Hans von Spakovsky:
Eric Holder will chair a new 527 political action committee, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC). With that announcement, Holder revealed the deep partisanship that he tried to obscure while serving as attorney general. Yet, that partisanship drove him throughout his tenure as the nation’s top law enforcement officer.
Unmentioned in Holder’s announcement of the new PAC was an executive action taken earlier this month by President Barack Obama — the most sweeping changes to racial and ethnic categories created by the federal government in decades, according to Heritage scholar Mike Gonzalez. These changes will deepen the racial identity politics that are tearing our country apart. And you can be sure that Holder’s will use them for partisan, political purposes.
Politico reports that the NDRC will “coordinate campaign strategy, direct fundraising, organize ballot initiatives” and most importantly, focus on legal challenges to redistricting to give Democrats more state legislative and congressional seats. Holder’s involvement should be no surprise given how thoroughly he politicized the Justice Department. During his tenure, he repeatedly used the Voting Rights Act (VRA) to attack Republican redistricting efforts, wage a war on election integrity reforms, and otherwise benefit his political party.
Electoral fairness?
The most amusing part of the announcement was Holder claiming, without any apparent embarrassment, that the purpose of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee will be to obtain “fair maps that represent our diverse communities.” Apparently, the way to get “fair” maps is to hire Democratic partisans like the executive director of the Democratic Governors Association, who will be the new president of the NDRC.
Barack Obama will also be working with the NDRC after he leaves office, which the Washington Post rightly called “a rare, if not unprecedented, step in the modern era.” His work for a partisan political action committee — the objective of which is to help only Democrats in their redistricting battles — is certainly a far cry from his prior claims about how the redistricting process should be reformed as a matter of fairness for all Americans.
In his State of the Union address this year, Mr. Obama said that “we have to end the practice of drawing our congressional districts so that politicians can pick their voters and not the other way around” and he vowed to “travel the country to push for reforms.” Apparently, however, the only reform that really interests him is one that will let Democratic politicians “pick their voters.”
Office of Management and Budget’s proposal
What makes this even worse is what happened on the day that Congress left town at the end of September. On Sept. 30, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) published a proposed revision to the race and ethnicity categories used in the census and by all federal agencies. OMB gave the shortest possible public comment period allowed — one month — making it obvious that the administration is intent on finalizing this new standard before it leaves office.
The Obama administration is seeking two critical changes that could affect more than 60 million people. First, OMB wants to create a new ethnic/racial group for those whose families immigrated from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). This would include peoples as different and culturally diverse as Arabs, Israelis, Persians and Berbers, although it would not include Pakistanis and Afghanis. OMB admits that this category “should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in nature,” which makes it obvious that this is a political classification created by government bureaucrats and progressive political appointees.