Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has his work cut out for him cleaning up the mess the Bush administration left at the Justice Department. Having begun by appointing a special prosecutor to investigate CIA abuses in the torture of terror suspects and hiring veteran career attorneys to oversee the department's Office of Professional Responsibility and Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, one of his top priorities must be reorganizing the agency's long-suffering civil rights division so that it can return to its traditional mission of enforcing anti-discrimination laws and protecting the rights of minorities.
Under Mr. Holder's predecessors, the civil rights division suffered grievously from political meddling in high-profile cases and hiring practices that ignored merit-based civil service rules in favor of ideological litmus tests that allowed minimally qualified partisan hacks to win top jobs. The predictable result was that dedicated career attorneys were demoralized and shunted aside; more than 200 of them left or were forced out over the last eight years.
Mr. Holder has requested an additional $22 million for the agency that will allow him to hire capable replacements for these valued employees without igniting the partisan furor that would come from having to weed out scores of incompetent Bush-era partisans who now enjoy civil service protection.
In addition to expanding the division's staff, Mr. Holder wants to shift its focus back to long-standing efforts on voting rights, housing and employment discrimination, discriminatory bank lending practices and the drawing of new voting districts after next year's census. He also wants to replace his predecessor's narrow emphasis on individual cases of intentional discrimination with a broader approach that takes into account systemic bias and policies that have a disparate impact on minorities.
None of this is going to be easy, and Republican critics of change in the Senate are already coalescing around opposition to Mr. Holder's choice to head the civil rights division, Maryland Labor, Licensing and Regulation Secretary Thomas E. Perez. Mr. Perez, a former Montgomery County Councilman and civil rights attorney in the Clinton Justice Department, is an experienced lawyer and administrator who has excellent qualifications for the job.
