Bill Clinton was being sued by now MA Governor Deval Patrick for violating the voting rights of Blacks while he was Governor of Arkansas. that stopped when Bill made him Asst. A.G.
Now she don't know nuff'n about nuff'n?
In 1989, then-Gov. Bill Clinton was sued as one of three top Arkansas officials responsible for the intimidation of black voters in his state as part of a legal action brought under the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
And a year earlier the U.S. Supreme court ruled that Clinton had wrongfully tried to overturn the election of a black state representative in favor of a white Democrat.
In the 1989 case, “the evidence at the trial was indeed overwhelming that the Voting Rights Act had been violated,” reported the Arkansas Gazette on Dec. 6, 1989. (The paper later became the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.)
“Plaintiffs offered plenty of proof of monolithic voting along racial lines, intimidation of black voters and candidates, other official acts that made voting harder for blacks,” the Gazette said.
A federal three-judge panel ordered Clinton, then Arkansas Attorney General Steve Clark and then Secretary of State William J. McCuen to draw new boundaries to give maximum strength to black voters.
“Until last year,” the Gazette complained at the time, “in more than a thousand legislative elections, the [Arkansas] delta region sent not one black to the legislature. Last year, the federal district court split a multimember district in Crittenden County that had submerged the large number of black voters in the county.”
In a related 1988 case, Clinton had tried to replace a duly elected African-American state representative with a white candidate, only to be stopped by the U.S. Supreme Court.
“The court, by an 8-0 vote, ruled against an appeal by Gov. Bill Clinton and other Arkansas officials that had challenged the election of Ben McGee as a state legislator,” the Associated Press reported on Dec. 12, 1988. McGee is an African-American.
“The case began when blacks in Crittenden County filed a voting rights lawsuit attacking the county’s at-large system for electing two House members. The suit contended that the system deprived black voters of a chance to elect a black to the House.
A special three-judge federal court had agreed earlier in the year that the system violated the federal Voting Rights Act.
The three-judge court threw out the results of a March 8 primary election in which the black candidate McGee was defeated by James Stockley, the white candidate handpicked by Gov. Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
“That was tantamount to election on Nov. 8, since no Republican ran for the seat,” the AP said.
Clinton and the other state officials had argued that the federal court improperly threw out the results of the first primary and ordered a new election.
The Supreme Court ruling came as the then-governor was fighting another court battle to preserve racial profiling in his state, a tool that Clinton later criticized while president as a “morally indefensible, deeply corrosive practice.”