There are plenty of legitimate criticisms to make regarding President Obama’s nominee to head the Labor Department, Thomas Perez. I covered some in my column last week. He’s a radical leftist on civil rights and labor issues. He sued major universities for using the Amazon Kindle, because they were not then equipped to serve blind students. He even pressured one state to drop its special care and treatment program for HIV-positive prisoners on the grounds that they had a right to live among the general prison population. Nor is there any indication that he’ll be an impartial arbiter of labor issues.

But some on the Right are now attacking Perez, Obama’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, on something else altogether: namely, his involvement in the Justice Department’s controversial decision to scale back a voter intimidation case against some self-styled Black Panthers who appeared at a Philadelphia polling station in 2008.