Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

The fall-out from recently-released Justice Department memos pertaining to Tom DeLay's gerrymandering of Texas continues:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Friday said that the Justice Department was not motivated by politics when it approved a controversial Texas congressional redistricting plan in 2003, overriding objections within the Civil Rights Division that minority voters would be harmed.

...Gonzales' insistence that politics played no role wasn't shared by some Civil Rights Division veterans. They say the Texas case, joined by the department's recent approval of a Georgia voter ID law later rejected by the court, suggests a troubling trend of politics trumping Voting Rights Act considerations.

"The decisions are politically driven," said American University law professor Richard Ugelow, a 29-year Civil Rights Division veteran who joined the exodus of career staff from Justice in recent years.

William Yeomans, a senior voting-rights expert who left the Justice Department earlier this year, said: "It's clear who benefits from those decisions."

He and other division veterans say it is highly unusual for political appointees to override a unanimous recommendation by career lawyers.

"It's probably not an overstatement to say it's unprecedented for that kind of overruling of the career staff to occur," said David Becker, who left the division last April after seven years.

Nancy Pelosi is now working to create an independent commission to investigate the Justice Department's actions, as well as a disturbing pattern within the DOJ of putting the desires of the Republican Party before the law of the land.