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Far-left organizations such as the
American Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way have written to
Attorney General Jeff Sessions to insist that hiring decisions for the agency’s
Civil Rights Division should be left to the entrenched bureaucrats who, in many
cases, were put in place under the Obama administration.
“The division’s career staff must
not be politicized by the incoming Justice Department political appointees,”
they wrote in a letter dated April 11.
“We urge you to affirm your
commitment to existing laws and equal employment opportunity (EEO) and hiring policies
– including specific direction and training of incoming political appointees on
the department’s EEO policies and civil service protections – that ensure that
personnel decisions in the Civil Rights Division, and throughout the
department, are made based on merit.”
The letter was in response to a
request that came just days earlier from a coalition of experts on civil
rights, asking
Sessions to clean up the Civil Rights Division by removing political activists
from leadership, ridding the office of “ideological rot” and stopping its
bureaucrats from abusing their authority.
The
first letter was initiated by J. Christian
Adams, a former attorney in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division who now leads the
nonprofit Public Interest Legal Foundation. Signatories included Hans von
Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation, William Pendley of the Mountain States
Legal Foundation, Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association, Kansas
Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Joel Mandelman, a former counsel for the
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
The letter charged that the Civil
Rights Division, during Barack Obama’s administration, “served purely
ideological ends with rigidity unmatched in other federal offices.” “Entrenched
federal bureaucrats jettisoned precepts like equal enforcement in favor of
political and racialized dogmas,” it said. Adams said the “most important
position General Sessions will fill in the DOJ is the AAG for Civil Rights.”
“For years, a radicalized Civil
Rights Division heavy-handedly advanced leftists causes with respect to voting,
law enforcement, immigration, and others while constitutional Rule of Law was
considered a nuisance. General Sessions has an opportunity to begin the course
correction necessary to protect all Americans from civil rights abuses.”
It was that division, when Adams
still was working with the DOJ, that refused to finish the nearly
completed prosecution of several New Black Panther Party members reported for
voter intimidation in the 2008 election.
WND
reported at the time when two party members were
filmed standing in front of the entrance to a Philadelphia polling station in
black uniforms, with one member wielding a club.
According to complaints, both men
were pointing at voters and shouting racial slurs, using such phrases as “white
devil” and, “You’re about to be ruled by the black man, Cracker!” But then-Attorney General Eric
Holder ordered the cases dropped.
Shortly after, Adams resigned. “I
was told by voting section management that cases are not going to be brought
against black defendants on [behalf] of white victims,” Adams said in testimony
before the Civil Rights Commission.
Adams was backed up by Christopher
Coates, the former head of the voting section for the Department of Justice’s
Civil Rights Division. Coates had led the original investigation of the New
Black Panther Party.
Coates stated in testimony, “I had
people who told me point-blank that [they] didn’t come to the voting rights
section to sue African-American people.”
The progressives’ letter to Sessions
defends the status quo. “We write now to address a specific
concern with the recommendation that ‘[t]he assistant attorney generals (sic)
in each component division must preserve or reacquire hiring authority and not
leave the decisions in the hands of career bureaucrats who are reliably opposed
to President Trump’s agenda.'”
The new letter, signed by the ACLU,
Human Rights Campaign, League of United Latin American Citizens, National
Center for Lesbian Rights, Public Citizen, Vote Rights Institute, Center for
Media and Democracy, Centerlink: The Community of LGBT enters and Common
Cause, cited concerns from 2008 that “a high ranking political appointee”
reviewed “political and ideological affiliations in hiring career attorneys.”
‘Purely ideological ends’
The earlier letter simply offered
advice to Sessions on eradicating what it described as the “ideological rot”
that already has been “laid bare by the Office of Inspector General.”
That office found, in a 250-page
report, “the toxic manner in which the division placed preferences on voting
rights victim cohorts and bullied employees from daring to enforce the law in a
colorblind fashion.”
Obama’s picks, the letter charged,
“did not believe civil rights laws should protect all Americans.” Further,
division employees posted on public websites criticisms of workers “who were
openly Christian.”
“During the Obama administration,
the division served purely ideological ends with rigidity unmatched in other
federal offices. Entrenched federal bureaucrats jettisoned precepts like equal
enforcement in favor of political and racialized dogmas,” the earlier letter
explained. The letter pleaded for leadership in the division to be taken away
from “political activists.”
“Perhaps one of the greatest myths
pushed by the Obama DOJ’s apologists was the claim of being the driving force
for voter protection. That administration’s record paints an entirely different
picture. In the eight year period, hardly any cases were filed under the Voting
Rights and National Vote Registration Acts. At no time did the division bring a
suit against voting discrimination or intimidation on its own. Yet, the public
perception was that the previous attorneys general were somehow vigorous
champions of civil rights.”
http://www.wnd.com/2017/04/aclu-defends-ideological-rot-at-justice-department/
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