Recently released documents -- disclosed by the Obama Justice Department only after a court battle -- reveal that the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice is engaging in politicized hiring in the career civil service ranks. Typical Washington behavior, you say? Except the hiring in question is nearly unprecedented in scope and significantly eclipses anything the Bush administration was even accused of doing. And the evidence of the current political activity is far less impeachable than what was behind the libelous attacks leveled at officials from the Bush years.For nearly a year, the Civil Rights Division rebuffed Pajamas Media's Freedom of Information Act request for the resumes of attorneys hired into the Division during the tenure of Eric Holder. PJM was finally forced to file a federal lawsuit earlier this year. Only then did Justice relent and turn over the documents. The result leaves little wonder why PJM's request was met with such intense resistance.
The Department's political leadership clearly recognized that the resumes of these new attorneys would expose the hypocrisy of the Obama administration's polemical attacks on the Bush administration for supposedly engaging in "politicized hiring" -- and that everyone would see just how militantly partisan the Obama Civil Rights Division truly is. Holder's year-long delay before producing these documents -- particularly when compared to the almost-instantaneous turnaround by the Bush administration of a virtually identical request by the Boston Globe back in 2006 -- also shows how deep politics now runs in the Department.
As Richard Pollock of Pajamas Media observed in an article, none of this should surprise anyone even remotely familiar with Holder's highly partisan nature. Indeed, Holder boasted to the American Constitution Society (an organization started as a liberal counterweight to the Federalist Society) back in June 2008 that the Obama Justice Department was "going to be looking for people who share our values," and that "a substantial number of those people would probably be members of the American Constitution Society." The hiring records from Holder's initial thirty months in office underscore how serious he was about this mission.
This is the first in a series of articles by Pajamas Media about the Civil Rights Division's hiring practices since President Obama took office. These accounts will put to the test Holder's repeated (and all-too-rarely scrutinized) statement that ideological considerations play no role in the hiring of career attorneys in his Department -- a test that the Department's practices clearly fail.
The evidence will demonstrate that, in contrast to the Bush administration's Civil Rights Division -- which hired individuals from across the political spectrum -- there has been nary a token conservative welcomed into the Division under Holder. More than that, though, this series will show that the ranks of new civil servants arriving in Holder's civil rights shop in protected civil service slots are some of the most strident ideologues in Washington.
But don't just take my word for it. Let the resumes speak for themselves.
We start today with the Civil Rights Division's Voting Section. This Section is responsible for enforcing, among other things, all aspects of the Voting Rights Act. This includes reviewing redistricting and other pre-clearance submissions under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act that covered jurisdictions throughout the country must submit to the Justice Department for approval. Redistricting maps, voter ID statutes, citizenship verification laws, and a host of other politically contentious election issues rest in the hands of these Voting Section bureaucrats.
Long a refuge of partisan activists and ideological crusaders, the Section has been filling its ranks over the last 30 months with like-minded liberals ready to do the bidding of left-wing advocacy organizations. Sixteen attorneys have come on board in this hiring binge. Who are these new radicals?
Rest of this at link. Talk about stacking the deck for teh 0ne. A close election will be lawyered to death to protect their agenda and screw the will of the people. We are getting the dictatorship we voted for.