Heritage Senior Legal Fellow Hans von Spakovsky has been closely following the politicization of the Obama Justice department under Attorney General Eric Holder, most recently covering the decision by Obama political appointee Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli to dismiss a voter intimidation lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party. The left has been largely silent about the rank hypocrisy of this decision, but that is slowly changing. Professor of Political Science and Law at Vanderbilt University Carol Swain writes at The Huffington Post:
In case you missed the story, last November 4th a polling precinct in Philadelphia, PA was patrolled by an organization called the New Black Panther Party, a Marxist group that in 2000, was listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a racial hate group. Video footage shot in 2008, show Black Panther precinct workers intimidating white voters.
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The SPLC has been mum on the issue, despite the fact that in 2000, it included the New Black Panther Party among its annual list of hate groups. In fact, what is most shocking is that the SPLC has spent far more resources hounding conservative organizations, such as the Center for Immigration Studies, and prominent citizens like CNN’s award-winning anchor Lou Dobbs, than it has protecting the civil rights of American voters, which includes white people as well as black.
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There is a name for what has happened. It is called “mission creep.” Mission creep occurs when an organization strays beyond its original purpose and engages in actions antithetical to its goals. Rather than monitoring hate groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center has become one.
The real "mission creep" is occurring in the Obama Justice Department. The obvious attempt to deny voters their voting rights was a very serious offense. Given prima facie evidence for it and a Federal Executive sworn to uphold the law, the Constitution, the only excuse for terminating the investigation could have been a clear-cut finding that there was no evidence to support any allegations. Excepting this, the results should have been submitted for decision to a federal grand jury! That the Southern Poverty Law Center was reluctant to again make enemies of the New Black Panthers is certainly cowardly, given that they had no trouble to call them out correctly eight years ago, but to my mind equally much a reflection of the changed "wind direction" in the White House. That's where the real "mission creep" came from, and Carol Swain might as well say it. Given the context, saying "mission creep" is really a euphemism for blatant racial bias by SPLC, and singling them out is a cover-up for not alleging gross dereliction of duty in the "new" department of justice. This is no longer just a case of ignoring some trivial problem in the interests of political correctness ! It IS the problem !