Source: http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=328747227228840
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, June 01, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Voting Rights: It's more than disturbing to see the Justice Department drop a case against armed bullies practicing intimidation tactics last Election Day. No American should ever fear to vote.
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The Washington Times reports that political staffers at Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department have trumped careerists and ordered that a complaint be dropped against three members of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense who used a billy club to harass voters in Philadelphia on the day of last year's November elections.
The incident became a sensation on Election Day itself, thanks to quickly posted YouTube video showing two of the threatening men dressed in paramilitary garb.
After months of work, Justice officials were on the verge of applying sanctions against the three this month, according to the Times, but "their superiors ordered them to reverse course, according to interviews and documents."
Two had their lawsuit dismissed with no penalty imposed, while the third man was banned from taking a weapon to a polling place in the future. Records indicate that the three men had refused to appear in court.
An interesting aspect to the case is that civil rights activist and former Bobby Kennedy aide Bartle Bull, working as an official poll watcher on the day, accused the Panthers of making themselves "an intimidating presence" in a sworn statement.
"In all my experience in politics, in civil rights litigation and in my efforts in the 1960s to secure the right to vote in Mississippi," according to Bull, "I have never encountered or heard of another instance in the United States where armed and uniformed men blocked the entrance to a polling location."
The Justice complaint called the incident part of a national operation to have New Black Panther members stationed at various polling places.
Voter intimidation has obviously played a big role in American history. Southern states had long used literacy tests and other means to keep blacks from casting ballots. The 1965 Voting Rights Act authorized the federal government to stop any "test or device . . . used for the purpose or with the effect of denying or abridging the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color."
The alleged behavior of the Panthers, however, is more akin to the physical bullying the Ku Klux Klan practiced during elections, memorably depicted in the final scenes of D.W. Griffith's propagandistic 1915 film, "The Birth of a Nation."
The fundamental legitimacy of our representative government depends on Americans' ability to exercise their power to vote with full peace of mind. There must be zero tolerance for anyone threatening that with physical violence. Our new attorney general takes this matter far too lightly.
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