The Daily Background

A somewhat disheartening note from an article about the Departmnt of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, which was ravaged into a shell of its former self during the Bush Administration:

Under the Bush administration, it was “destroyed,” said John Payton, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who criticized the shift away from the department’s traditional civil rights focus to a more expansive agenda that included prosecuting complaints of religious discrimination and human trafficking. Independent investigations by the Office of the Inspector General also found that the civil rights division during the years that George W. Bush was president had been plagued with political hiring scandals and racial insults, further straining the department’s already icy relationship with civil rights veterans.
[…]
The challenge will likely fall to Tom Perez, a former Maryland politician and civil rights lawyer who is Obama’s nominee to head the civil rights division. Seven months after Perez was nominated, his confirmation remains held up in a power play in the Senate that both sides say has little to do with Perez.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) asked Senate Republicans to delay Perez’s confirmation after the Department of Justice reduced charges in a case of alleged voter intimidation against the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia that was filed in the waning days of the Bush administration. Smith called the decision “possible political interference.”

Agreeing with Smith, Hans von Spakovsky, a top lawyer in the civil rights division during the Bush years, said that on Holder’s watch “politics has been behind one decision after another,” and that the former president’s appointees “brought a balance, which hadn’t been there before.”

Riiiiiiight. The Bush Administration brought “balance” to the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division like Kanye brings “balance” to award ceremonies.

And really? That’s cause to hold up such an important nominee?

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