Testifying before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights today, Bush-era Voting Section Chief Christopher Coates accused the Obama administration, the Civil Rights Division, and civil-rights groups of being “at war” with “race neutral” enforcement of civil-rights laws.
Coates testified that he thought the New Black Panther Party voter-intimidation case was narrowed because higher-ups in the division were angry about the filing of a voter intimidation case in Mississippi on behalf of white voters.
“This disposition of the NBPP case was ordered because the people calling the shots in May 2009 were angry at the filing of the Ike Brown case and angry at our filing of the NBPP case,” Coates told the commission. “That anger was the result of their deep-seated opposition to the equal enforcement of the VRA [Voting Rights Act] against racial minorities and for the protection of whites who have been discriminated against.”
Conservatives attacking the Justice Department have spent months lionizing Coates as an apolitical or even liberal figure. But in his testimony today, Coates aligned himself with the politicized leadership of the Bush-era Justice Department, defending their practice of hiring attorneys based on ideology. When asked about the internal Justice Department report that found that former Civil Rights Division head Bradley Schlozman had violated civil-service laws with his partisan hiring practices, Coates said he was merely trying to "diversify" the division.
"Mr. Schlozman found a Civil Rights Division that is almost totally left-liberal in terms of the ideology of the people that were working in it," Coates said. "And that he made a concerted effort to diversify the division so that liberals as well as conservatives could find work there."
Commissioner Michael Yaki looked at Coates in disbelief. "Are you basically defending Mr. Schlozman’s actions here today?”
Coates responded with a pop-culture reference. “To criticize Schlozman for hiring on the basis of ideology, for the career people in the Civil Rights Civision to do that, is like Snooki on the show Jersey Shore criticizing Lady Gaga for dressing extravagantly.” This reflects the long-standing views of conservatives that civil-rights lawyers are inherently liberal and partisan.
In fact, Schlozman's policies, which the Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility and Inspector General's Office "found violated Department policy and federal law." Coates' use of the term "diversify" is also interesting, since, as a result of Schlozman's hiring practices, there were only two black lawyers left in the entire division by 2007. Schlozman's policies helped precipitate an exodus of civil-rights attorneys out of the section, 236 out 350 between 2003 and 2007. According to the IG/OPR report, Schlozman was clear about his intentions with the hiring process, e-mailing a colleague that "as long as I’m here, adherents of Mao’s little red book need not apply.” In another e-mail Schlozman wrote of the voting section, “My tentative plans are to gerrymander all of those crazy libs rights out of the section.”
Coates used his own background as an ACLU attorney, and his subsequent promotion to head the voting section as evidence that the Bush-era leadership at DoJ wasn't politicized. But in response to questioning for Commissioner Yaki, Coates admitted to being the attorney described by Schlozman in the IG/OPR report as "a true member of the team," as I first reported last January. It didn't seem to occur to Coates that was probably why he was selected to head the voting section.
Other attorneys in the division with ACLU backgrounds didn't get as much of a benefit of the doubt. When another attorney was applying for a spot in the special litigation section, Schlozman asked a colleague, "“If [the applicant] is so conservative how is it that she was a member of the ACLU in Tennessee during law school?”
Nevertheless, Coates’ testimony is likely to serve as the justification for broadening the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’ investigation into the NBPP case into a larger inquiry into whether or not the Civil Rights Division enforces the laws in a “race neutral” manner. If Republicans take back the House, there are likely to be at least four investigations—two internal Justice Department reports, the USCCR report, and a congressional committee investigation—into a voter intimidation case where no one has come forward to actually say they were intimidated, and the dispute was over whether or not to broaden a civil injunction—not a criminal penalty—against a handful of members of the New Black Panther Party.
Merely a few years after the Bush administration presided over an unprecedented politicization of the Civil Rights Division, conservatives have managed to reverse that accusation with a single, low-stakes voter-intimidation case that doesn't involve any voters actually being intimidated. But the notion that Coates is a nonpartisan whistle-blower should be put to rest today.
UPDATE: Here's Ryan J. Reilly's take.
