The Party of Calhoun Prepares to go to War on Civil Rights Enforcement

Another modest shift to the right from the second of America’s two largely interchangeable neoliberal parties:

By the time Perez and his team were done, the Civil Rights Division was the most aggressive and effective civil-rights law firm in the country—and perhaps the government’s most aggressive and effective enforcement agency. The Democratic Congress played a central role. It gave the division money to hire new career lawyers, enabling us to recruit truly outstanding, experienced, and committed people. We also insisted that front-line supervisors apply rigorous standards to all their employees, which helped to get the best performance from everyone and encouraged poor performers to find something else to do. We brought in several new section chiefs who took on both longstanding and newly developing civil-rights issues.

Under Perez, the division pushed forward on as many issues as possible as quickly as possible. When he moved on to head the Department of Labor, his successors Jocelyn Samuels and Vanita Gupta—neither of whom served with Senate confirmation—built on his achievements.
Trump’s announcement that Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions is his choice for attorney general sends an especially strong signal about the new administration’s intentions.

The election of Donald Trump, I fear, will wipe out all those achievements. Trump’s announcement that Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions is his choice for attorney general sends an especially strong signal about the new administration’s intentions. Sessions first came to public notice in the 1980s as a young Reagan-appointed U.S. attorney in Alabama, when he criminally prosecuted three prominent local voting-rights activists for voter fraud—only to see a jury acquit the activists in a matter of hours. Although Reagan nominated Sessions for a federal judgeship, the Republican-controlled Senate voted down his nomination after a number of Department of Justice lawyers—including one from the Civil Rights Division—testified about his use of racist language with his coworkers. Sessions has attracted national attention in recent years for his extreme anti-immigration positions.

Definitely read the whole thing.

Putting Jeff Sessions in charge of supervising the Civil Rights Division is like having the fox supervising the henhouse, the bully supervising detention, or Andy Puzder being named the Secretary of Labor.