The New York Times reports that Eric Holder is refocusing the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department back toward its traditional role of protecting civil rights--as opposed to actively undermining them for partisan reasons.
During the Bush tenure at the Justice Department, political appointees dismantled the procedural safeguards in hiring that put career attorneys rather than political appointees in charge of the hiring process. This enabled the Bush administration to screen out those whom they found ideologically unsympathetic, which most of the time included anyone with any kind of interest in protecting civil rights for minorities--if you, say, worked for the ACLU or the NAACP LDF that's the kind of credential that would get your resume thrown in the refuse pile. If you got your law degree from a school run by a televangelist, you were Bush administration approved.
Naturally, conservatives are very concerned that this depoliticizing of the hiring process will lead to people actually concerned with upholding civil rights laws getting hired at Justice:
Some conservatives are skeptical that such a policy will keep politics out of hiring, however. Robert Driscoll, a division political appointee from 2001 to 2003, said career civil rights lawyers are “overwhelmingly left-leaning” and will favor liberals.
“If you are the Obama administration and you allow the career staff to do all the hiring, you will get the same people you would probably get if you did it yourself,” he said. “In some ways, it’s a masterstroke by them.”
Let's reiterate the objection here: The concern is that hiring people for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department who actually care about civil rights laws will lead to those laws being enforced, which for Republicans is "political."
Then there's this incredible quote:
Among the critics, Hans von Spakovsky, a former key Bush-era official at the division, has accused the Obama team of “nakedly political” maneuvers.
Yes, this would be the same Hans von Spakovsky who spent his career trying to keep nonwhites from voting and whose potential appointment to the Federal Election Commission prompted six of his colleagues to write a letter to the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration urging he be rejected. Also, Obama was one of the senators who blocked his appointment to the FEC, so it's not like he might be holding a grudge or anything.
Reforming the Civil Rights Division may seem like a small thing. But I honestly believe the most lasting damage the Bush administration did to American society was in the Justice Department, where torture was "legalized," the right to vote became conditional, and the job of upholding the nation's laws was entrusted to ideologues and religious fanatics who were hired based on their partisan loyalties. I think we've only begun to understand how much American society was warped by these developments, and how important it is to reverse them.
-- A. Serwer
