Adam Serwer makes an excellent point:
Andrew Breitbart and friends have alleged that the Pigford settlement is Barack Obama "paying off" black voters. I find the concept of needing to bribe the most loyal Democratic voters in the country to vote for the first black president to be mystifying. Then again, this is a website whose writers openly speculate that the narrowing of the New Black Panther case is an explicit quid-pro-quo between the Obama administration and a black hate group. The second Pigford II settlement was passed by unanimous consent. Why Republicans in the Senate are so eager to help Democrats "buy" the votes of their most loyal constituency is unclear.
And he offers a biting conclusion:
Part of why I find the Republican obsession with Pigford so fascinating goes beyond what Ta-Nehisi Coates refers to as the possibility that somewhere, someone black is getting away with something. The Pigford case is a perfect example of how racism distorts what many conservatives imagine is a perfect American meritocracy in which whites just happen to end up on top most of the time. It's not just about opposing remedies to discrimination, it's about denying the reality that for decades "affirmative action" was a whites only program.