Civil rights? What a radical concept!

New York Times reporter Charlie Savage writes that Attorney General Eric Holder plans to revamp the Justice Department’s civil rights division so that the division actually does weird things like enforce the country’s civil rights laws. How quaint.

Holder apparently has this strange idea that even non-caucasian citizens have a right to vote. Obviously, he wouldn’t have a political future in Georgia.

The new attorney general is trying to roll back the damage inflicted by eight years of the Bush administration, when the Justice Department was essentially converted into a political arm of the Republican National Committee whose only purpose was to file bogus vote fraud charges against ACORN employees.

Savage writes:

The division is “getting back to doing what it has traditionally done,” Mr. Holder said in an interview. “But it’s really only a start. I think the wounds that were inflicted on this division were deep, and it will take some time for them to fully heal” . . . he described his Civil Rights Division efforts as more restoration than change. The recent moves, he argued, are a return to its basic approach under presidents of both parties — despite some policy shifts between Republican and Democratic administrations — before the “sea change” and “aberration” of the Bush years.

The Times article quotes Hans von Spakovsky, the vote-suppression specialist from Atlanta who was a top Justice official under Bush, as saying that the Obama plans for the department are “nakedly political.” Of course, being called nakedly political by von Spakovsky is roughly equivalent to being called a racist by David Duke.

The renewed emphasis on civil rights and voting rights enforcement has already been felt in Georgia. In late May, the Justice Department rejected the citizenship verification program that Secretary of State Karen Handel used to “flag” and challenge the eligibility of registered voters in the 2008 elections on the grounds that they allegedly were not citizens. The department charged that this program had prevented thousands of African American, Latino and Asian persons from exercising their lawful right to vote.

Handel has requested that the department reconsider that decision and that it also approve the state’s new law requiring persons to provide proof of citizenship before they can register to vote.

Memo to the secretary of state: don’t hold your breath.