In 2006, then-Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage discovered that political appointees in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department had dismantled safeguards against politicized hiring and instead of hiring civil rights attorneys, had begun hiring attorneys based on their loyalty to the Republican Party.
The profile of the lawyers being hired has since changed dramatically, according to the resumes of successful applicants to the voting rights, employment litigation, and appellate sections. Under the Freedom of Information Act, the Globe obtained the resumes among hundreds of pages of hiring data from 2001 to 2006.
Hires with traditional civil rights backgrounds either civil rights litigators or members of civil rights groups have plunged. Only 19 of the 45 lawyers hired since 2003 in those three sections were experienced in civil rights law, and of those, nine gained their experience either by defending employers against discrimination lawsuits or by fighting against race-conscious policies.
Meanwhile, conservative credentials have risen sharply. Since 2003 the three sections have hired 11 lawyers who said they were members of the conservative Federalist Society. Seven hires in the three sections are listed as members of the Republican National Lawyers Association, including two who volunteered for Bush-Cheney campaigns.
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. And six listed Christian organizations that promote socially conservative views.
This had a dramatic and calculable impact on the way that the division approached civil rights issues, and the leadership in the division fostered an atmosphere of hostility that lead to a mass exodus of experienced civil rights lawyers out of the division. The Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility and Inspector General concluded that political appointee Bradley Shlozman had broken civil service laws and lied to Congress about it. The Bush administration's politicized hiring practices also sowed the seeds of the New Black Panther Party kerfluffle, as attorneys hired on the basis of their conservative credentials complained to the media that the Obama administration was somehow breaking with longstanding precedent in an effort to facilitate some kind of racial payback.
In 2011, Savage is writing a very different story:
Instead, newly disclosed documents show, the lawyers hired over the past two years at the division have been far more likely to have civil rights backgrounds — and to have ties to traditional civil rights organizations with liberal reputations, like the American Civil Liberties Union or the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
The release of the documents came as a House Judiciary subcommittee prepared to hold its first oversight hearing, on Wednesday, on the Civil Rights Division since Republicans regained the House. It also comes against the backdrop of efforts by conservative activists and media outlets to throw back at the Obama administration the charges of politicizing the Justice Department that were made against the Bush administration.
Former Republicans hired during the Bush era have attempted to characterize the shift in hiring as somehow sinister. They do not think there was anything unethical about Schlozman making hiring decisions on the basis of partisan loyalty, but they think there's something terrible about the Obama administration hiring people actually qualified to do the work the division does. Because they view attorneys committed to civil rights issues as liberal by definition, for them not bending over backwards to hire Republicans amounts to "politicizing" the division.
This is nonsense--Republicans are opposed to what the division does in principle, and so they are seeking to discredit it as an institution. But despite all the howls from the right, the changes to the division represent the most undiluted example of positive change from the last administration to the current one. With the allegations of racial bias associated with the NBPP case proven false, Republicans may try to pivot to the question of hiring practices at DoJ, but there's really no comparison between what the Bush administration did--hiring loyalists handpicked by political appointees--and what the Obama administration has done by giving career attorneys more power to make those decisions.
If the past few years are any indication though, Republicans have grown even more committed to the idea that the primary qualification for a civil servant is which party they belong to, and sunk into even greater denial about how unethical Schlozman's behavior actually was. If that's the case, the tug of war over the soul of the division is hardly over.
