While the Justice Department missed the deadline to provide a witness from the Civil Rights Division to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for their planned hearing on the infamous New Black Panther Party case, the head of the Civil Rights Division, Thomas Perez, has offered to testify at a later date. Ryan Reilly reports:
According to a letter obtained by Main Justice, The Justice Department and the commission agreed that Perez would testify separately from the hearing scheduled this Friday, which will feature several Republican poll watchers and a former Bush administration official. Perez’s testimony will take place on May 14 in a round-robin format that allocates each of the eight commissioners five minutes at a time.
Perez wasn't at the Civil Rights Division when the case was filed (during the prior administration, by a conservative ideologue) or when it was dismissed (months before he was confirmed). But Perez has been harshly critical of the Bush administration's stewardship of the Civil Rights Division, which ushered in a period of politicized hiring and lax enforcement of civil rights laws that Perez publicly pledged to reverse, something that's earned him the ire of former Bush-era officials responsible for politicizing the Justice Department.
Perez's testimony before the highly partisan and conservative Civil Rights Commission is likely to be a heated one. Republicans have tried to use the dismissal of the New Black Panther case to argue that the current administration's handling of the Civil Rights Division is as politicized as the last one, but this criticism is weak. The case brought against the New Black Panthers employed a rarely used provision of the Voting Rights Act that was first used to prevent a statewide voter-suppression campaign against black voters initiated by then-Sen. Jesse Helms. The Bushies wanted to use the full resources of the federal government to go after a couple of guys standing outside a polling station holding batons.
-- A. Serwer
