Why are those people still there? The lawyers and bureaucrats in Obama’s Civil Riots Division were among the worst of the worst swamp critters. They were making gays and transgenders more equal than all other Americans, stirring up racial animus in Ferguson and Baltimore and doing everything in their power to undermine voter ID laws. Those people should have been gone the day after Jeff Sessions was sworn in.
Conservative scholars have urged Attorney General Jeff Sessions to purge “ideological rot” that’s festered in the department’s Civil Rights Division under the Obama administration through internal reforms meant to reverse partisanship in the agency.
But liberal groups, seizing on a recommendation that political appointees rather than career bureaucrats play a role in the hiring process, argued this week that such a move would be a return to hiring practices already deemed improper and illegal under the George W. Bush administration.
The polarization over the issue underscores how much the division’s priorities can shift from one prevailing political wind to the next.
The 25 conservatives who authored the letter to the Justice Department urging reforms wrote that under the Obama administration, the Civil Rights Division “served purely ideological ends with rigidity unmatched in other federal offices.”
Among suggested reforms, they said the assistant attorneys general in each division “must preserve or reacquire hiring authority and not leave the decisions in the hands of career bureaucrats who are reliably opposed to President Trump’s agenda.”
For liberal groups, who already worry that their victories on policing, voting rights and LGBT issues will be rolled back under the Trump administration, the suggestion was alarming.