Conservatives go after the head of the Voting Rights Section of the Justice Department for "cruddy" lawyering and "racial scaremongering against voter ID laws."

Joshua Lott/Reuters

There are reasonable criticisms one could make about Thomas Perez's work as a federal official as he nears his confirmation fight for Secretary of Labor. This, from Jennifer Rubin, in which she cites a blogger at the American Spectator, is not one of them:

Quin Hillyer documents that as the chief of the Justice Deaprtment's (sic) civil rights division Perez proved to be a cruddy lawyer: He has led the administration's racial scaremongering against voter ID laws, but got smacked down hard by the U.S. District Court for the D.C. Circuit, so that elections in South Carolina this week will go ahead with the law in effect. (This wasn't a partisan decision: The unanimous three-judge panel included Clinton appointee Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.)

Even leaving the "racial scaremongering" junk aside, this assertion is unsupported by fact. Whatever faults he may have as an administrator (faults that the Office of Inspector General detailed earlier this week), Perez and his colleagues in the Voting Rights Section achieved consistent success last year invoking federal law to block discriminatory voting practices.

I guess it all depends on your definition of "a cruddy lawyer," but the truth is that Perez and company prevailed in Texas, and in Florida, and, yes, even to a significant degree in South Carolina, where the Justice Department forced state officials to delay implementation of their voter identification law until after the November general election.