Eric Holder Sues to Block Louisiana School Choice

In a sane world, this would be a scandal: Obama’s Department of Justice has sued to block poor African-Americans (and others) from escaping failing schools in Louisiana and trying, at least, to get a decent education:

The Justice Department is trying to stop a school vouchers program in Louisiana that attempts to help families send their children to independent schools instead of under-performing public schools.

The agency wants to stop the program, led by Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal, in any school district that remains under a desegregation court order.

In papers filed in U.S. District Court in New Orleans, the agency said Louisiana distributed vouchers in 2012-13 to roughly 570 public school students in districts that are still under such orders and that “many of those vouchers impeded the desegregation process.” The federal government argues that allowing students to attend independent schools under the voucher system could create a racial imbalance in public school systems protected by desegregation orders.

Really? Really? The New Orleans public school system is 88% African-American. Now, how could allowing 570 kids to flee the public school system possibly “create a racial imbalance”? The racial imbalance is already there; and, in any event, Louisiana’s scholarships presumably are distributed among the races in more or less the same proportions as are found in the public schools.

This is one of many examples of the unprecedented politicization of the Department of Justice under Barack Obama and Eric Holder. Normally, we expect DOJ to actually do some good, by enforcing federal laws. But Holder doesn’t do much of that; prosecutions of firearms offenses, for instance, have plummeted on his watch. Holder is all about politics of the most venal sort.

This Louisiana case is typical: Holder wants to keep the archaic residue of the civil rights movement alive forever, as a club with which to beat the Southern states, and as a means of screwing African-Americans. After all, if blacks can’t escape from terrible schools, their employment prospects will be lousy. They likely will be welfare-dependent, and therefore reliable Democratic voters for decades to come. That is, as best one can infer it from the facts, the calculation that Obama and Holder have made. Governor Bobby Jindal denounced Holder’s lawsuit:

After generations of being denied a choice, parents finally can choose a school for their child, but now the federal government is stepping in to prevent parents from exercising this right. Shame on them. Parents should have the ability to decide where to send their child to school.

“Shameful” is really not a strong enough word for Eric Holder’s latest outrage. I don’t actually think that Barack Obama is the worst president in American history; not while we have James Buchanan to kick around. But it is hard to see any competition for Eric Holder as the worst Attorney General.

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