MB Civic

By Derrick Z. Jackson | July 29, 2006 | The Boston Globe

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.