DoJ: The law has "unwritten exceptions"

Check out the Boston Globe story yesterday by Charlie Savage on the strange journey of Bradley Schlozman, one of the Department of Justice's new US Attorneys - no, not one of the eight replacements, one of the ones slipped in before this all hit the fan:

Todd Graves brought just four misdemeanor voter fraud indictments during his five years as the US attorney for western Missouri -- even though some of his fellow Republicans in the closely divided state wanted stricter oversight of Democratic efforts to sign up new voters.

Then, in March 2006, Graves was replaced by a new US attorney -- one who had no prosecutorial experience and bypassed Senate confirmation. Bradley Schlozman moved aggressively where Graves had not, announcing felony indictments of four workers for a liberal activist group on voter registration fraud charges less than a week before the 2006 election.

...

Schlozman is emerging as a focal point of the investigation into the firing of eight US attorneys last year -- and as a symbol of broader complaints that the Bush administration has misused its stewardship of law enforcement to give Republicans an electoral edge.

No stranger to election law controversy, Schlozman previously spent three years as a political appointee in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, where he supervised the voting rights section.

Not that he knew anything about voting rights, except, apparently, that poor people don't have any.

His tenure running the section is notable for three big plans:

Schlozman and his team soon came into conflict with veteran voting rights specialists. Career staff committees recommended rejecting a Texas redistricting map in 2003 and a Georgia photo ID voting law in 2005, saying they would dilute minority voting power. In both cases, the career veterans were overruled. But courts later said the map and the ID law were illegal.

Bob Kengle , a former deputy voting rights chief who left in 2005, said Schlozman also pushed the section to divert more resources into lawsuits forcing states to purge questionable voters from their rolls. One such lawsuit was against Missouri, where he later became US attorney. A court threw the Missouri lawsuit out this year.

All three of them, you note, have been ruled illegal by the courts - unfortunately, sometimes too late for the elections they interfered with.

He also changed the profile of the average lawyer in the section:

Schlozman also moved to take control of hiring for the voting rights section, taking advantage of a new policy that gave political appointees more control. Under Schlozman, the profile of the career attorneys hired by the section underwent a dramatic transformation.

Half of the 14 career lawyers hired under Schlozman were members of the conservative Federalist Society or the Republican National Lawyers Association, up from none among the eight career hires in the previous two years, according to a review of resumes. The average US News & World Report ranking of the law school attended by new career lawyers plunged from 15 to 65....

Asked to respond on behalf of Schlozman, the Justice Department said it considers job applicants with a wide variety of backgrounds and insisted that politics has played no role in hiring decisions.

I guess what that means is We're think bad lawyers from crappy law schools have as much right to work at Justice as anyone else!

But here's the kicker in the article (emphasis mine):

The department said Schlozman's office got permission from headquarters for the election-eve indictments. It added that the department interprets the policy as having an unwritten exception for voter registration fraud, because investigators need not interview voters for such cases.

First, like announcing, as Schlozman did in November before the election, that "this national investigation is very much ongoing" won't put a chill on participation from people who fear being arrested because their name is similar to someone else's? Please. Of course it will. People who remember what it was like in the bad old days when stopping legitimate voters was a routine thing will not buck a "national investigation" - people who don't have ID because they're old or poor or both will remember what happened only sixe - or two - years ago.

But more important: what the hell kind of law has "unwritten exceptions" to it?

Think about that for a minute. An unwritten exception. That would mean the police or the FBI could do any damned thing they wanted.

Is that the way we want the United States of America to be run?