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On the Twitter account that landed Heard in hot water, he calls himself a “Voting Rights Gladiator . . . Outside Agitator.” Before joining the Voting Section, Heard worked for a number of years at the Advancement Project, a radical left-wing voting organization. The Advancement Project has worked closely with the ACLU, NAACP LDF, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, and other liberal advocates to oppose voter-ID statutes, felon-disenfranchisement laws, and citizenship-verification regulations, and has adopted extreme positions on many other state and federal voting-rights laws.
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My sources tell me that Heard is the attorney who made and wrote the EAC’s decision to reject Kansas’s and Arizona’s request to modify the voter-registration form to include state requirements in the first place. Once the EAC regained a quorum of commissioners and hired a new executive director, the agency reversed the previously announced policy and allowed Kansas and Arizona to include citizenship-verification requirements with the federal voter-registration form. In other words, the EAC wound up doing the right thing, in accordance with the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision.
` Which brings us to the League of Women Voters lawsuit filed on February 12. Kansas has asked to intervene in the case. Its pleadings make the same bombshell allegations outlined above: that partisan lawyers in the Voting Section wrote EAC policies that should have been written by the EAC, not an agency under the control of the President.
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It charges that: . . . in the previous case concerning Kansas’s 2013 requested language, Kobach v. Election Assistance Commission, the United States Department of Justice drafted the response to Kansas’s 2013 request and presented that response to the States as if it were coming from the EAC itself. In effect, the Department of Justice commandeered the vacant ship that was the EAC and used that vessel to fight against the interests of the State of Kansas.
If these allegations are true (and based on the history of the Voting Rights Section during this administration, they may well be), then the Eric Holder–run Justice Department was actively engaged in blocking an independent bipartisan federal agency from allowing a state to verify that only citizens are registering to vote.
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Like most federal agencies, it is the Justice Department that is supposed to defend the EAC when it is sued. Based on my experience working in the Voting Section, it would not surprise me if Bradley Heard and the other lawyers who may have tried to sabotage the Kansas and Arizona requests are now back on the case. Except this time, instead of writing policy for the EAC designed to thwart Kansas and Arizona, they may end up attacking the new EAC policy behind closed doors when they are supposed to be defending it in court. That’s a potential conflict of interest, especially because those lawyers — if they were acting in a policy-making capacity instead of a legal capacity when they implemented the EAC’s prior position — may be potential witnesses in the case.
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It is a potential conflict of interest that District Court Judge Richard J. Leon should delve into deeply. He should ask Justice Department lawyers about it at the hearing on Monday, particularly if there are any signs that lawyers for the federal government appear to be taking a dive instead of defending the EAC’s sound decision. And there is no question that Judge Leon should allow Kansas to intervene in this lawsuit to defend the EAC’s decision. All signs point to this Justice Department not conducting the type of high-quality, vigorous, professional defense it is obligated to provide.
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