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Pam Karlan to head voting rights unit at DOJ

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Politico is reporting (and Jeffrey Toobin is confirming) that Stanford Law Professor Pam Karlan will become Deputy Assistant Attorney General for voting rights in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.  This position is NOT subject to Senate confirmation.

Professor Karlan is one of the leading liberal Constitutional scholars and, at 54, would make a great choice for the next vacancy on the Court, but her taking this position is important not just for her professional development, but because it ensures that voting rights will be front and center at DOJ as we enter the crucial period where DOJ will be challenging states like Texas and North Carolina on their new restrictive voting laws.

Predictably, right wing heads are already exploding.  At PJ Tattler, they describe her as a “dishonest radical”.

Crossposted at The Daily Kos

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Categories: General.

/ 8 Comments

8 comments

  1. JanF

    The only way we win in 2014 is if the elections are fair and honest. And the only way that happens is if the odious voting laws passed in red states are aggressively attacked in the federal courts.

    The Supreme Court wiping out part of the VRA does not mean that minority voters are fair game for disenfranchisement. It just means that one of our tools was taken away and we have to work harder to fight back.

    Professor Karlan will have her work cut out for her: Researchers Find Factors Tied To Voting Restriction Bills Are ‘Basically All Racial’

    Two University of Massachusetts Boston academics — Keith G. Bentele, an assistant professor of Sociology, and Erin O’Brien, an associate professor of Political Science — recently published a paper looking at the proposal and passage of restrictive voter access legislation from 2006 to 2011. In the paper, titled “Jim Crow 2.0? Why States Consider and Adopt Restrictive Voter Access Policies,” the authors conclude that restrictive voter measures are connected to both partisan and racial factors.

    “We looked at proposed and passage over this period, and we looked at just 2011 specifically,” Bentele told TPM in an interview this week. “And you have this consistent emergence — over and over and over — these partisan and racial factors are the most strongly associated with these outcomes.”

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