Heritage Senior Legal Fellow Hans von Spakovsky has been closely following the politicization of the Obama Justice department under Attorney General Eric Holder, most recently covering the decision by Obama political appointee Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli to dismiss a voter intimidation lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party. The left has been largely silent about the rank hypocrisy of this decision, but that is slowly changing. Professor of Political Science and Law at Vanderbilt University Carol Swain writes at The Huffington Post:

In case you missed the story, last November 4th a polling precinct in Philadelphia, PA was patrolled by an organization called the New Black Panther Party, a Marxist group that in 2000, was listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a racial hate group. Video footage shot in 2008, show Black Panther precinct workers intimidating white voters.

The SPLC has been mum on the issue, despite the fact that in 2000, it included the New Black Panther Party among its annual list of hate groups. In fact, what is most shocking is that the SPLC has spent far more resources hounding conservative organizations, such as the Center for Immigration Studies, and prominent citizens like CNN’s award-winning anchor Lou Dobbs, than it has protecting the civil rights of American voters, which includes white people as well as black.

There is a name for what has happened. It is called “mission creep.” Mission creep occurs when an organization strays beyond its original purpose and engages in actions antithetical to its goals. Rather than monitoring hate groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center has become one.