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Pierce writes: "The Senate Judiciary Committee, Richard Durbin (D-Illinois) presiding, heard from two administration nominees for critical positions in the Department of Justice. Todd Kim was nominated to be Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources. But he wasn't the main event."

Sen. Tom Cotton. (photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty)
Sen. Tom Cotton. (photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty)


Republicans Aren't Interested in the Civil Rights Division Doing Anything About Civil Rights

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

15 April 21


A Senate hearing on Joe Biden's nominee to lead the Justice Department section reinforced a decades-long pattern.

he Senate Judiciary Committee, Richard Durbin (D-Illinois) presiding, heard from two administration nominees for critical positions in the Department of Justice. Todd Kim was nominated to be Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources. But he wasn’t the main event. That was Kristen Clarke, whom the administration wants to be the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Done correctly, this position is where all the hottest issues of the day come together, from police violence to voting rights to systemic racism.

Over the past two decades, it’s been one of the flashpoints of every confirmation process in a new administration. It was the job to which President Bill Clinton tried to appoint Lani Guinier only to chicken out when the Wall Street Journal’s button men raised hell about Guinier’s writings on election law. (Guinier didn’t even get a hearing in the Senate.) The George W. Bush administration worked to dismantle the Civil Rights Division’s mandate and shift the division’s focus from racial and economic discrimination to a new concentration on alleged threats to “religious liberty.”

President Barack Obama had the devil’s own time filling the job. In 2016, his initial choice was Philadelphia lawyer Debo Adegbile, but Adegbile’s work as an NAACP lawyer in the successful effort to get convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal off death row—and, it should be noted, into a life sentence—was enough to throw the Republicans in Congress into a frenzy, and to drive timorous Democrats under the bed. Seven of them joined the Republicans to defeat the nomination before the whole Senate. Agdebile was replaced in the job by Vanita Gupta, who most recently was the Biden administration’s choice to be Associate Attorney General. Donald Trump nominated Eric Dreiband, who, in his white-shoe career at D.C. power firm Jones Day, had defended North Carolina’s embarrassing “bathroom law.” So recent history indicates that Republicans would rather the position not exist but, if it must, it should do as little as possible in the area of civil rights.

Clarke already had a taste of this before Wednesday’s hearing. A quite organized campaign of innuendo, half-truth, and outright smears was waged against her, and they weren’t even original smears, either. From New York:

Thursday presented a new tactic. Maureen Faulkner, the widow of the Philadelphia police officer whom activist Mumia Abu-Jamal was convicted of killing in 1982, was a guest on the [Tucker Carlson] show. Clarke, said Carlson, had “worked very hard to get Abu-Jamal free. Clarke even referred to him as a ‘political prisoner.’” Faulkner went for it. “She hates white people, that’s my honest to god true feeling. And she wants to defund the police. She’s a vile woman. And she’s dangerous.”

Carlson mined Clarke’s writings from her undergraduate days at Harvard to find things with which to gin up phony outrage. She’s even been accused of being anti-Semitic based on a speaker she engaged for a group she headed as a Harvard student. So, at the very least, when the Judiciary Committee’s Republicans trotted out this threadbare garbage on Wednesday, we all knew what was coming.

The first moment of hilarity came when Senator John Cornyn of Texas tried to bring up a satirical column Clarke had written in college, prefacing his question with the one Martin Luther King quote that every conservative knows. (Oh, come on, you know which one.) The column was a spoof of The Bell Curve in which Clarke proposed the genetic superiority of Black Americans.

“This op-ed opened with a satirical reference to the statement you just read,” Clarke replied.

This caused Cornyn to reply, with a look like a dog confronting a duck, “So this was satire?”

After Cornyn, Senator Mike Lee, the konztitooshunal skolar from Utah, quizzed Clarke about the famous Philadelphia New Black Panthers video from 2008, the one in which two Black men stood around a polling place, opening doors for old ladies and being so intimidating that a woman came out of the building and made a phone call right behind them. Then Lee moved on to a “voter fraud” case brought by the Bush DOJ, which was notoriously corrupt on the subject, back in 2006, a case involving a Black political organizer named Ike Brown, who a federal court said had discriminated against the white voters of Noxubee County.

But the real star was Senator Tom Cotton, the bobble-throated slapstick from Arkansas, and perhaps the most humorless human being on whom I have ever laid eyes. Cotton went all around Robin Hood’s barn trying to get Clarke to say whether or not she thought Officer Darrin Wilson should have been charged in the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Clarke dodged, not too adroitly to my mind, but the whole damn spectacle was absurd. Cotton hammered away until Durbin asked him to let Clarke finish an answer and Cotton started bellyaching at him. “Could you please stop your pattern of interrupting me repeatedly?” Cotton then moved on to asking Clarke if the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin last March was justified. (The officer was cleared this week of all charges and returned to duty.)

It was plain that the point of the Republican attack on Clarke’s nomination was purely racial; they made it clear that they expected her to go soft on supposed Black election fraud, and harsh on white police who kill Black citizens. (Hell, Lee even ran down a list of things that Clarke has referred to as “racist” in one forum or another. It was stunning.) They have nothing but that now, even if they have to reach back a decade to find examples. They’re not shy about it anymore, not at all.

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