As the Senate Judiciary Committee rolls through Donald Trump’s nominees, Democrats and members of the Congressional Black Caucus were sharply critical (to say the least) of Trump’s pick to lead civil rights enforcement at the Justice Department. “He testified it’s not in the best interest of the American people for women to be paid the same as men,” according to Sen. Patrick Leahy. “Now, the word Neanderthal comes to mind, but I will not use it. I will only think it.” But there's more:
After leaving government, [Eric] Dreiband cashed in on his tenure at the EEOC to start working on behalf of companies fighting off discrimination suits brought by his former employer. He defended big corporations against the EEOC, including CVS Pharmacy in a case over its severance agreements and Bloomberg in a pregnancy discrimination case. Most famously, Dreiband was part of a team that defended the retailer Abercrombie & Fitch for refusing to hire a Muslim teen whose headscarf violated the company’s “look” policy. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Abercrombie lost. Dreiband also took his expertise to Congress on several occasions, where he urged reforms that would reduce the EEOC’s authority.
Dreiband also defended the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a government agency, from … a religious discrimination complaint, after the commission revoked a job offer to a highly qualified Muslim woman, with one commissioner allegedly writing that having a Muslim do work on religious freedom in Pakistan would be like “hiring an IRA activist to research the UK twenty years ago.” Dreiband won that case by arguing that federal civil rights protections didn’t apply to the commission. But as a result of the case, Democrats made sure that civil rights law was extended over the commission, and pushed out the commissioners who had been involved in the discrimination.
And he’s a Senate vote away from being the Justice Department’s top civil rights enforcer.