Civil Rights Agencies Come Under Fire
The nation’s principal civil rights enforcement agencies have come under fire from advocates concerned about the agencies’ commitment to enforce civil rights laws.
The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice “has failed to pursue race and gender based discrimination cases aggressively,” according to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (Lawyers' Committee).
These and other issues were described in an October 5, 2005 letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee Chair and ranking Member, which urged the Senate to “raise concerns” about the Division during the confirmation hearings of Wan J. Kim to the position of Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, the most important civil rights position in the federal government.
The Division’s workload has decreased significantly, a signal of a lack of interest in civil rights enforcement, the Lawyers' Committee said, citing a drop in prosecutions of civil rights violations, down to 51 in 2003 from 83 in 2000.
The Lawyers' Committee letter said that the loss of valued career attorneys, as well as “drastic” changes in Division hiring procedures were “troubling” because they have “contributed to a clear perception of the politicization of the Division.”
These personnel changes, as well as their impact on Division decisionmaking, have been the topic of several articles in the last year. William R. Yeomans, a former high-ranking Division attorney wrote in an article in the September/October 2005 issue of Legal Affairs magazine that “declining morale and talent drain have contributed to a decline in the Division’s enforcement activity.”
Personnel policies have been retooled, Yeomans wrote, to “replace [career lawyers] with attorneys selected because of ideology.”
Relying on job application materials obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, the Boston Globe reported on July 23, 2006 that Division hires with civil rights experience have plunged, while those with conservative credentials, such as membership in the Federalist Society, have soared.
Moreover, nearly 20 percent of the Division’s career attorneys left in 2005, according to a November 13 Washington Post article. Yeomans, a Division attorney for
24 years, took a buyout in 2005.
These shifts have coincided with changes in the types of cases that the Division has taken on. For example, career attorneys in the Division’s Appellate Section are spending increasing amounts of time defending deportation orders, which detracts from civil rights enforcement, according to Yeomans, who noted that the Appellate Section only filed six amicus briefs in 2004, a third less than the 22 filed
in 1999.
According to the Globe article, the Division is “bringing fewer voting rights and employment cases involving systematic discrimination against African Americans, and more alleging reverse discrimination against whites and religious discrimination against Christians.”
Under previous administrations, on major decisions
political appointees consulted “extensively” with career attorneys, according to Yeomans. That situation began to change during the switch from the Clinton to the Bush administrations, Yeomans wrote, when “[d]ecisions increasingly were made in isolation from career attorneys and were communicated as orders. Attorneys who sought
to engage in discussion or propose alternative approaches were viewed as disloyal and suffered the consequences.”
In a well-publicized example of division supervisors overruling career lawyers, The Washington Post reported
on November 18, 2005 that the approval of Georgia’s controversial voter I.D. program under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act came about despite a 51-page memo
from career attorneys in the Division citing the program’s retrogressive effects on minorities.
Civil rights advocates have also been troubled by staff cuts and a growing backlog of cases at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
According to a June 14, 2006 Washington Post article,
“the agency’s full-time staff, which numbers 2,343 employees, has shrunk by more than 19 percent since 2001.” Its backlog of 47,516 charges for next fiscal year is up from an estimated 39,061 this year and 33,562 in 2005, the Post said. Despite this, President Bush’s 2007 budget request for the agency was $4 million less than it received this budget year.
