Democracy at Work

Could this really, actually happen? I guess so...

Faced with the prospect of losing a committee vote, Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Richard J. Durbin Wednesday backed down a bit from their opposition to a Republican nominee to the Federal Election Commission accused of stymieing minority voting power.

Feinstein of California and Durbin of Illinois had expressed serious reservations over Republican Hans von Spakovsky’s nomination to a 6-year term on the FEC. And Feinstein, chairwoman of Senate Rules Committee, seemed to be setting the stage to vote against his nomination, signaling she would take the unusual step of seeking individual votes in her committee for von Spakovsky and three other pending FEC nominations – a Republican and two Democrats.

But Feinstein and Durbin on Wednesday joined a unanimous vote to move von Spakovsky’s nomination and those of the three others to the full Senate without recommendation.

Lithwick's article lays out most of Spakovsky's crimes. Spakovsky is one of the masterminds behind the "Voter Fraud" fraud, which was used to give intellectual cachet to the idea generally that voter fraud was widespread, and that specifically voter identification laws, targeted at minorities that usually vote Democratic, was the solution:

In support of his position that voter-ID laws did not unconstitutionally suppress the votes of poor and minority voters, Hearne cited the decision of the DoJ to approve the pre-clearance of Georgia's voter-ID law, and a law review article supporting such laws, written under the pseudonym Publius. Hearne didn't reveal that the decision on Georgia was made by political appointees of the DoJ over the strong objections of career attorneys there who believed the law was indeed discriminatory. Nor did he explain that (as I discovered and blogged about a few years earlier) Publius was none other than Hans von Spakovsky, then serving as one of the political DoJ officials who approved the Georgia voter-ID law. (President Bush later gave von Spakovsky a recess appointment to the Federal Election Commission.)

There is simply no way the Democratic Senate can let this slide. Spakovsky is a walking, talking affront to democracy. The Democrats approving this would be akin to a mass neutering. Of course, after that gutsy vote to condemn MoveOn.org for their ad in the New York Times, there's no telling what decision they might make.