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Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall
This is a bullshit proposition that you just made up in your head (although to be fair, maybe you didn't just make it up, maybe it lives there). I have never ever heard anyone say anything close to this.
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She didn't make it up. If you read the interim report that she linked to, from page 78, you will see that it refers to a Washington Post article quoting an anonymous DOJ staffer as saying:
"There are career people who feel strongly that it is not the voting section's job to protect white voters," the lawyer said. "The environment is that you better toe the line of traditional civil rights ideas or you better keep quiet about it, because you will not advance, you will not receive awards and you will be ostracized."
It also quotes testimony from a former DOJ staffer, Coates, saying that he did not believe that someone senior to him at DOJ, King, "supports equal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act". Not that she (King) said this, but that he (Coates) believed it.
It further quotes Coates and another DOJ staffer about an Obama political appointee at DOJ, Fernandes, as follows:
Ms. Fernandes responded by telling the gathering there that the Obama administration was only interested in bringing traditional types of Section 2 cases that would provide equality for racial and language minority voters. And then she went on to say that this is what we are all about or words to that effect....
Ms. Fernandes reiterated that directive in another meeting held in December 2009 on the subject of federal observer election coverage, in which she stated to the entire group in attendance that the Voting Section's goal was to ensure equal access for voters of color or language minority.
Coates in particular described this as hostility to race-neutral enforcement of voting rights laws. I quoted what the report actually said because I don't think that is the best interpretation of the evidence in, or even a particularly fair one, but obviously it is a politically useful one, and in some circles it is accepted as the truth.
