Court Rules only Voting Rights Criminals Can Sue Voting Rights Criminals — No Kidding

On Nov. 20, Donald Trump-appointed judges permanently barred the NAACP from suing government voting rights violators. Only the government itself may sue to stop the government itself from committing gross racial vote suppression.  

If you think that’s crazy, Trump judges don’t care what you think.

The ruling by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals literally blesses racist blockades to the Voting Rights Act in seven states under its malfeasant jurisdiction (Arkansas, Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Missouri). If the U.S. Supreme Court goes along with this ruling, the whole of the United States will be Jim Crow’d.

The facts: This week, the court voted 3-2 that the NAACP is banned from bringing any suit — ever — for racial discrimination under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The ban also applies to the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU (which filed a friend-of-the-court brief on the side of NAACP) and every other civil rights organization in those seven states. Only the government itself may sue.

As it is the government itself which is the perpetrator of the crime of vote suppression, this ruling means that only the perpetrator of the crime may sue itself.

The court’s “left-wing” justice, that is, a George Bush appointee, dissented. Democracy Docket, the front-line group of voting rights attorneys, called the decision “catastrophic.” That’s an understatement. In legalese, the ruling bars “a private right of action” against a state discriminating against voters of color under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.  “Private” here means “voter.” That is, if Arkansas passes a law that only white voters may cast a ballot in a drop box, the voter would have no right to challenge the ruling in Court. Think I’m exaggerating?  That effectively is the case under new Georgia law. 

There is a tiny crack in the wall allowing justice to sneak through: Private citizens and their representatives like the NAACP are now blocked from the courtroom but, because the “government” includes the feds, the Trump tribunal had no choice but to invite the U.S. attorney general to join the case in place of the NAACP.

This is a small comfort, given that under the Trump and Bush Administrations, it was the federal government itself that organized and directed the Jim Crow operations. Let me count the ways…

Tears of a Clone
In June 2007, the U.S. Justice Department’s Prosecutor for Arkansas, Tim Griffin, had to resign from office in disgrace and in tears, when my investigations team at BBC Television broadcast the evidence that Griffin ran an illegal “caging” operation to block the votes of tens of thousands of Black, Hispanic, Asian and Jewish voters.

We’d gotten our hands on dozens of emails sent from Griffin to Republican operatives in Florida and elsewhere. The emails contained lists of voters of color to be blocked from the polls. Griffin called them “caging” lists. The scheme was as simple as it was cruel: soldiers of color who were shipped to Iraq were sent letters from the GOP to their home voting addresses, “do not forward.”  When the letters were returned, “caged,” by the GOP, the voters’ ballots were then challenged and could not be counted. Go to Iraq; lose your vote; mission accomplished. A report on my investigation by David Brancaccio on PBS also found that Griffin used the caging lists to send letters to Black student voters during their summer vacations, so the letters would be returned. 

This was a straight-up crime under the Voting Rights Act — committed by the Justice Department itself. 

I must note that Griffin said, literally through tears, “I didn’t cage anyone!” – although the emails were clearly marked from “Tim Griffin.”  I’m the only reporter that actually believed him. Griffin’s a schmuck, clueless about the process of caging, a term used only by specialists in direct mail marketing. However, his boss at the time, Karl Rove, owned a direct mail business and was famous for not having his own computer. Did Rove borrow his flunky’s computer to do the nasty? Rove never answered the query from BBC. Here’s a clip explaining the Rove-Griffin caging scam from The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

Griffin/Rove Voter Caging Attack
David Iglesias, former U.S. Prosecutor for New Mexico, told me that Griffin and Rove ordered Iglesias fired for refusing to arrest Hispanic voters on fake charges of voting fraud. Griffin’s purpose was to justify mass purges of Hispanics from the voter rolls to steal the electoral vote in New Mexico in 2004 for George W. Bush’s re-election.  (Griffin succeeded.)

I could go on with examples all night — but I chose these for a chilling reason. This week’s catastrophic ruling blocking victim voters from suing for their rights, Arkansas NAACP versus the state of Arkansas was argued for the law-breaking state by Arkansas Attorney General… Tim Griffin!

I can’t make this up. Tim Griffin, the voting rights criminal, won the court’s approval to continue his vote-suppressing spree. It’s as if a bank robber, paroled from prison, won a court ruling that allowed him to return to robbing banks. Al Capone would be so, so jealous.

The point is, that almost all vote suppression is rooted in laws, procedures and actions of the government itself, from cutting off early voting to shutting polling stations to purging legal voters of the wrong color (blue). If victim voters can’t sue, they have to ask the perps to sue for them.

What made Griffin’s win doubly delicious for vote rustlers is that the court ruled that, while voters cannot sue if they are victims of voting crimes, the court admitted that the state was, indeed, likely guilty:

“[T]here is a strong merits case that [Arkansas’ actions] are unlawful under §2 of the Voting Rights Act.”

Will this berserko ruling of the Eighth Circuit survive a Supreme Court review? Two “Justices,” Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, have already indicated that they would bar a private right of action, that is a voter’s right to action, under the Voting Rights Act. 

And that’s my warning for today:  We have more to fear from the men in black robes than the men in white sheets.