Prometheus 6

The Huffington Post reports the Justice Department is issuing subpoena to former employees to compel testimony, or at least a Fifth Amendment assertion, of the politization of its Civil Rights division by Bradley Schlozman.

They're going after Hans von Spakovsky, famous for forgetting WHY he was working to restrict minority voting rights (with a special emphasis on Native Americans), and Jason Torchinsky, who held a similar position to von Spakovsky...both the employment position and the refusal to testify position.

You have the proverbial snowball's chance in Gehenna of getting the truth out of those two. I suggest contacting Carl Goldman, executive director of AFSCME's Council 26, the union that represents non-attorney staff in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.

“When I ask our members in the Civil Rights Division what’s their biggest problem, their answer is discrimination.... They tell me stories about minority employees being continually passed over for jobs that are given to white employees. They talk about disrespect from managers. They talk about explicitly racist comments that are made by attorneys, the same attorneys that have been brought in by the Republican political appointees that run [the Justice Department].

I'd also like them to look into what the Civil Rights Division has actually done for more evidence of politization. It was so blatant it should have receive more complaints than coverage.

The Bush administration has filed only three lawsuits -- all of them this year (P6: 2005) -- under the section of the Voting Rights Act that prohibits discrimination against minority voters, and none of them involves discrimination against blacks. The initial case was the Justice Department's first reverse-discrimination lawsuit, accusing a majority-black county in Mississippi of discriminating against white voters.

The change in emphasis is perhaps most stark in the division's appellate section, which has historically played a prominent role intervening in key discrimination cases. The section filed only three friend-of-the-court briefs last year -- compared with 22 in 1999 -- and now spends nearly half its time defending deportation orders rather than pursuing civil rights litigation. Last year, six of 10 briefs filed by the section were related to immigration cases.

And their defenders, like Roger Clegg, have no idea of, or no concern for, the reason career positions in the Justice Department exist at all.

"If the career people are not reflecting the policy priorities of the political appointees, then there's a problem," Clegg said. "Elections have consequences in a democracy."

Even better is this, from Ralph F. Boyd Jr., the civil rights chief from 2001 to 2003.

"It's not a prosecutor's job to bring lots of cases; it's a prosecutor's job to bring the right cases. If it means fewer cases overall, then that's what you do."...

Then there's Holland, the Justice spokesman, selectively citing statistics while accusing those who see the problem of doing so. The department is on the winning side of court rulings 90 percent of the time compared with 60 percent during the Clinton years, and that's what he thinks counts. Federal courts are "less likely to reject our legal arguments than the ones filed in the previous administration," he said.

Never mind that their court cases were all in the Confederacy. Here's some typical cases, including my faovrite one, in which they sued Southern Illinois University - Carbondale for complying with a National Science Foundatio-run program. One in which SIUC was more of an affiliate than manager or operator...the prime institution, University of Chicago, would have known how to fight that nonsense. I'm pretty convinced SIUC knew, but (here comes the unproven assertions) officers higher than the affirmative action guy took a dive for a Federalist Society associate.

Case: United States v. Southern Illinois University

Year: 2006

Issue: The university offered paid fellowships for minorities and women. The Civil Rights Division sued the university for discriminating against white men. To avoid a court battle, the university dropped the program.

Attorney: The case was handled by a graduate of Indiana University Law School who was hired in February 2004. He is a member of the Federalist Society and the Republican National Lawyers Association. Previously, he worked for the Center for Individual Rights, a nonprofit group that has filed many lawsuits opposing affirmative action in higher education.

That's the kind of guy they hired to defend "our" rights.

The have a LOT of material to work with because the Civil Rights Division was the first to be gutted. They chose it because

1. They really want to get us, socially and economically, back to just after the Depression but just before WW II.
2. They know the mainstream doesn't see Black equality as worth the price they'd pay in white anger.
3. They can set a lot of precedents in an area no one important is watching. 

Maybe that's why it's the last case to be reported on...maybe they needed more time. We'll see what they're working on.