Cutting out the heart. This may sound like "inside baseball," but its a critically important story about voting rights, and its something you should know about.

As you may know, the Justice Department oversees many aspects of our voting rights. In order to protect minorities in states with a history of voter disenfranchisement, for example, the Justice Department has to certify local election law changes that might have a negative impact on minority voting rights.

As we know from the student voting rights issue, legislators don't always want to make it easier for certain people to vote. So the idea with the Justice Department certification is to have a process in place so that experts can make decisions without a political agenda.

Well, that is about to change. The Justice Department is about to cut the heart out of the expert review process by preventing Justice Department employees from making recommendations on voting rights issues, so that the political agenda types who get appointed by the Administration can make every decision unimpeded.

According to the Washington Post, "Disclosure of the change comes amid growing public criticism of Justice Department decisions to approve Republican-engineered plans in Texas and Georgia that were found to hurt minority voters by career staff attorneys who analyzed the plans. Political appointees overruled staff findings in both cases."

So, instead of over-ruling the expert recommendations, which draws public scrutiny, they want to simply prevent the experts from making recommendations at all.