Is the Justice Department Conducting Latino Outreach on Behalf of the GOP?

Earlier this month, the Department of Justice's top official overseeing voting rights, John Tanner, made some insensitive comments about elderly and minority voters at a Latino forum in Los Angeles, raising eyebrows in the voting rights community and prompting Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama to call for his ouster on Friday.

But the greater outrage, according to civil rights lawyers across the country, is how the Department's Voting Section has turned away from defending minorities that are seen as supporting Democrats -- African Americans and Native Americans -- while instead focusing on another minority that is seen as a Republican swing vote -- Latinos.

"It may be cynical, but it may also be true," said Julie Fernandes, senior policy analyst and special counsel for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, "that the enforcement for Latinos has been more vigorous because they see it as more in their political interest -- their partisan interest."

Next week, the House Judiciary Committee will hold an oversight hearing on the Voting Section, whose duty is to implement the nation's voting rights laws. While the firing of several federal prosecutors who did not pursue partisan voter fraud cases has garnered national headlines, the Voting Section's enforcement record has had far less scrutiny.

The Voting Section "did not file any cases on behalf of African-American voters during a five-year period between 2001 and 2006, and no cases have been brought on behalf of Native-American voters for the entire administration," Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights told the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on June 21, 2007.

This summer and fall, Voting Section Chief John Tanner and other top attorneys have been reaching out to civil rights groups -- particularly Latinos -- with appearances to tout the Section's record since Tanner became chief in mid-2005. Their message, which will no doubt be repeated before the House Judiciary Committee next week, is under Tanner the Section has doubled the lawsuits filed -- most notably to enforce laws concerning bilingual election materials and assistance for Hispanic and Asian voters.

It was during an appearance at the National Latino Congresso in Los Angeles in early October where Tanner, after being challenged by voting rights activists such as Alan Breslauer of BradBlog.com, said minority voters are less likely to be impacted than senior citizens by voter I.D. laws because they tend to have shorter life spans. That remark prompted Sen. Obama to call for Tanner's ouster on Friday.

"Such comments are patently erroneous, offensive, and dangerous and they are especially troubling coming from the federal official charged with protecting voting rights," Obama said in a letter to Acting Attorney General Peter Keisler.

"John Tanner ... is a dedicated career civil servant who has worked for decades to protect voting rights," said Justice Department Spokesman Brian Roehrkasse, responding to Sen. Obama on Friday. "Under Mr. Tanner's leadership, the Voting Section has doubled its production in lawsuits, from an average of eight new cases a year to 16 new cases. It has brought over twice as many lawsuits under the minority language provisions of the Voting Rights Act in five years as in the previous 32 years combined... including the first cases in history on behalf of Filipino, Vietnamese and Korean voters."

This past Thursday -- a day before Obama's letter became public -- Tanner and a Voting Section associate spoke at the University of California Berkeley at an event sponsored by Center for Latino Policy Research and the Election Administration Research Center. He spoke of his background fighting for the rights of African-Americans in Alabama in the 1960s and touted the Voting Section's current record on minority language lawsuits -- especially on behalf of Latino voters.