From the Inside Out: Remaking the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division
Today the Boston Globe reports that the Bush Administration has dramatically changed the hiring procedures for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Instead of hiring career attorneys with strong backgrounds in civil rights law, political appointees have been tasked with hiring new attorneys and are filling the Division with attorneys who have less experience, but more conservative credentials.
John Greenbaum, career attorney in voting rights from 1997 - 2003:
``The clear emphasis has been to hire individuals with conservative credentials," he said. ``If anything, a civil rights background is considered a liability."
Here are some numbers from the article:
- The percent of lawyers hired with civil rights background has decreased, from 77 to 42 percent since the administration changed the rules to give political appointees more influence in the hiring process.
- Of those lawyers nearly half, 9 of 19 lawyers gained experience by "defending employers against discrimination lawsuits or by righting against race-conscious policies"
- The average ranking for the law school attended by successful applicants hired after 2003 has dropped, from 34 in the years before the changes, to 44 after 2003 when hiring changes began.
- The number of lawyers with conservative credentials has risen sharply.
- 11: number of lawyers who were members of the conservative Federalist Society
- 7: number of lawyers who are members of the Republican National Lawyers Association.
- 2: number of lawyers who volunteered for the Bush-Cheney campaigns.
- 6: number of lawyers who worked for Christian organizations that promote "socially conservative views".
- "Several new hires worked for prominent conservatives, including former Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr, former attorney general Edwin Meese, Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, and Judge Charles Pickering."
The result of this shift?
"There has been a sea change in the types of cases brought by the division, and that is not likely to change in a new administration because they are hiring people who don't have an expressed interest in traditional civil rights enforcement," said Richard Ugelow, a 29-year career veteran who left the division in 2002....
Morale has plunged and experiences lawyers are leaving the division.
...
At a recent NAACP hearing on the state of the Civil Rights Division, David Becker , who was a voting-rights section attorney for seven years before accepting the buyout offer, warned that the personnel changes threatened to permanently damage the nation's most important civil rights watchdog.
``Even during other administrations that were perceived as being hostile to civil rights enforcement, career staff did not leave in numbers approaching this level," Becker said. ``In the place of these experienced litigators and investigators, this administration has, all too often, hired inexperienced ideologues, virtually none of which have any civil rights or voting rights experiences."
The results of this shift can be seen already. President Bush's political appointees in the Justice Department have demonstrated their willingness to push their own agenda, regardless of the effect it will have on civil rights.
...division supervisors overruled the recommendations of longtime career voting-rights attorneys in several high-profile cases, including whether to approve a Texas redistricting plan and whether to approve a Georgia law requiring voters to show photographic identification.
With these hiring changes the Bush Administration has made it even easier to push for discriminatory laws that make it harder for Americans to exercise their freedom to vote and severely weakened an institution which has worked to ensure the protection of civil rights for decades.
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