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During his
signing of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, President Lyndon
B. Johnson shook hands with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
(United Press International/File 1964 |
Civil rights hiring
shifted in Bush era
Conservative leanings
stressed
By Charlie Savage,
boston.com from the Web, July 24, 2006
WASHINGTON, July 23 -- The
Bush administration is quietly remaking the Justice Department's Civil Rights
Division, filling the permanent ranks with lawyers who have strong conservative
credentials but little experience in civil rights, according to job application
materials obtained by the Globe.
The documents show that only 42 percent of the lawyers hired since 2003, after
the administration changed the rules to give political appointees more influence
in the hiring process, have civil rights experience. In the two years
before the change, 77 percent of those who were hired had civil rights
backgrounds.
In an acknowledgment of the department's special need to be politically neutral,
hiring for career jobs in the Civil Rights Division under all recent
administrations, Democratic and Republican, had been handled by civil servants
-- not political appointees.
But in the fall of 2002, then-attorney general John Ashcroft changed the
procedures. The Civil Rights Division disbanded the hiring committees made
up of veteran career lawyers.
For decades, such committees had screened thousands of resumes, interviewed
candidates, and made recommendations that were only rarely rejected.
Now, hiring is closely overseen by Bush administration political appointees to
Justice, effectively turning hundreds of career jobs into politically appointed
positions.
The profile of the lawyers being hired has since changed dramatically, according
to the resumes of successful applicants to the voting rights, employment
litigation, and appellate sections. Under the Freedom of Information Act,
the Globe obtained the resumes among hundreds of pages of hiring data from 2001
to 2006.
Hires with traditional civil rights backgrounds -- either civil rights
litigators or members of civil rights groups -- have plunged. Only 19 of
the 45 lawyers hired since 2003 in those three sections were experienced in
civil rights law, and of those, nine gained their experience either by defending
employers against discrimination lawsuits or by fighting against race-conscious
policies.
Meanwhile, conservative credentials have risen sharply. Since 2003 the three
sections have hired 11 lawyers who said they were members of the conservative
Federalist Society. Seven hires in the three sections are listed as members of
the Republican National Lawyers Association, including two who volunteered for
Bush-Cheney campaigns.
Several new hires worked for prominent conservatives, including former
Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr, former attorney general Edwin Meese,
Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, and Judge Charles Pickering. And six
listed Christian organizations that promote socially conservative views.
The changes in those three sections are echoed to varying degrees throughout the
Civil Rights Division, according to current and former staffers.
At the same time, the kinds of cases the Civil Rights Division is bringing have
undergone a shift. The division is bringing fewer voting rights and
employment cases involving systematic discrimination against African-Americans,
and more alleging reverse discrimination against whites and religious
discrimination against Christians.
"There has been a sea change in the types of cases brought by the division, and
that is not likely to change in a new administration because they are hiring
people who don't have an expressed interest in traditional civil rights
enforcement," said Richard Ugelow, a 29-year career veteran who left the
division in 2002.
No 'litmus test' claimed
The Bush administration is not the first to seek greater control over the Civil
Rights Division. Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan tried to limit
the division's efforts to enforce school desegregation, busing, and affirmative
action. But neither Nixon nor Reagan pushed political loyalists deep in
the permanent bureaucracy, longtime employees say.
The Bush administration denies that its changes to the hiring procedures have
political overtones. Cynthia Magnuson , a Justice Department spokeswoman,
said the division had no "litmus test" for hiring. She insisted that the
department hired only "qualified attorneys."
Magnuson also objected to measuring civil rights experience by participation in
organizations devoted to advancing traditional civil rights causes. She
noted that many of the division's lawyers had been clerks for federal judges,
where they "worked on litigation involving constitutional law, which is
obviously relevant to a certain degree."
Other defenders of the Bush administration say there is nothing improper about
the winner of a presidential election staffing government positions with
like-minded officials. And, they say, the old career staff at the division
was partisan in its own way -- an entrenched bureaucracy of liberals who did not
support the president's view of civil rights policy.
Robert Driscoll , a deputy assistant attorney general over the division from
2001 to 2003, said many of the longtime career civil rights attorneys wanted to
bring big cases on behalf of racial groups based on statistical disparities in
hiring, even without evidence of intentional discrimination.
Conservatives, he said, prefer to focus on cases that protect individuals from
government abuses of power.
Hiring only lawyers from civil rights groups would "set the table for a
permanent left-wing career class," Driscoll said.
But Jim Turner , who worked for the division from 1965 to 1994 and was the
top-ranked professional in the division for the last 25 years of his career,
said that hiring people who are interested in enforcing civil rights laws is not
the same thing as trying to achieve a political result through hiring.
Most people interested in working to enforce civil rights laws happen to be
liberals, Turner said, but Congress put the laws on the books so that they would
be enforced. "To say that the Civil Rights Division had a special penchant
for hiring liberal lawyers is twisting things," he said.
Jon Greenbaum , who was a career attorney in the voting rights section from 1997
to 2003, said that since the hiring change, candidates with conservative ties
have had an advantage.
"The clear emphasis has been to hire individuals with conservative credentials,"
he said. "If anything, a civil rights background is considered a
liability."
But Roger Clegg , who was a deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights
during the Reagan administration, said that the change in career hiring is
appropriate to bring some "balance" to what he described as an overly liberal
agency.
"I don't think there is anything sinister about any of this. ... You are not
morally required to support racial preferences just because you are working for
the Civil Rights Division," Clegg said.
Many lawyers in the division, who spoke on condition of anonymity, describe a
clear shift in agenda accompanying the new hires. As The Washington Post
reported last year, division supervisors overruled the recommendations of
longtime career voting-rights attorneys in several high-profile cases, including
whether to approve a Texas redistricting plan and whether to approve a Georgia
law requiring voters to show photographic identification.
In addition, many experienced civil rights lawyers have been assigned to spend
much of their time defending deportation orders rather than pursuing
discrimination claims. Justice officials defend that practice, saying that
attorneys throughout the department are sharing the burden of a deportation case
backlog.
As a result, staffers say, morale has plunged and experienced lawyers are
leaving the division. Last year, the administration offered longtime civil
rights attorneys a buyout. Department figures show that 63 division
attorneys left in 2005 -- nearly twice the average annual number of departures
since the late 1990s.
At a recent NAACP hearing on the state of the Civil Rights Division, David
Becker, who was a voting-rights section attorney for seven years before
accepting the buyout offer, warned that the personnel changes threatened to
permanently damage the nation's most important civil rights watchdog.
"Even during other administrations that were perceived as being hostile to civil
rights enforcement, career staff did not leave in numbers approaching this
level," Becker said. "In the place of these experienced litigators and
investigators, this administration has, all too often, hired inexperienced
ideologues, virtually none of which have any civil rights or voting rights
experiences."
Dates from '57 law
Established in 1957 as part of the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction,
the Civil Rights Division enforces the nation's antidiscrimination laws.
The 1957 law and subsequent civil rights acts directed the division to file
lawsuits against state and local governments, submit "friend-of-the-court"
briefs in other discrimination cases, and review changes to election laws and
redistricting to make sure they will not keep minorities from voting.
The division is managed by a president's appointees -- the assistant attorney
general for civil rights and his deputies -- who are replaced when a new
president takes office.
Beneath the political appointees, most of the work is carried out by a permanent
staff of about 350 lawyers. They take complaints, investigate problems,
propose lawsuits, litigate cases, and negotiate settlements.
Until recently, career attorneys also played an important role in deciding whom
to hire when vacancies opened up in their ranks.
"We were looking for a strong academic record, for clerkships, and for evidence
of an interest in civil rights enforcement," said William Yeomans, who worked
for the division for 24 years, leaving in 2005.
Civil Rights Division supervisors of both parties almost always accepted the
career attorneys' hiring recommendations, longtime staffers say. Charles
Cooper, a former deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights in the
Reagan administration, said the system of hiring through committees of career
professionals worked well.
"There was obviously oversight from the front office, but I don't remember a
time when an individual went through that process and was not accepted," Cooper
said. "I just don't think there was any quarrel with the quality of
individuals who were being hired. And we certainly weren't placing any
kind of political litmus test on ... the individuals who were ultimately
determined to be best qualified."
But during the fall 2002 hiring cycle, the Bush administration changed the
rules. Longtime career attorneys say there was never an official
announcement. The hiring committee simply was not convened, and eventually
its members learned that it had been disbanded.
Driscoll, the former Bush administration appointee, said then-Attorney General
John Ashcroft changed hiring rules for the entire Justice Department, not just
the Civil Rights Division. But career officials say that the change had a
particularly strong impact in the Civil Rights Division, where the potential for
political interference is greater than in divisions that enforce less
controversial laws.
Joe Rich , who joined the division in 1968 and who was chief of the voting
rights section until he left last year, said that the change reduced career
attorneys' input on hiring decisions to virtually nothing. Once the
political appointees screened resumes and decided on a finalist for a job in his
section, Rich said, they would invite him to sit in on the applicant's final
interview but they wouldn't tell him who else had applied, nor did they ask his
opinion about whether to hire the attorney.
The changes extended to the hiring of summer interns.
Danielle Leonard, who was one of the last lawyers to be hired into the voting
rights section under the old system, said she volunteered to look through
internship applications in 2002.
Leonard said she went through the resumes, putting Post-It Notes on them with
comments, until her supervisor told her that career staff would no longer be
allowed to review the intern resumes. Leonard removed her Post-Its from
the resumes and a political aide took them away.
Leonard said she quit a few months later, having stayed in what she had thought
would be her "dream job" for less than a year, because she was frustrated and
demoralized by the direction the division was taking.
The academic credentials of the lawyers hired into the division also underwent a
shift at this time, the documents show. Attorneys hired by the career
hiring committees largely came from Eastern law schools with elite reputations,
while a greater proportion of the political appointees' hires instead attended
Southern and Midwestern law schools with conservative reputations.
The average US News & World Report ranking for the law school attended by
successful applicants hired in 2001 and 2002 was 34, while the average law
school rank dropped to 44 for those hired after 2003.
Driscoll, the former division chief-of-staff, insisted that everyone he
personally had hired was well qualified. And, he said, the old hiring
committees' prejudice in favor of highly ranked law schools had unfairly blocked
many qualified applicants.
"They would have tossed someone who was first in their class at the University
of Kentucky Law School, whereas we'd say, hey, he's number one in his class,
let's interview him," Driscoll said.
Learning from others
The Bush administration's effort to assert greater control over the Civil Rights
Division is the latest chapter in a long-running drama between the agency and
conservative presidents.
Nixon tried unsuccessfully to delay implementation of school desegregation
plans. Reagan reversed the division's position on the tax-exempt status of
racially discriminatory private schools and set a policy of opposing school
busing and racial quotas.
Still, neither Nixon nor Reagan changed the division's procedures for hiring
career staff, meaning that career attorneys who were dedicated to enforcing
traditional civil rights continued to fill the ranks.
Yeomans said he believes the current administration learned a lesson from
Nixon's and Reagan's experiences: To make changes permanent, it is
necessary to reshape the civil rights bureaucracy.
"Reagan had tried to bring about big changes in civil rights enforcement and to
pursue a much more conservative approach, but it didn't stick," Yeomans said.
"That was the goal here -- to leave behind a bureaucracy that approached civil
rights the same way the political appointees did."
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