneys in the section had been aware of the letter -- even then-Assistant Attorney General Alex Acosta, who oversaw the Civil Rights Division, had not known about it. The letter went out under the signature of Sheldon Bradshaw, a senior political appointee in the division, on his last day.

In written answers (pdf) submitted to the committee weeks later, von Spakovsky changed his tune: "As I recall, I may not have consulted with the Section prior to drafting [the letter]." Von Spakovsky did not note that this was at variance with his spoken testimony. He continued, however, to say that he thought that he did consult with the section on a follow-up letter, sent in September. That letter, of course, reversed his earlier advice.

Von Spakovsky made the change not only at the urging of career voting section lawyers (who'd only heard of his April letter from Arizona officials), but also at the urging of the Election Assistance Commission, which was created by Congress in 2002, in part, to advise the states on the implementation of the Help America Vote Act.

Read more »

Last week, Hans von Spakovsky testified before the Senate Rules Committee that he'd been something of a wallflower when he worked at the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. His critics had it all wrong, he said. Despite claims that he'd led the Department's efforts to overturn the voting rights section's traditional work protecting African-American voters -- using the division's power instead to spread the myth of voter fraud and purge state voter rolls -- von Spakovsky said that he'd merely been there in an advisory capacity. People asked his opinion and he gave it, that's all.

But those who actually worked under him in the voting rights section say otherwise, calling him the de facto head of the section.

And in a letter to the Senate Rules Committee yesterday (the committee is considering von Spakovsky's nomination to be a commissioner at the Federal Election Commission), a group of former voting rights professionals in the Department laid out the numerous areas where von Spakvosky had been less than forthright in his testimony. You can read the letter here.

We've already noted one area where von Spakovsky's testimony is highly disputable. McClatchy, reporting on yesterday's letter, highlights another.

Under questioning from Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) about the Civil Rights Division's failure to file discrimination cases on behalf of African-American voters while he was there, von Spakovsky argued that Durbin had it all wrong. They'd actually filed two cases (von Spakovsky didn't mention that one of those was actually initiated during the Clinton administration), and there were two other cases that the leadership at the Department had approved for filing, but that hadn't moved forward. He was all for protecting African-American voters, really.

What he didn't mention was this:

A former Justice Department political appointee blocked career lawyers from filing at least three lawsuits charging local and county governments with violating the voting rights of African-Americans and other minorities, seven former senior department employees charged Monday....

Von Spakovsky blocked a major suit against a St. Louis suburb and two other suits against rural governments in South Carolina and Georgia and halted at least two investigations of election laws that appeared to suppress minority voting, one of them in Wyoming, said Joseph Rich, the former voting rights section chief....

Monday's letter included the first allegations that von Spakovsky torpedoed suits and investigations over alleged state, county or local laws that diminish the voting strength of African-Americans, Native Americans or other minorities or prevent them from voting altogether.

Von Spakovsky, the letter said, stripped the voting rights section chief of his authority to open investigations of discrimination without his superiors' approval.

As McClatchy reported last week, despite Democratic opposition to von Spakovsky's nomination, Republicans may be able to protect him by legislative maneuvering. Regardless of von Spakovsky's fate, though, his nomination, along with the U.S. attorney firings investigation (which has shined a light on von Spakovsky's former colleague, Bradley Schlozman), is proving a valuable opportunity to expose what's been happening at the Civil Rights Division under the Bush administration.

It's amazing what happens when a former Justice Department official sits behind a microphone.

Earlier this week, six veterans of the Civil Rights Division's voting rights section wrote the Senate Rules Committee to urge that they reject Hans von Spakovsky's nomination as a commissioner at the Federal Election Commission. The reason, they wrote, was that von Spakovsky had been "the point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division's mandate to protect voting rights" when he worked at the Justice Department.

Von Spakovsky, they wrote, had been instrumental in overruling career attorneys who objected to voter ID laws -- such as the infamous case of Georgia's 2005 law, which was ultimately blocked by a federal appeals court, likened by the judge to a Jim Crow-era poll tax.

But in his testimony before the panel yesterday, von Spakovsky said they had it all wrong. He was merely one counsel among many there, and when he was asked his opinion, he gave it; he was not "a decision maker." He nevertheless defended the division's stances, even though, he argued, they weren't his decisions to make. Here is under questioning by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) about the Georgia voter ID law:

Joe Rich, the former chief of the voting rights section, and one of the former section employees who wrote the committee about von Spakovsky, told me that von Spakovsky's minimization of his own role was laughable: "He was the de facto chief of the section."

One example in particular drove this home, Rich said.

Read more »