The civil rights division of the Department of Justice got a well-deserved reputation as a partisan cesspool during the presidency of George W. Bush. Career veterans left in droves out of disgust or from being pushed out and new people were hired whose commitment to fighting discrimination was, to say the least, suspect. Under the Obama administration, the division's reputation has been somewhat repaired. Not, of course, in the view of Republicans. They say that the division's voting rights section discriminates against conservatives and whites. Adam Serwer at
Mother Jones writes that they:
have accused the division's voting section of engaging in partisan gamesmanship by screening hires for ideology, trying to block Freedom of Information Act requests from conservative organizations, and choosing which civil rights laws to enforce based on racial and political preferences.
A new 258-page
report released Tuesday by the department's Office of the Inspector General demolishes or undermines most of those accusations. It concludes, however, that deep partisan division has hampered the effectiveness of the voter section's operations and led to some questionable decisions. There's more about the report below the fold.
We found that people on different sides of internal disputes about particular cases in the Voting Section have been quick to suspect those on the other side of partisan motivations, heightening the sense of polarization in the Section. The cycles of actions and reactions that we found resulted from this mistrust were, in many instances, incompatible with the proper functioning of a component of the Department.
Polarization within the Voting Section has been exacerbated by another factor. In recent years a debate has arisen about whether voting rights laws that were enacted in response to discrimination against Blacks and other minorities also should be used to challenge allegedly improper voting practices that harm White voters. Views on this question among many employees within the Voting Section were sharply divergent and strongly held. Disputes were ignited when the Division’s leadership decided to pursue particular cases or
investigations on behalf of White victims, and more recently when Division leadership stated that it would focus on “traditional” civil rights cases on behalf of racial or ethnic minorities who have been the historical victims of discrimination.
Serwer summarizes the IG's specific findings. This includes knocking down the claim of Virginia Republican Rep. Frank Wolf that Freedom of Information Act requests were politicized as well as Republican claims that the division went easy on members of the New Black Panther Party accused of intimidation at the polls. Neither thing happened, the report states. Serwer:
Politicized hiring: Another key GOP complaint is that under Obama the civil rights division has, in the words of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), only hired people who have "experience with liberal advocacy groups." This is a mirror image of the criticism leveled during the Bush era, when the head of the civil rights division was found to have had engaged in illegal hiring practices and then misled Congress about it. By contrast, the new report notes that Thomas Perez placed hiring responsibility back in the hands of career attorneys. The IG report states that there is no evidence "staff allowed political or ideological bias to influence their hiring decisions." Yet the report oddly recommends that the division, when hiring lawyers, place less emphasis on "demonstrated interest in the enforcement of civil rights laws" so that candidates with explicit conservative credentials may stand a better chance. (It's hard to imagine an IG stating that the Securities and Exchange Commission should hire more, say, divorce lawyers).
While the report provides little support for Republican complaints, running throughout its pages are far too many examples of the poisonous polarity within the department between its more conservative and more liberal staff. That, the authors say, should be dealt by administrative discipline against offending employees who are still with the division and a new commitment to professionalism and impartiality.