And Now We Return to 'Dead Men Suffer No Bias' . . .

By Al Kamen
Friday, October 12, 2007

Back in 2005, when last we checked with John K. Tanner, chief of the voting rights section in the Justice Department's civil rights division, he was rippin' about the leak of a document that showed most of the section's lawyers -- but not Tanner -- thought a Georgia voter-ID law discriminated against black voters.

"Despicable," "clear breach of ethics," "unprofessional" and so forth, he railed in his e-mail -- which was promptly leaked. Anyway, the courts in effect struck down that law as -- whaddaya know? -- discriminatory.

Last week, the Brad Blog posted a video of Tanner's more recent musings on voter-ID laws -- laws needed to combat the endemic and growing problem of illegal voting, apparently by vote-deprived Canadians sneaking across the border.

These laws, Tanner told the National Latino Congreso in Los Angeles, do not, in fact, discriminate against minorities.

"It's primarily elderly persons" who don't have photo IDs, he said. "And that's a shame. You know, creating problems for elderly persons just is not good under any circumstance."

But that "also ties in to the racial aspect," he continued, "because our society is such that minorities don't become elderly the way white people do. They die first."

"And so," he said, "anything that disproportionately impacts the elderly has the opposite impact on minorities -- just the math is such as that." See? These laws actually help minorities.

In fact, it could well be that minorities and poor people are the very folks who benefit from having photo IDs. A couple days before the Los Angeles speech, Tanner spoke to the Georgia NAACP. "You think you get asked for ID more than I do?" he asked, according to the Associated Press. "I've never heard anyone talk about driving while white."

And poor people certainly have photo IDs. "When someone goes to a check-cashing business," he said, "God help them if they don't have a photo ID." And: "People who are poor are poor. They are not stupid. They are not helpless."

Please, take a moment -- you owe it to yourself as a citizen -- to watch Tanner's illuminating analysis on this issue at http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5145.

Like He Never Left

He's baaack! After a brief spell as former attorney general and as everyone's favorite congressional witness, Alberto Gonzales was back at the White House this week and, as far as some folks were concerned, was still America's top lawyer.

The odyssey started Oct. 2, when Timothy Noah of Slate (which is owned by The Washington Post) wrote about the "seat-warmers" occupying the lower-tier Bush Cabinet jobs -- that is, the positions excluding State, Defense, Treasury and Justice.

He challenged readers on Oct. 2 to match the names and faces he listed with their Cabinet jobs. And he provided the answers so they could check themselves.

Problem was, a red-faced Noah found out, he got a couple wrong himself. He identified the agriculture secretary as Mike Johanns, but Johanns left on Sept. 20. And Jim Nicholson had left the job of veterans affairs secretary on Oct. 1.

How could Noah have made this error? Well, he relied on the White House Web site. What was he thinking?

Noah duly corrected his list. A few days later, the White House corrected the site, with pictures of Chuck Conner as acting secretary of agriculture and acting secretary Gordon H. Mansfield running VA. Peter Keisler was listed as acting attorney general.

But Wednesday, the White House, in a Sen. Larry Craig-like move, un-resigned Gonzales, re-listing him as attorney general and vaporizing Keisler.

And Gonzales was back at the White House on Wednesday afternoon at a celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month. Bush singled out his old buddy when he addressed the crowd: "I appreciate my friend, my dear friend, former attorney general of the United States, Al Gonzales."

As of yesterday afternoon, Gonzales, who has retained white-collar defense lawyer George Terwilliger to represent him in investigations into whether he lied to lawmakers and allowed politics to influence hiring and firing at the Justice Department, was still listed as attorney general.

More Presidential Sax

This just in yesterday from the Los Angeles Times:

"Disgraced Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu had a well-known affection for fine living and all things Clinton. And his collector's taste and eye were on display Wednesday, when federal authorities unsealed documents showing they had seized more than 180 bottles of pricey wine from Hsu's New York apartment, as well as a saxophone believed to have been autographed by President Clinton."

Was the reed still wet?

Arms Control -- What, Me Worry?

Michael Allen, formerly the senior director for legislative affairs on the National Security Council, has moved over to become the senior director for counterproliferation. That's the post vacated by John Rood in September 2006 when Rood went to the State Department to be assistant secretary for international security and nonproliferation. (He's been nominated to be undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, but that nomination is going nowhere.) The NSC job remained vacant until a few weeks ago, when Allen formally took over. The move raised eyebrows among the arms-control crowd because Allen doesn't have much experience on these issues. He's in his mid-30s, and before working in the administration had been a counsel to Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who's not seen as much of a foreign policy expert. Now Allen is in a position previously occupied by serious heavyweights, including Bob Joseph, Bob Bell, Gary Samore and Dan Poneman.

Our colleague Dafna Linzer's article in March 2006 focused on the youthful crew that had assumed major NSC positions.

"At the NSC, staffers said the gap is most noticeable when their boss, National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley, recounts his years as an arms-control negotiator during the Cold War.

" 'We're like 'Arms control, what's that?' " said Michael Allen, Hadley's special assistant for legislative affairs.

" 'I often hear about arms control from the old-timers, but it's so different now. It's about all the places we don't have embassies now and it's very rare, it seems, that [Congress] is lobbying the executive branch to engage. Most of the times it's isolate, how can we isolate a country even more?' said Allen, a lawyer who grew up in Mobile, Ala., and could easily win an Owen Wilson look-alike contest. Don't ask the 32-year-old Allen about the era of bipartisanship; he never experienced it."