The DOJ: From black voters to the Salvation Army

For those like us and TPM Muckraker that have been following the DOJ attorney scandal for some time, we've established what the Justice Department has largely failed to do in recent years -- namely, enforce voting rights, especially for African-Americans (with most Voting Rights Act areas being in the South).

But as TPM Muck points out today, it's just as important to follow what they have been doing, which entailed a drastic shift of priorities and resources to issues that are of special concern to the religious right. As the New York Times reports:

The changes are evident in a variety of actions:

* Intervening in federal court cases on behalf of religion-based groups like the Salvation Army that assert they have the right to discriminate in hiring in favor of people who share their beliefs even though they are running charitable programs with federal money.

* Supporting groups that want to send home religious literature with schoolchildren; in one case, the government helped win the right of a group in Massachusetts to distribute candy canes as part of a religious message that the red stripes represented the blood of Christ.

* Vigorously enforcing a law enacted by Congress in 2000 that allows churches and other places of worship to be free of some local zoning restrictions. The division has brought more than two dozen lawsuits on behalf of churches, synagogues and mosques.

* Taking on far fewer hate crimes and cases in which local law enforcement officers may have violated someone's civil rights. The resources for these traditional cases have instead been used to investigate trafficking cases, typically involving foreign women used in the sex trade, a favored issue of the religious right.

* Sharply reducing the complex lawsuits that challenge voting plans that might dilute the strength of black voters. The department initiated only one such case through the early part of this year, compared with eight in a comparable period in the Clinton administration.