The last two paragraphs of Charlie Savage’s piece in today’s New York Times — regarding what is happening now in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice — were, inverted pyramid aside, two of the most direct, helpful paragraphs in the entire 31-paragraph article. They were:
[Attorney General Eric Holder] described his Civil Rights Division efforts as more restoration than change. The recent moves, he argued, are a return to its basic approach under presidents of both parties — despite some policy shifts between Republican and Democratic administrations — before the “sea change” and “aberration” of the Bush years.
“Of course there are going to be critics,” Mr. Holder said. But, he argued, “any objective observer” would see the recent approach as consistent with “the historical mission of the division, not straying into some kind of liberal orthodoxy. It really is just a function of enforcing the statutes.”
A.G. Holder
The inverted pyramid, for non-journalist folks, is one of the most basic rules of journalism, that a story is written with the most important information at the top. The rule is helpful both due to the waning attention of readers and due to the very pragmatic reality that cuts come from the bottom if a last-minute change results in a story needing to take up less space.
Unfortunately, Holder’s direct, concise explanation was right at the bottom of the article, following the absurd notion of Hans von Spakovsky “accus[ing] the Obama team of ‘nakedly political’ maneuvers.”
Josh Marshall and all the folks at Talking Points Memo have been detailing the errs of von Spakovsky since May 2007. As Paul Kiel once called him, he was the Bush DOJ’s “voter suppression svengali.”
One of Kiel’s more significant reports about von Spakovsky was described by Marshall as thus:
We’ve reporting for a while on Hans von Spakovsky, one of the key bamboozlers at the Bush civil rights division, who worked with Bradley Schlozman on getting the voting section to finally start cracking down on all the vote scams perpetrated by black people. Anyway, von Spakovsky is now up for confirmation for a position as an FEC commissioner, where he’s sure not to do any harm. But now it seems that in his confirmation testimony he may have fibbed about his role in purging people who believe in voting rights from the voting rights section.
That is who is describing the Obama DOJ’s moves as “nakedly political.” Not that The New York Times mentioned that. Also unmentioned was the surely insignificant fact that von Spakovsky was denied a spot on the Federal Elections Commission because, in part, of the fact that a certain Senator from Illinois blocked it. Sen. Barack Obama.
Nope, no grudge there.
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Chris Geidner is a lawyer in Washington, D.C., who writes at Law Dork, contributes regularly to Metro Weekly and has written for The Atlantic Online, Advocate.com, Salon and other publications. An extended biography can be found
Oh, I think Spakovsky quite sincerely believes black people are a threat to the sanctity of the ballot. I don’t think that’s motivated by politics.
Wow, this place is becoming an echo chamber.
Let’s say I accept everything you say about Mr. von Spakovsky as true. It says nothing about Mr. Holder. There are days when I think that if Glenn Beck said that rocks roll downhill, you would disavow the Theory of Gravity as a vast right wing conspiracy. That von Spakovsky says the Holder DOJ is partisan does not make it untrue.