InstaPundit points this morning to an article in the Washington Times about a truly mind-boggling new race-based decision out of the Department of Justice.
KINSTON, N.C. | Voters in this small city decided overwhelmingly last year to do away with the party affiliation of candidates in local elections, but the Obama administration recently overruled the electorate and decided that equal rights for black voters cannot be achieved without the Democratic Party.
The Justice Department’s ruling, which affects races for City Council and mayor, went so far as to say partisan elections are needed so that black voters can elect their “candidates of choice” — identified by the department as those who are Democrats and almost exclusively black.
This requirement certainly sounds as though the DOJ believes black voters in Kinston can’t elect their “candidates of choice” without a party label attached, which itself seems to rest on the assumption that most or all of the Democrats will be black.
But in fact the requirement may be even screwier than that.
The department ruled that white voters in Kinston will vote for blacks only if they are Democrats and that therefore the city cannot get rid of party affiliations for local elections because that would violate black voters’ right to elect the candidates they want.
This is so wacky that it’s hard to believe even the Obama/Holder Justice Department could make this argument. On the other hand, maybe nothing is too wacky for our new “post-racial” DOJ. But if it does believe that blacks can’t elect the “candidates of their choice” without party labeling because whites will only vote for blacks who are Democrats (how many black Republican candidates are there in Kinston?), then isn’t this requirement for party labeling a purely partisan attempt to elect Democrats?
If blacks as a group (not as individuals) have a right to elect “candidates of their choice,” and if that choice can be achieved only by electing Democrats, why not simply outlaw the Republican Party as a criminal conspiracy to deprive blacks of their rights?
Wait, you say, that’s going too far. Really? Is it really suggesting anything much more extreme than the Department dropping an all but successful voter intimidation complaint against weapon-wielding members of the Black Panther Party in Philadelphia? (Note that the recent Kinston partisan requirement decision was “made by the same Justice official who ordered the dismissal of a voting rights case against members of the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia.”)
Or, for that matter, is it really going beyond the recent concerted White House attempt to brand a news organization as not a news organization because it doesn’t like that news organization’s “perspective”?
