Justice Department change is a welcome one

The Justice Department is back in the business of enforcing civil rights.

This counts as good news, considering the wilderness years of the Bush administration.

During that time, more than half of the 350 lawyers in the department’s civil rights division left, fed up with the hijacking of the department by right-wing ideologues.

Now, there’s a new attorney general with a new attitude. Eric Holder told the New York Times the division “is getting back to what it has traditionally done.”

It’s about time.

So much has happened while the civil rights division was away.

Latinos are now the nation’s largest minority group.

Arab Americans and Muslim Americans became major targets of racial profiling.

The number of blacks in prison approached one million.

George Bush vetoed the Matthew Shepard Act, which would have extended hate crime laws to cover gay people.

During all this, the civil rights division occupied itself mainly by protecting straight white men from discrimination.

It sought to limit enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, which is probably the most successful civil rights legislation ever.

The Bush administration Justice Department attacked affirmative action programs, rarely supported minority plaintiffs in private discrimination cases and only brought cases itself when there was “smoking gun” evidence.

The most lasting damage, however, was the hiring of Republican operatives in career positions, even when anti-patronage rules barred those positions from being filled with political hires.

Every attorney general, including those in previous Republican administrations, had respected this essential aspect of good government.

Bush administration Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, however, seemed as hostile to civil service laws as they were to civil rights laws.

An internal Justice Department investigation found that senior managers sought to staff the division exclusively with conservatives, who Deputy Assistant Attorney General Bradley Scholzman called “real Americans” — as opposed to the “libs” and “pinkos” he tried to eradicate from the Department. Scholzman’s conduct was so egregious that the Justice Department inspector general actually referred him to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for criminal prosecution (which was declined).

Attorney General Holder has his work cut out for him. His first step, wisely, is to hire fifty new attorneys. Unfortunately the division’s lawyers still don’t have a boss. President Obama nominated respected civil rights lawyer Thomas Perez months ago, but Senate Republicans have held up confirmation hearings because they are angry about the change in the division’s priorities under the Obama administration. They are afraid the Justice Department might do its job — and actually enforce the civil rights laws for a change.

Paul Butler is a former trial lawyer with the Department of Justice. He teaches at the George Washington University Law School and is the author of “Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice.” He can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.