This situation is an unfortunate legacy of the civil rights battles of the 50s thru 70s and the imposition of a set of federal statutes upon the states.
In the (lets remember DEMOCRAT) South and neighboring states, obvious crimes would not be prosecuted or even if they make it to court, the juries would be packed with the White Citizen’s Council members. Many of these were blatant violations of Constitutional Rights but the local and state governments would just not enforce and ignore the violations.
So the US Government did its own run-around the concept of Federalism to rectify the problem by passing a series of over-arching Civil Rights Laws that allowed the Federal Government a separate prosecutorial function un-thought-of in the Constitution. These laws also added special scrutiny to certain (Southern) States and other governing districts where the Dept. of Justice maintains the right of ‘prior approval’ on election laws as well as civil justice statutes.
In short, the bad behavior (including lynching and semi-judicial murder) brought about bad law and that bad law is what we are talking about here. A.G. Holder has the big club of these laws to batter at unapproved decisions and he is obviously using it in this case. An interesting side note here is that at the November 25th remarks by A.G. Holder on the Ferguson unrest, he did add an interesting expansion about how Ferguson was not the only government under scrutiny by the DoJ.
As a previous Obama Administration Official (Rahm E.) stated, “Never let a good crisis go to waste!”
Yes, and now the pendulum has swung the other way and we have an oppressive federal government trampling on the rights of the people. Ironic that it’s the Democrats again.
The Founders had it correct. Put the Constitutional protections back in.