(Name-mce) ListServ Division of uncivil rights

[bill@billhowe.org]

   DERRICK Z. JACKSON

   Division of uncivil rights By Derrick Z. Jackson

   Boston Globe| July 29, 2006

   PRESIDENT BUSH bragged last week to the NAACP, ``I come from a
family committed to civil rights." He said Thurgood Marshall and
Martin Luther King Jr. were part of America's ``second founding, the
civil rights movement." He talked about his recent tour of the
National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis with the prime minister of
Japan. ``If you haven't been there, you ought to go," he said.

   Three days later, the Globe's Charlie Savage reported that Bush is
gutting the civil rights division of the Justice Department.

   Savage obtained documents under the Freedom of Information act and
found that just 19 of 45 lawyers hired for the division's voting
rights, employment litigation and appellate sections since 2003 have
civil rights backgrounds and of the 19, Savage wrote that ``nine
gained their experience either by defending employers against
discrimination lawsuits or by fighting against race-conscious
policies." This happened because halfway into Bush's first term,
former attorney general and Confederate romanticist John Ashcroft
rewrote hiring procedures to eliminate hiring committees composed of
veteran civil servant lawyers. Ashcroft replaced the relatively
neutral committee with political appointees. Instead of lawyers whose
careers demonstrated a commitment to the historically disenfranchised,
some of the newer lawyers worked for other romancers of segregation
and opponents of affirmative action and voting rights such as
Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, retired Judge Charles Pickering, and
former attorney general Edwin Meese. According to the Globe, a
quarter of the lawyers hired since 2003 are members of the
conservative Federalist Society, a group whose board of visitors is
littered with civil rights rollback advocates such as Meese, Robert
Bork, William Bradford Reynolds, C. Boyden Gray, and Theodore Olson.
Utah Senator Orrin Hatch is a cochairman of that board with Bork. The
cynical and cronyistic detour from civil rights was so repulsive to
career professionals that 63 attorneys left in 2005 under a buyout
program, nearly double the annual number of those who normally left
in recent years. Prosecutions of discrimination cases on behalf of
people of color and women dropped 40 percent under Bush, according to
a Washington Post review last November of Justice Department
statistics. ``If anything, a civil rights background is considered a
liability," Jon Greenbaum, a former attorney in the voting rights
section, told the Globe. The way things are going, all Americans will
share in the liabilities of a government that cannot spell l-a-w if
you spot it the ``l" and the ``a." While Bush turns one section of
the Justice Department on its historical head, he is completely
locking the doors on another. Last week, Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales admitted that Bush personally blocked the department's
Office of Professional Responsibility from investigating the ethics
of the warrantless White House wiretapping program. The Office for
Professional Responsibility's top lawyer complained in one memorandum
in the spring, ``Since its creation some 31 years ago, OPR has
conducted many highly sensitive investigations involving executive
branch programs and has obtained access to information classified at
the highest levels. In all those years, OPR has never been prevented
from initiating or pursuing an investigation." Finally, the American
Bar Association issued a bipartisan task force report this week that
was sparked by other reporting by the Globe's Savage. The ABA sharply
criticized Bush's unprecedented use of ``signing statements" to say he
can disregard more than 800 laws passed during his administration --
more than all prior presidents combined. The ABA said that such
signing statements -- by any president -- are ``contrary to the rule
of law and our constitutional system of separation of powers." The
most notorious of the signing statements would let Bush evade bans on
detainee torture and deploying US troops in Colombia. They would free
him from informing Congress about diverting federal funds to secret
operations and about secret uses of the Patriot Act to search homes
and seize property. Bush wants to ignore laws that would allow
government scientists to present uncensored findings to Congress and
would protect nuclear safety whistleblowers. The same Bush who
chatted up the NAACP about Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King
is the same Bush who, according to the ABA report, used signing
statements 15 times to reject affirmative action and diversity
requirements in federal hiring. One area of presidential rejection is
in the recruitment and training of people of color and women in
intelligence agencies. The Justice Department censored much of a 2003
report on diversity in the attorney ranks. Bush tells the NAACP to go
to the museum. His administration is a civil rights mausoleum.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson at globe.com.
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