Civil rights groups are warning Trump's Department of Justice not to bow to the demands of notorious voter suppression advocates to repoliticize the Civil Rights Division. Noted George W. Bush administration DOJ veterans Hans von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams as well as Trump's transition team adviser Kris Kobach have demanded that Attorney General Jeff Sessions "'not leave [hiring] decisions in the hands of career bureaucrats who are reliably opposed to President Trump's agenda' and to instead turn over hiring authority to 'the Assistant Attorney Generals in each component Division.'" That means having the political people—who want to end enforcement of the Voting Rights Act—hire more political people who have the same aim.
That aim is voter suppression. That couldn't be more clear than in their call for a "return to race-neutral Voting Rights Act enforcement" and "an end to politically-driven pursuits against state photo voter identification requirements, citizenship verification in voter registration, and common-sense adjustments to early voting periods."
The conservatives' letter claimed that in the DOJ's Civil Rights Division under President Obama "[e]ntrenched federal bureaucrats jettisoned precepts like equal enforcement in favor of political and racialized dogmas with a zeal that risks litigation failure and invites court sanctions."
"Perhaps one of the greatest myths pushed by the Obama DOJ's apologists was the claim of being the driving force for voter protection. That administration's record paints an entirely different picture," the letter said. The conservatives argued that voter ID cases were "were needlessly brought" and that racial gerrymandering cases could "drag almost a decade" and waste "millions of taxpayer dollars" in order to "[pervert] voting laws to engineer political advantage."
Because they were not pursuing "race-neutral Voting Rights Act enforcement." Because we all know how white people's votes have been suppressed in the last 60 years.
Civil rights groups have responded to this push from the Bush crew with their own warning to Sessions, reminding him that the "Justice Department's own regulations similarly prohibit such discrimination [in hiring]. […] These civil service laws were enacted to strengthen and preserve the accountability of our democratic government by replacing a system of political patronage with one where government officials were selected based on merit to serve all Americans."
It's Sessions, so it's hard to imagine that the civil rights groups will even get his attention. But it's a warning as well that he's going to be mired in litigation. They are reminding him that "making hiring decisions or taking—or failing to take—other personnel actions (such as the assignment of cases) based on actual or perceived political affiliation is a violation of the merits system protections contained in the Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) and other federal law." And they’ll be there to fight it out in the courts, if necessary.