Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Downward Slide of Justice

John Fund posts at NRO:

President Obama’s last head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division was Thomas Perez, a highly controversial radical. Perez is now the secretary of the Department of Labor. (He was confirmed in July this year by a vote of only 54 to 46.) When looking to replace Perez at the DOJ, President Obama could have chosen to improve the Civil Rights Division — after all, the Justice Department’s own inspector general concluded in a report earlier this year that the division was guilty of “deep ideological polarization” and a “disappointing lack of professionalism.”

Instead, Obama has picked someone who clearly shares Perez’s worldview, Debo Adegbile, the senior counsel to the highly partisan Senate Judiciary Committee. He will also be the fourth head of the division who has worked at the Washington office of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. This group, which has a rigid view of civil-rights enforcement, has recently lost several high-profile court cases. Just last February, Adegbile went before the Supreme Court to defend Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which required that many states (mostly Southern) have all changes to their voting laws precleared either by the DOJ or in federal court. The Supreme Court properly decided that this portion of the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional, given that much of the data used to decide which states needed preclearance dated from 40 years ago

“His nomination is an in-the-face appointment,” says J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department whistle-blower who documented his disillusion with the Perez Civil Rights Division in his book Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department. “Any thought that Obama would moderate as a lame duck with collapsing poll numbers vanishes with the Adegbile nomination.” He notes that during Adegbile’s time at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the group became increasingly radical, going so far as to oppose criminal-background checks by employers and endorsing extreme racial-hiring quotas.

It even provided legal representation to Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and Marxist revolutionary who was convicted of murdering a Philadelphia police officer. The question of Abu-Jamal’s guilt is not a close call. Two hospital workers testified that Abu-Jamal confessed to them: “I shot the motherf***er, and I hope the motherf***er dies.” His brother, William, has never testified to his brother’s innocence even though he was at the scene of the crime. Abu-Jamal himself chose not to testify in his own defense.

Please read the rest at “The DOJ’s Radical Civil Rights Division”. 

###

No comments: