The U.S. Senate will hold hearings this week on the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court. Since the nomination of Robert Bork in the 1980’s and the ensuing turbulent hearing for him, Republicans have tended to nominate a very conservative judge who had not produced a paper trail exposing his position on key issues. Well, things seemed to have changed, as the current nominee for the Court, Judge Gorsuch, has been a reliably conservative judge. For example, he has favored businesses over consumers and working people, and he has demonstrated what Senator Schumer calls hostility toward women’s rights.
A significant fact about Judge Gorsuch is that he implied what his position might be on a major issue, voting rights. He did this more than once by expressing admiration for a known opponent of voting rights, Hans von Spakovsky.
Spakovsky is a primary proponent of the myth of voter fraud. Two magazines, The Nation recently and The New Yorker back in 2012, produced long articles describing Spakovsky as instrumental in spreading the myth of widespread voter fraud and backing new restrictions to make it harder to vote.
According to Ari Berman in The Nation, Few people in the Republican Party have done more to limit voting rights than Hans von Spakovsky. In the period, 2005-06, Spakovsky worked for the Justice Department where he was called the point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to protect voting rights.
Because of his known role in the efforts of states like Georgia to make voting more difficult for minorities and poor people, when the Bush Administration nominated Spakovsky to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), several Democratic lawmakers spoke out against him. This group included Barack Obama, then a Democratic Senator from Illinois who put a hold on the confirmation, effectively blocking it.
More recently, Spakovsky argued that the Voting Rights Act was not clearly constitutional at the time it was enacted (in 1965).
At the same time that Obama and other Democrats were blocking Spakovsky from the FEC, the current Supreme Court nominee, Judge Neil Gorsuch was praising him. He had already praised Spakovsky for his Voting Integrity Project, which was involved in pushing States to scrub its voter rolls of felons and other ineligible people, which led to the erroneous disenfranchisement of thousands of voters.
Thus, one must conclude that Judge Gorsuch may be weak on voting rights. Let us hope the Democrats question him on that issue. Even if they do not succeed in blocking this man who takes the late hard right Justice Scalia as a role model, they could establish by their questions the importance of the Voting Rights Act.