While most Americans with jobs will be busy flipping burgers, driving trucks or cleaning offices, Friday should be fun for all the Federal employees at the Voting Section at the Department of Justice. It’s “Field Trip” day to the federal court. Arguments will be heard in the case of Laroque v. Holder. This morning, an invitation went out to all 89 Voting Section employees encouraging them to leave work and trek across town to sit in on a court hearing. These are federal employees who are not assigned to work on the case being heard on Friday. They have no legitimate job related purpose to be there. They can read a transcript of the hearing if they need to.
But who can pass up a nice leisurely jaunt out of a moribund office to watch some courtroom drama? It’s the same reason prisoners are willing to pick filthy garbage up from the side of the road. Anything beats sitting around, doing nothing behind a closed door, watching the clock and scrambling for work assignments that never materialize.
Tired of cases being rejected to protect language minority voters in Democratic-controlled jurisdictions? Hand me a garbage bag! Confused why political leadership won’t approve investigations into states with too many dead people on the rolls? Sign me up for that Field Trip! No more Section two cases being approved? Get me outta here!
It’s why even pressing license plates can be appealing after days of solitary idleness. So maybe the taxpayers funding the Field Trip can be merciful when an entire federal office of 89 people is invited to leave work and depart the office for some courtroom drama.
Of course many of their jobs will depend on the outcome of the hearing. If Section 5 is struck down, credible justifications to maintain these federal jobs evaporate.
What is LaRoque v. Holder, you ask? Well:
In Laroque v. Holder, Kinston NC residents are challenging the Constitutionality of Section 5 preclearance requirements. In April 2009, then political appointee Acting Assistant Attorney General Loretta King interposed an objection to Kinston’s move away from partisan elections for town council – opining that black voters wouldn’t know for whom to vote if the word “Democrat” did not appear next to their name.
Gee, isn't that a bit racist? I mean, doesn't that insinuate that blacks cannot educate themselves on a candidate and see if they like them without a party label? Gee, sounds like LBJ when he told a group of governors that with the Great Society welfare expansion he would have those "n*****s voting democrat" for a long time. Liberal arrogance and elitism at its finest. Well, so the question is, did anyone take the invitation up to skip work? The answer, from the National Review, is a resounding YES:
When DOJ claimed the power under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to invalidate their referendum changing the town elections from partisan to nonpartisan, the citizens filed suit to challenge the constitutionality of the renewal of Section 5. DOJ’s response was to try to deny them their day in court.
One half of the courtroom was occupied by lawyers and staff from the Voting Section of the Justice Department on a taxpayer-paid field trip. Even Julie Fernandes, the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights under an ethical cloud for her role in the New Black Panther Party scandal, was there. She apparently didn’t see the irony of her having an announced, race-based policy for enforcing the Voting Rights Act, on one hand, and her presence as the DOJ argued for the continued constitutionality of Section 5 on the other.
If where you sit is a sign of where you stand, it was probably appropriate that the DOJ staff were all sitting on the left side of the courtroom. Of course, they may have been avoiding me, sitting on the right side.
This is pathetic, but indicative of the attitude of those entrenched bureaucrat liberals who see things throught he prism of Washington elitism, intensified by the "JustUs" mentality of the Obama administration.
