The Bush League: How The GOP Rolled Back Federal Voting Rights Enforcement

By Andrew Gumbel, The Nation. Posted October 3, 2008.

In 2002 conservative political journalist John Miller wrote an extraordinary call to arms in which he declared open season on the civil rights division of the Justice Department. This was the division that, for close to fifty years, had been dedicated to erasing the legacy of Jim Crow and protecting the rights of minority voters.

"There may be no part of the federal government where liberalism is more deeply entrenched," he fulminated in the National Review. Then he sketched out how conservatives could reclaim it for themselves. His jeremiad was headlined Fort Liberalism: Can Justice's Civil Rights Division Be Bushified?

Six years on, we know the answer painfully well. What makes Miller's piece so extraordinary is that nearly every one of his proposals was implemented. "Republicans should work to gain more control over the civil rights division and its renegade lawyers," he wrote. Check. "The administration should permanently replace those it believes it can't trust," including senior career section chiefs. Check. "Republican political appointees should seize control of the hiring process." Again, check.

To the extent that Miller injected any note of caution, his prescription was exceeded. "They [Republican political appointees] don't need to make sure every new lawyer is a member of the Federalist Society," he suggested. "Simply hiring competent professionals who don't come from left-wing organizations would be an enormous improvement." In fact, the ultraconservative Federalist Society quickly became a favored recruiting ground--twenty-seven out of twenty-nine members who applied in 2002 were granted interviews, according to a report from Justice's inspector general--while lawyers affiliated with more progressive organizations were roundly snubbed.

At the same time, Republicans at the Justice Department became so zealous in the pursuit of their political aims that competence went out the window, along with any sense of caution. Instead of simply correcting a perceived imbalance, they ripped up the professional integrity of the department like no presidential administration in memory and hobbled its much-prized independence--in the civil rights division and just about everywhere else.

A startling flurry of inspector general reports--including one released September 29 focusing on the US Attorney firing scandal--along with the testimony of former Justice staffers interviewed at length by The Nation, paint a detailed picture of how a once-proud government department came to teeter on the brink of a nervous breakdown. With the presidential election looming, the consequences of pervasive politicization could be profound, as the department's rules of engagement in the electoral process have been completely remade to allow a much greater degree of direct interference.

"They have destroyed the internal culture of the Justice Department as a restraint on the executive branch," said Bruce Fein, a prominent Washington constitutional lawyer who cut his teeth at Justice during the Watergate scandal and later served as a political appointee under Reagan. "There's no professional insistence on treating law and politics separately. It's all one."

Gerry Hebert, a former head of the voting section who now lobbies for greater professional accountability at the Justice Department through the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, confirmed this view: "To see what's been done to the department is one of the most tragic things in my professional career."

The devastation has been profound. Bush loyalists have crammed key positions and even rank-and-file trial lawyer posts with unqualified conservative ideologues interested only in carrying water for the White House. They have put people with little litigation experience in charge of litigating sections; they have rejected top candidates from Harvard, Yale and Stanford and favored an improbable number of alumni from the Regent University School of Law, a conservative Christian school founded by Pat Robertson.

The civil rights division has been the prime target because it has a direct influence on the conduct of elections--and because minority voters skew so heavily toward the Democrats. But the culture of politicization has pervaded the whole department, turning it into little more than a rubber stamp for the White House on hugely controversial constitutional issues, from warrantless wiretapping to the definition of torture.

Apologists for the administration will tell you there is nothing unusual about presidents politicizing the leadership of government departments--after all, Robert Kennedy was the president's brother when he became attorney general. What is different about this Bush presidency, though, is the depth of the shake-up--no administration has tried to install political sympathizers in career posts before, let alone on this scale--and the degree of hostility shown toward career lawyers and their staff.

"The people who came in really had a take-no-prisoners approach," Hebert said. "If you didn't like it, too bad. They had real contempt for the career people, who they saw as left-wing Democrats." As demonstrated in two extensive IG reports published in June and July, the department leadership, under John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, hijacked the honors program, previously used to recruit the best and brightest from the nation's top law schools, and put it in the hands of a political committee that used flagrantly partisan criteria to screen out liberals and promote conservatives, regardless of their experience or credentials.

See more stories tagged with: bush administration, department of justice, john tanner, alberto gonzalez, selective enforcement

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