The Administration's Assault on the Civil Rights Community

In a new piece I wrote for MSNOW, I offer some additional context for a topic we’ve been following here on Civil Discourse. It’s important and I wanted to share the view from the Deep South with the network’s viewers too. This piece helps to complete the thoughts I’ve been sharing here about the Justice Department’s deeply flawed prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center. You can read it here.

The SPLC case has dropped out of the news cycle because it’s in that quiet period where arraignment is pending, discovery takes some time, and the Judge has been considering a few preliminary motions. Trump’s slush fund corruption has knocked the case off the front burner, but the SPLC case is equally indicative of this administration’s corruption, and we can’t let it disappear. I hope you’ll take a minute to read the piece.

It starts like this: “On June 2, the Justice Department filed a superseding indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, updating one it filed in April. This indictment didn’t add new charges or defendants. Instead, it was an attempt to correct legal errors pointed out by multiple analysts. Even a corrected indictment, though, isn’t enough to fix a deeply flawed prosecution. Shortly after the original indictment, the SPLC filed an unusual motion ‘to address the government’s materially false statements and to enforce rules prohibiting further prejudicial extrajudicial statements.’ Typically, it’s the government that charges a defendant with making false statements. Here, the defendant was lobbing that allegation at the government.”

This is an unusual situation: the Judge denied the motion, but only because the government conceded error and walked back the false statement. The problem is, and we’ve seen it across this Justice Department’s “revenge docket” executed to please the proverbial audience of one, a prosecution doesn’t have to succeed to punish the person, or in this case entity, that has been indicted. The effort to intimidate and quiet voices that oppose this administration is transparent. And now, this administration is going after the civil rights community that has played such an essential role in calling it out and taking it to court: “The indictment of the SPLC is a cudgel thrown at the heart of the civil rights community.”

This is a piece that puts the prosecution in the larger context of the administration’s effort to silence loud, persistent voices, to get us all to bend the knee. Currently, I’m following the FBI’s raids on a pro-voting group in Ohio, not a national name like the SPLC, lesser known, not likely to summon as much public outrage, Kash Patel and Tood Blanche may have thought. But they are in the same vein. We should expect more of this as we draw closer to the election. And remember, they wouldn’t be going after your vote and after the people who work so hard to protect your vote, if it didn’t matter so damn much. You and your vote are powerful. This administration knows it and that’s why they are so afraid of us.

We’re in this together,

Joyce