7-24-06, 10:22 am
Bush already has a six year record of anti-Civil Rights and anti-Civil Liberties policies that makes any appeal he would make to people of color absurdly comical if it were not simply a ploy to divert attention from what his administration is actually doing to undermine civil rights legislation.
In that regard, there is a disturbing report in this Sunday’s Boston Globe concerning how the administration is 'transforming' to the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. Traditionally, lawyers seeking appointment to various sections of the division were screened by committees of staff lawyers in regard to their background and experience and these committee recommendations were rarely rejected. This practice was ended in 2002 by Attorney General John Ashcroft.
What now happens is that the higher political appointees at the top of the sections within the division basically choose the new attorneys to be hired without any real scrutiny from the professional staff, the some 350 lawyers who work under them. Recently, there has been significant turnover as many attorneys with decades of experience in the Civil Rights division have left rather than continue to work on administration deportation orders and anti-affirmative action suits which they are now assigned in great numbers.
Of the 45 new attorneys hired for the three sections (Voting Rights, Employment Litigation, and Appellate sections) of the Civil Rights Division since 2003, only 19 have had Civil Rights experience and of these, nine either defended employers charged with discrimination or plaintiffs opposed to affirmative action policies. Of the 45, 11 identified themselves as members of the ultra-right Federalist society, which funnels both attorneys and judges into the federal judicial system. Many others belonged to various Republican and conservative organizations, including some who formerly worked for former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese, former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (he of Strom Thurmond Birthday party fame) that eminent defender of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Kenneth Starr. The Federalist Society particularly sees itself as committed to eliminating all traces of progressive jurisprudence from the New Deal on from U.S. society.
Meanwhile, the Civil Rights division has shifted its energies away from discrimination suits against violations of the Voting Rights Act and discrimination in employment against African Americans to suits involving anti-affirmative action 'discrimination' against whites (that is white plaintiffs who charge that affirmative action policies discriminate against them) and religious discrimination suits by Christians (often backdoor attempts to further undermine the separation of Church and State).
As, William Yeomans, an attorney who worked for the division for 24 years noted, the Bush administration has 'learned' from the failures of the Nixon and Reagan administration to permanently undo the Civil Rights Division of the Justice department in its enforcement of the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s.
'Reagan tried to bring about big changes in civil rights enforcement and pursue a more conservative approach, but it didn’t stick…' because the professional staff attorneys continued to try to enforce the laws. The 'goal here,' Yeomans concludes, will be to 'leave behind a bureaucracy that approached civil rights the same way the political appointees did.'
And that is exactly the greatest danger. Neither Civil Rights nor civil liberties nor the regulatory role of the Federal Trade Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission and all other regulatory agencies of government will have anything more than a rightwing foundation if what Europeans often call the 'permanent government,' the professional civil service staff, is filled with Federalist society and other rightwing ideologues who will seek to pursue reactionary policies regardless of whom the political appointees are.
History is literally filled with many examples of progressive and even socialist governments whose radical reforms were undermined by existing bureaucracies who used the labyrinth of government to either deflect or simply ignore legislation and policies and continue conservative business as usual.
For African Americans particularly, it should be clear that the Republican Party has since the late 1960s actively courted pro segregation Southern whites and all other racially prejudiced white voters (Nixon’s aides called this policy their 'Southern strategy') as a core constituency for nearly four decades. Even those African Americans who have risen into the upper middle class as high paid professionals and/or managers, those who do profit in the short-run from GOP policies that benefit corporations and the wealthy to the exclusion of everyone else, have something to lose from a Justice Department filled with attorneys seeking to defend racist institutions and practices from their victims, not vice versa.
For the NAACP and all other progressive organizations, the issue should be how to 'liberate' the federal government from the legion of rightwing appointees who are seeking to clone themselves into the lower echelons of the federal bureaucracy. Ending this period of rightwing Republican ascendancy in Congress and the presidency is the first step. Finding ways to free all of the regulatory and social agencies (including those dealing with science and basic research) from civil service appointees whose political allegiances and willingness to do the bidding of higher political appointees are their most important credentials will have to follow if we are not to spend decades recovering from the disasters of the Bush administration.
--Reach Norman Markowitz at
