Bad Nominations, Bad Bills, and Bad Agencies | Center for Equal Opportunity

The Senate Judiciary Committee has voted 10-8 along party lines to send to the Senate floor the nomination of Debo Adegbile to head the Justice Department’s civil-rights division. As I noted earlier, the Obama administration certainly had its work cut out for it when it tried to find someone farther to the left than Thomas Perez to head the Justice Department’s civil-rights division, but it appears to have succeeded.

Among his other accomplishments, Mr. Adegbile went out of his way to play a role in defending cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, an international cause célèbre on the left, prompting the Fraternal Order of Police to oppose his nomination, along with a number of other law-enforcement groups, including (in alphabetical order) the Major County Sheriffs’ Association, National Association of Police Organizations, National Narcotic Officers’ Associations’ Coalition, National Sheriffs’ Association, and New Jersey State Policemen’s Benevolent Association, as well as Philadelphia District Attorney R. Seth Williams (the murdered policeman was from Philadelphia; his widow has asked to testify against Mr. Adegbile, but that request has been rejected by the Committee).

As Carl Rowan Jr. — who is himself a former deputy U.S. marshal, FBI special agent, and chief of police — wrote: “He isn’t the first questionable nomination made by a president who, for one reason or another, seems drawn to those with radical backgrounds, but this one is an open slap in the face to everyone in law enforcement.” That’s especially important here, because the head of the civil rights division must work closely with state and local law enforcement, not only in joint efforts, but also in supervising their compliance with civil-rights laws.

The nomination is also something of a slap to the House of Representatives, which, on December 6, 2006, marked the 25th anniversary of Officer Faulkner’s murder by passing 368–31 House Resolution 1082, condemning the murder.

Investor’s Business Daily had a good editorial on this and Mr. Adegbile’s other left-wing causes here. He doesn’t like voter ID and other ballot-integrity measures, and was on the wrong side in any number of Supreme Court cases, including, most recently, Shelby County v. Holder (finding the preclearance coverage formula under the Voting Rights Act to be outdated), as well as the challenge to Obamacare, District of Columbia v. Heller (striking down the D.C. gun-control law on Second Amendment grounds), and Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC (where his arguments were unanimously rejected as the Court ruled that the Free Exercise Clause protects us against “significant burdens on religious practice,” as Mr. Adegbile himself put it).

Here’s hoping the full Senate does not approve this nomination.

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The Wall Street Journal had an outstanding editorial last week, opposing the Voting Rights Act amendments that have recently been proposed with the ostensible purpose of overturning last year’s perfectly reasonable decision in Shelby County v. Holder. That decision invalidated the preclearance formula of the Act that required some states to get the federal government’s approval before making any changes in local laws related in any way to voting.

Here’s a brief summary of the editorial (also, I wrote my own piece about the bill earlier, here): The Journal notes that “the liberal goal is to give national politicians more power to play racial politics in a few unfavored states”; that the new bill’s scheme to keep some states in federal receivership “fails to take into account broader racial progress in all of those states”; and that the bill’s use of an “effects” test raises constitutional problems and is “an open door to political abuse that is a specialty of this Administration.” All true, as is the editorial’s conclusion: that the Voting Right Act’s current provisions “provide ample federal enforcement when local politicians limit minority rights,” and so the preclearance mechanism does not need to be resurrected.

Here’s an even briefer summary: This a bad bill.

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The Littler law firm has a comprehensive and interesting report on what the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has been up to, and it’s not reassuring. Among its priorities are “systemic” investigations and lawsuits (which I suspect generally mean “disparate impact” claims) and figuring out some way, any way to make discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation illegal under existing federal employment law (though Congress has never passed any such legislation). Also discussed in the report are the agency’s numerous recent setbacks in the courts.

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Finally, in a Federal Register notice recently, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are soliciting nominations for possible membership on the Advisory Committee on Breast Cancer in Young Women. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the notice contained this interesting passage (my italics):

“The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will give close attention to equitable geographic distribution and to minority and female representation so long as the effectiveness of the Committee is not impaired. Appointments shall be made without discrimination on the basis of age, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, HIV status, disability, and cultural, religious, or socioeconomic status.”

I’m afraid the Obama administration’s mask slipped a bit on this one; it might as well have said, “We’ll do our best to include women and minorities, so long as they aren’t TOO unqualified.” And of course the commitment in the first sentence to make the selection with an eye on sex and color is immediately disavowed with the promise in the second sentence not to do so. Just another diverse day’s work.

It’s interesting that even in an administration supportive of politically correct preferences, and even in a context where selection with an eye on sex and ethnicity has more than the usual plausibility, it’s acknowledged that such preferential treatment is inevitably at odds with choosing the best qualified.

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