During the Bush administration, liberals in Congress and the mainstream media were obsessed with allegations of “politicization” of the Justice Department. So it is amazing to watch the Obama Justice Department making what seem to be purely political decisions with absolutely no concern expressed by those same congressional and journalistic liberals. The latest example of the Left’s ostrich mentality is the dismissal by the Civil Rights Division of a National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) lawsuit filed against Missouri by the Bush Justice Department four years ago. The dismissal has gone conspicuously unmentioned on the division’s website.

Republican legislators considering the NVRA back in 1993 didn’t like its mandate forcing states to allow mail-in registration, one of the biggest sources of voter-registration fraud. But many of them voted for the bill once they had secured what they thought was an acceptable compromise: In return for the provision for mail-in registration, Democrats agreed to a requirement that states “conduct a general program” to remove “the names of ineligible voters” — usually, people who have died or moved out of the jurisdiction.

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In fact, liberal career lawyers at Justice scoffed at this statutory requirement. For the first ten years following passage of the NVRA — covering the entirety of the Clinton administration — not a single lawsuit was filed to enforce the provision. The Civil Rights Division consistently ignored indisputable evidence that many states were not cleaning up their registration lists. Indeed, some counties actually had more registered voters than the Census showed they had voting-age residents.

Not until the Bush administration took over — and in fact, only after the division’s new leadership overcame intense internal opposition from career staff — were suits filed against states like Indiana and Missouri to enforce this NVRA provision. In the case of Indiana, the Republican secretary of state quickly agreed to clean up the state’s registration list. The list was so breathtakingly inaccurate that the U.S. Supreme Court noted last year, in its decision upholding Indiana’s photo-identification law, that 41 percent of voters on the list were ineligible.

The situation was as bad or worse in Missouri: When the suit was filed, in 2005, one-third of the counties had more registered voters than voting-age residents. One county’s list was 153 percent of the Census count. Talk about people dying to vote! And the state had done virtually nothing to clean up its rolls.

Despite these staggering numbers, liberals were extremely upset about the decision to file suit. Some congressional Democrats and civil-rights organizations complained that the Civil Rights Division was engaging in “voter suppression.” Suppression of whom? Dead people?

Right after the case was filed, Missouri’s Democratic secretary of state, Robin Carnahan, agreed to settle, and negotiations commenced over a draft consent decree. Carnahan even issued a press release lamenting the deficiencies in many Missouri counties. But a few days later, she suddenly changed her mind, presumably fearing the fallout from daring to capitulate to the Bush Justice Department. Carnahan’s new tune was that the secretary of state had no obligation to ensure that individual counties were complying with federal law.

Carnahan’s legal theory makes a mockery of the NVRA, which was passed in large part to make states responsible for voter registration. Unfortunately, the case was assigned to Judge Nanette Laughrey, an extremely liberal Clinton appointee whose husband was appointed to a state commission by Robin Carnahan’s father, the late Gov. Mel Carnahan. (Judge Laughrey, incidentally, once literally sold an extension of time to parties in a civil case: She told them on the record in open court that she would grant their request for an extension only if they paid $90,000 to Legal Aid of Western Missouri.) Judge Laughrey accepted Carnahan’s view of the law and ruled in favor of the state, notwithstanding the NVRA’s language obligating “the State” to ensure that proper voter-registration lists are maintained. Judge Laughrey chastised the Justice Department for failing to provide any evidence of voter fraud, even though proving the existence of voter fraud is not an element of proving a violation of the NVRA.