Civil Wrongs

Alex Wong / Getty Images Attorney General Eric Holder committed this week to repairing the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, one of the most scandal-plagued institutions in the Bush administration. But advocates and alumni warn that the damage runs far too deep to repair quickly, The Daily Beast's Benjamin Sarlin reports.

The scandals at the CIA, FEMA, and the Pentagon may have drawn bigger headlines, but the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division suffered as much damage under President George W. Bush’s watch as any federal institution. Its leaders put the brakes on the office’s traditional enforcement priorities, while their henchmen stocked the traditionally apolitical ranks of career lawyers with ideologues, many of whom were hired explicitly because they lacked civil-rights experience. Attorney General Eric Holder announced Monday his intent to jump-start the office—a crucial engine of the civil-rights movement. But advocates and alumni say the job of repairing the damage may prove far harder than it might seem.

   The Civil Rights Division’s acting head derided the average civil-rights group as a “psychopathic left-wing organization designed to overthrow the government.”     

“Eric Holder has a big job in trying to restore some sanity to the approach the division takes,” said Mary Frances Berry, the former chairwoman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. She estimated it may take at least two years to clear out dead weight from the department and make the staff functional once more. Holder alluded to the difficulty in cutting through the bureaucracy himself, telling The New York Times that “the wounds that were inflicted on this division were deep, and it will take some time for them to fully heal.”

Creating the “wounds”: a change in hiring practices under Bush that gave political appointees broad latitude to hire like-minded employees to career positions. Under Bradley Schlozman, who served as acting head of the division before resigning under pressure in 2007, the office made personnel choices based more on conservative credentials than the lawyers’ relevant civil-rights experience. A report released in January by the Justice Department’s inspector general slammed the agency’s new hiring practices, concluding that Schlozman had made false statements to Congress to cover them up. The IG’s report turned up emails in which he referred to rejected employees as “some lefty who we'll never hire” and “commies” while deriding the average civil-rights group as a “psychopathic left-wing organization designed to overthrow the government.” 

Capitol Hill looked the other way; the Republican majorities in both the House and Senate from 2003 to 2007 did not make oversight of the department a top priority. The result was a glut of inexperienced, ideological hires and a chilling effect on experienced employees, many of whom quit in response to the changes. The division, created to enforce anti-discrimination laws, also developed a diversity problem. Between 2003 to 2007, the agency didn't hire a single black attorney to replace those who left, leaving its criminal section, which employed 50 lawyers, with only two African Americans. The voting section filed only one case on behalf of a black voter from 2001 to 2006—and that was a holdover from the previous administration.

John Tanner was head of the voting-rights section until 2007, when he resigned following a host of dustups. Among the most memorable: He defended a Georgia law requiring voters to show photo IDs on the bizarre basis that "minorities don't become elderly the way white people do: they die first." He later was discovered to have written emails about how he liked his coffee "Mary Frances Berry style—black and bitter.”