Putting Law Above Politics

Our View: As President Obama Seeks To Reshape The Justice Department, Securing The Confirmation Of Thomas Perez As Chief Of The Civil Rights Division Should Be Job 1

The delay to his nomination has little to do with Mr. Perez himself but with Republicans attempting to stop the policy changes Mr. Holder and Mr. Perez want to make in the department; most of the reasons given publicly for holding up a vote deal with questions about cases in which Mr. Perez had no involvement.

The only objection raised about Mr. Perez in particular stems from his service on the board of CASA de Maryland, an immigrant rights group that criticized a 2007 Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation in Baltimore that targeted Latino day laborers. GOP senators have pounced on that incident as evidence that Mr. Perez is too liberal on immigration.

Let's be clear about what happened in that raid. According to a report about the January 2007 incident, ICE agents were told by their supervisor to go out and "bring more bodies in" and "were ordered to seek additional arrests that day due to managerial pressure to produce statistics." They went to a Fells Point 7-Eleven and, the store's surveillance video shows, targeted Latino men while ignoring blacks and whites, including a white man in a pickup truck who had come to hire day laborers. One of those detained was a janitor who was on his way to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where his son was undergoing treatment for cancer. If Mr. Perez objects to those tactics, all the better.

The matter is a distraction, since immigration law is a relatively minor aspect of the civil rights division's work, and in any case, policy on the issue is set by the Department of Homeland Security and enforced by ICE.

But the tactics of obfuscation and delay nevertheless pose a problem for the Obama administration at a time when it finds itself under siege on multiple fronts. Moreover, government personnel rules prohibit reassigning midlevel staffers at the division for 120 days after Mr. Perez is confirmed. That means even when Mr. Perez finally gets down to work, it could be months before he can put his own people in key positions.

The president and the Senate's Democratic leadership must find a way to break this procedural logjam. Once a vote is scheduled, there's no doubt that Mr. Perez - who was endorsed 17-2 in committee - will be confirmed and can get on with the reforms needed to put the civil rights division back on track.