For Blog Against Racism Day, I took a look at the Bush administration's civil rights record. I wasn't surprised that it was horrible, but the scope and magnitude of what they've done to civil rights enforcement were shocking even to a cynic like myself.
Under Bush, the Civil Rights Division has become dominated by partisan hacks and effectively abandoned the job of civil rights enforcement, as a recent Washington Post article details:
The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, which has enforced the nation's anti-discrimination laws for nearly half a century, is in the midst of an upheaval that has driven away dozens of veteran lawyers and has damaged morale for many of those who remain, according to former and current career employees....prosecutions for the kinds of racial and gender discrimination crimes traditionally handled by the division have declined 40 percent over the past five years, according to department statistics. Dozens of lawyers find themselves handling appeals of deportation orders and other immigration matters instead of civil rights cases.And here's the capper:
The Bush administration has filed only three lawsuits -- all of them this year -- under the section of the Voting Rights Act that prohibits discrimination against minority voters, and none of them involves discrimination against blacks. The initial case was the Justice Department's first reverse-discrimination lawsuit, accusing a majority-black county in Mississippi of discriminating against white voters. [emphasis added]The Civil Rights Division website provides a graphic example of this; nowhere on the main page is there any mention of civil rights in a racial context. (There is a link to a page providing all kinds of information on efforts to combat 'religious discrimination'; many of the cases detailed there are, of course, pet causes of the religious right.)
The emphasis on voting rights in the Washington Post article is key; after the fiascos in Florida (in 2000) and Ohio (in 2004), voting rights is arguably the single most important civil rights issue in America. As Jeffrey Toobin explained in a New Yorker article last year, voting rights is also an area where the Bush administration's agenda is diametrically opposed to traditional notions of civil rights. Toobin discusses the opposing imperatives of 'voter access' (making sure everyone gets to vote) and 'voter integrity' (making sure nobody votes who shouldn't); under Ashcroft, the DOJ's enforcement of voting rights shifted radically from the former to the latter. 'Voter integrity', of course, was a key catchphrase of voter suppression efforts in the 1950s and '60s--efforts in which a young William Rehnquist participated, challenging black and Hispanic voters at polling places in Arizona. In the Orwellian world of the current DOJ, the best way to protect the rights of minority voters is to take measures that have the effect of suppressing their participation.
This change of emphasis is responsible for what may be the single most indefensible civil rights decision by this DOJ: the approval of a spectacularly bad voter-identification law in Georgi:
A team of Justice Department lawyers and analysts who reviewed a Georgia voter-identification law recommended rejecting it because it was likely to discriminate against black voters, but they were overruled the next day by higher-ranking officials at Justice, according to department documents.The stated purpose of the law is to prevent fraud, of course...but its primary sponsor admits that it would suppress the African-American vote:
The memo, leaked to The Washington Post, went on to state: "Rep. Burmeister said that if there are fewer black voters because of this bill, it will only be because there is less opportunity for fraud. She said that when black voters in her black precincts are not paid to vote, they do not go to the polls."I'll be clear about this: I'm not calling Bush a racist, or Ashcroft, or Gonzales (or John Roberts, who helped push a similar agenda in Reagan's DOJ). I don't think racism as such is the primary motivation here. The single overriding motivation for the Bush administration is partisanship, and I think we have to see this in that light; it's all about helping Republicans. They don't act to suppress the African-American vote because they hate African-Americans; they do it because African-Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. It's just business.
In their world, everything is subordinated to partisan gain--including the civil rights of American citizens. Whatever the motivation, the effect is racist.
By way of perspective, think about Little Rock in 1957. Think about the University of Mississippi in 1962, or the University of Alabama in 1963. Think about all the times during the peak years of the civil rights movement when the law enforcement capabilities of the federal government were brought to bear on the side of rights for all Americans. And think about how far the DOJ has fallen since then.
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