How H.R. 4 Would Let Leftist Extremists At The DOJ Control The Entire Nation’s Elections

Forcing states to run election rules by the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division is like giving that power to the Democratic National Committee.

Why are Democrats in Congress staging a series of show hearings to generate support for H.R. 4, “The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act”? Because, they claim, there is a wave of “voter suppression” going on across the country.

That is nothing more than a political fabrication. Requiring voters to show ID to authenticate their identity, or trying to ensure voter registration rolls are accurate and up-to-date, are not “voter suppression” and don’t prevent any eligible individual from registering and voting.

H.R. 4 isn’t just unnecessary and unjustified. It’s a dangerous bill that would give the partisan bureaucrats of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department administrative veto powers over states’ changes to election procedures.

As Cleta Mitchell noted in The Federalist earlier this month, H.R. 4 is “even more insidious” than its cousin, H.R. 1, precisely because “it would enable the vastly well-funded Democrat ‘voting rights’ apparatus to control American elections.” This control would extend over states’ election integrity measures like voter ID (even if passed by ballot referenda approved by all of the voters of a state).

These left-wing ideologues are hostile to the equal, non-partisan enforcement of federal voting rights laws. They are a threat to each state’s constitutional power to control its own election procedures and have repeatedly exhibited their biased attitudes over the course of decades.

DOJ’s Long History of Partisanship

This blatant bias was perhaps best captured in 1994 in Johnson v. Miller, where a federal court issued a scathing opinion charging that “the considerable influence of ACLU advocacy on the voting rights decisions of the United States attorney general is an embarrassment.” The judge was “surprised” that DOJ “was so blind to this impropriety, especially in a role as sensitive as that of preserving the fundamental right to vote.”

In 2013, the inspector general of the Justice Department issued a report titled “A Review of the Operations of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division.” No one who reads that report could possibly endorse the idea of giving these partisans the legal power to decide what the election rules are for each state. Only leftist activists who want to give their DOJ allies the power to dictate election procedures (and gain a political advantage) could pretend it’s a good idea.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) is race-neutral. It protects all voters from discrimination. But that is decidedly not the view of the Voting Section staff. The IG found “relevant evidence” demonstrating the staff “disfavored” cases where victims of discrimination were white. This resulted in their ignoring discrimination against white voters even in the most egregious of circumstances.

For example, the Voting Section failed to take direct action against a Guam law that used ancestry restrictions (like those used in the South to exclude blacks during the Jim Crow era) to prevent white and Asian residents of Guam from being able to register and take part in a plebiscite. It took an expensive private lawsuit to end Guam’s bigoted treatment of its residents, which even the liberal Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals found violated the 15th Amendment in Davis v. Guam in 2019.

Abusing DOJ Employees for Doing Their Jobs

In 2005, the Section reviewed Georgia’s voter ID law under the now-expired preclearance provision of the VRA, the same provision H.R. 4 wants to reimplement. The IG found that staff attorneys implied a newly hired attorney who was suspected of favoring Georgia’s voter ID law was a Nazi sympathizer, referring to him as “a hand-picked Vichyite.”

When this attorney recommended that the attorney general preclear the ID law, other members of the review group engaged in a series of “hostile” and “snide” actions. These unprofessional actions included dispersing customized coffee mugs mocking the attorney to staff and secretly accessing the attorney’s intranet work folder and mocking his work product with others under the email cover “lookie what I found.”

Georgia’s voter ID law was subsequently found not to be discriminatory by a federal court in 2009 and has been in force since then, vindicating the harassed staffer.

In 2006, according to the IG, staff members assigned to file a lawsuit under the VRA against black officials in Noxubee County, Mississippi, for discriminating against white voters were subjected to written and verbal abuse from peers. The team leader was called a “Klansman” in official email correspondence. A black intern who requested to join the team was repeatedly taunted as a “token,” and career employees complained to the intern’s mother that her son was acting as a racial “turncoat.”

A federal court in 2007 found that the defendants in Noxubee County had engaged in “blatant” racial discrimination in a case the majority of career staff wanted to ignore. Not only did they want to ignore it, they attempted to intimidate and harass those who...

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