Bush corrupts DOJ's civil rights div. (And Repubs wonder why black people don't like them? )

By Lee Russ

Monday, July 24, 2006 at 05:07 PM

Remember when the Soviet Union was the laughingstock of the civilized world because it continually put party loyalty ahead of experience and competence in administration of the country?

According to a piece in the Boston Globe we can say hello to Comrades Bush and Rove (or, as they are known to familiars, Comrade Bushnik and Comrade Rovelinski).  And say hello to protection of Christians (in a Christian country) while saying good-by to protection of racial minorities.

Civil rights hiring shifted in Bush era
Conservative leanings stressed
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | July 23, 2006
WASHINGTON -- 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.
....
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 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.
...
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.
...
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."

Yup, there's no litmus test.  They just happen to all be dogmatically and extremely conservative.  On the Supreme Court.  On the Courts of Appeal.  On the Federal District Courts.  In the DOJ.  In the EPA.  In the Department of Interior.  In the Department of Defense.  In the Department of Education. In the SEC.  In the Department of Energy.

This is going to hurt for a long, long time.  Maybe forever.  So on the slim chance that anyone reading this voted for George W.---I hope you rot in....