Under Bush, Civil Rights Division Works to Protect... Whites (TPM Muckraker)

[marmar]

Under Bush, Civil Rights Division Works to Protect... Whites

By Paul Kiel - April 6, 2007, 12:15 PM

The U.S. attorney firings scandal has laid bare the administration's -- and particularly Karl Rove's -- preoccupation with prosecuting voter fraud. But there's a flip side to this coin. The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division has virtually abandoned its traditional role, undertaken since the 1965 Voting Rights Act, of actively protecting African American voters from discrimination.

There's no greater demonstration of that fact than this simple fact: During the first five years of the Bush administration, the Justice Department's voting section only filed a single case alleging voting discrimination on behalf of African American voters. That's despite the fact that the section, part of the Civil Rights Division, was created mainly to protect African American voters from discrimination.

But during that same time period, the section managed to file the first ever "reverse" discrimination case under the Voting Rights Act.

That case, United States v. Ike Brown and Noxubee County, alleges that Brown, the chairman of Noxubee County's Democratic Executive Committee in Mississippi, has been trying to limit whites' participation in local elections. The case, filed in 2005, is currently being tried, and is likely to reach its conclusion later this month.
...(snip)...

A similar shift has occurred in the division's employment litigation section, which is tasked with preventing discrimination in employment. That section has managed to file two "reverse" discrimination cases alleging discrimination against whites under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, while filing only one alleging discrimination against African Americans in the past six years.

The complete piece is at: http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002956.php

[bluerum]

1. And oil companies. eom