Looks like the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division is due for a complete makeover.
Founded in 1957 to enforce anti-discrimination laws, the CRD focused on isolated cases of intentional discrimination under the Bush administration. President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, however, plan to revamp the CRD so that it targets policies in housing, hiring and so forth that disadvantage minorities. To boot, division officials are urging federal agencies to aggressively enforce rules that forbid recipients of taxpayer money from policies that have a disparate impact on underrepresented groups, the New York Times reported.
Overhauling the CRD comes at a high cost. Because the division needs 50 more lawyers to undergo this transition, the Obama administration has requested that an additional $22 million go to the CRD in fiscal year 2010. That's an 18 percent jump from before.
While conservatives are already criticizing the CRD's makeover, Holder argues that he's simply restoring the division to the way it traditionally functioned under both Republican and Democratic administrations in the past. The Bush administration allegedly adopted such a radically different approach of running the CRD that the legality of some of its practices under the former president has come into question. As the Times reports:
"From 2003 to 2007, Bush political appointees blocked liberals from career jobs and promotions, which they steered to fellow conservatives, whom one such official privately described as 'real Americans,' a department inspector general report found. The practice, which no previous administration had done, violated civil service laws, it said."
Under the Bush administration, a reported 236 of the CRD's estimated 350 civil rights lawyers departed from 2003 to 2007. Many of their replacements lacked the necessary qualifications to tackle complex civil rights litigation, a report by the Obama administration found.
To prevent a similar scenario, the CRD will implement a new hiring policy where panels of employees will determine hiring practices instead of political appointees.
This sounds like the best way to prevent party bias from affecting employment decisions, but Robert Driscoll, a conservative appointed to the CRD under the Bush administration, is doubtful. He told the New York Times:
"If you are the Obama administration and you allow the career staff to do all the hiring, you will get the same people you would probably get if you did it yourself," he said. "In some ways, it's a masterstroke by them."
What do you think? Are the new plans for the CRD akin to a brilliant chess maneuver, or will these changes actually amount to leveling the playing field in the division and, most importantly, ensuring that the CRD prioritize fighting injustice against minorities? Hopefully, under the Obama administration, party divides in the CRD will dissolve. It was Obama, after all, who declared that America was neither "red" nor "blue" but "purple."
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