Abuse of power

Damn right there needs to be an investigation into this!
Why even bother to have staff attorneys at the Department of Justice who are experts in various fields if their opinions ultimately carry no weight?

What I want to know is what does it mean specifically under the 1965 Voting Rights Act for states to get Justice Department approval for redistricting maps? Does it mean that a political flunky can just rubberstamp any old plan that suits the partisan purposes of the party in power without regard to how it effects minority voting rights? I somehow don't think that was the intent of the law.

This is really sad if they can actually get away with this. For people who think our government system is screwed up today, here is a classic example of why.
And let's not forget that this is not an isolated case. There is a clear pattern of this abuse of power happening continuously with this administration:

In recent weeks, developments in the Justice Department and elsewhere in the government have involved instances in which political appointees countermanded the judgment of professional staff experts whose conclusions were not in line with the administration's philosophy.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department lawyer who has led the civil racketeering case against the tobacco industry for five years announced that she was retiring because of disagreements with supervisors.

"I didn't feel like I had the support at all times of the political team," the lawyer, Sharon Y. Eubanks, said.

Last month, the nonpartisan examiners at the Government Accountability Office said that the Food and Drug Administration had relied on politics and ideology rather than science in rejecting over-the-counter sales of the morning-after contraceptive Plan B.

In broadcasting, the inspector general of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting found that its former chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, had repeatedly crossed boundaries in the law intended to protect public television and radio from political interference.

And to think we have three more years of this garbage to contend with. I just hope people get good and sick of it by then.