Washington, D.C. -- Civil rights leaders across the nation are characterizing the possible nomination of former Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder for the spot of U. S. attorney general as a ‘bold choice’ for prospective upgrades in civil rights and criminal justice laws that have long hindered Black progress.
“President-elect [Barack] Obama has made a bold choice in nominating Eric holder as the attorney general,” says Charles Ogletree, Harvard Law School professor and director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. “Eric brings nearly three decades of public service to this enormous task and will usher in a new appreciation for civil rights and dignity and respect for individual liberties. I applaud this decision and so should anyone deeply concerned about the fair and rational application of the rule of law.”
The slot of attorney general, among the most important top nominations to be made by the incoming president, oversees the U. S. Department of Justice. The DOJ deals with a variety of issues, including public policies under the Civil Rights Division that disparately affect Black people. They include affirmative action, racial profiling, police misconduct, hate crimes, judicial discretion in mandatory minimum sentences, the death penalty and other sentencing disparities, voting rights and redistricting reviews.
Obama has not yet made the Holder nomination official, but the transition team has strongly signaled that he is the president-elect's top choice. A formal announcement is pending.
Meanwhile, Obama named his archrival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as his secretary of state; Gen. James L. Jones, a former NATO commander, as his national security adviser, and retained Robert M. Gates as secretary defense secretary.
The Obama nominations reveal that he is focusing on national security issues as well as justice issues at home.
Holder, who would be the first African-American to serve as attorney general, comes one year after New York activist Al Sharpton led a march of thousands around the Justice Department, decrying policies that have failed to fairly deal with police misconduct and hate crimes.
Holder, whose pending appointment must first be confirmed by the U. S. Senate, would not only be the first African-American to serve as attorney general, but is viewed as a fair-minded former judge whose civil rights record reputedly bespeaks balance, fairness and equity.
Legal experts who deal in racial justice say these are the qualities that have been missing in the Bush Justice Department, largely characterized by decisions made by Republican political appointees viewed as cold to civil rights laws. A widely held complaint has been that Bush administrative appointees have often undermined opinions and legal advice of lawyers – especially in the civil rights division.
“The last eight years have probably been the most disastrous for the Department of Justice in its history. They have been catastrophic for the Civil Rights Division,” says John Payton, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. “The mission of the Civil Rights Division has been literally abandoned; its career attorneys forced out or demoralized, its leadership compromised by political considerations. In many important ways, we have not really had a Civil Rights Division for the past eight years.”
Holder could help fix that, says Payton.
“The mission of the next attorney general will be to restore - not just the integrity of the Department of Justice but its very soul,” says Payton. “Eric Holder is a spectacular pick.”
Among those issues of greatest concern is affirmative action, which the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights defines as ''a contemporary term that encompasses any measure, beyond simple termination of a discriminatory practice, which permits the consideration of race, national origin, s*x and disability, along with other criteria, and which is adopted to provide opportunities to a class of qualified individuals who have either historically or actually been denied those opportunities, and to prevent the reoccurrence of discrimination in the future.''
In other words, public agencies and institutions are allowed to consider race, national origin, gender and disability – among other factors – when seeking qualified candidates for admissions and contracts. However the obscurity of recent Supreme Court rulings have caused some universities and public contracting agencies to fear executing programs to bring racial inclusion, a hesitation called a ''chilling affect.''
Holder has a history of judicial posts, in which he revealed his bend toward civil rights. In 1988, then-President Ronald Reagan appointed him to serve on the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. He stepped down in 1993 to accept an appointment from President Bill Clinton as U. S. attorney for the District of Columbia. He was the first African-American U.S. Attorney in that office. Then, in 1997, Clinton appointed Holder as deputy attorney general to then Attn. General Janet Reno. He was also the first African-American to hold that office. In 2001, after the election of President George Bush, Holder joined the private law firm of Covington and Burling, where he has largely handled civil and criminal cases as well as internal corporate investigations.
According to Thehistorymakers.com, Holder’s civil rights record includes early clerkships for the NAACPLDF and the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division as a student at Columbia law school in 1974 and 1975. During his four-year tenure as U. S. attorney in D. C., he created a domestic violence unit, implemented a community prosecution project, and developed Operation Cease-Fire, a program aimed at gun ownership by criminals, according to the website, which documents the lives of African-American heroes. As deputy attorney general - in addition to supervising the litigating, enforcement, and administrative components in both civil and criminal matters of the DOJ, he created a program called Lawyers for One America, which aimed to diversify the legal profession and provide free legal work to those in need across the nation.
With strong Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate, it is expected that the Congress will work closely with Holder to remove barriers to Black progress. Democratic members of Congress have largely received straight As and Bs on NAACP Legislative Report Cards, including former Sen. Obama.
U. S. Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), who serves as the highest-ranking African-American in Congress as House Majority Whip, says he anticipates the removal of long-held barriers as the Congress works with Holder - if his pending nomination is confirmed by the Senate.
“We want somebody who will protect the rights and privileges...of being Americans that African-Americans have. And the current administration, time and time again, trampled upon those rights,” Clyburn says. “So, if you’ve got an Eric Holder over there that says, ‘I’m going to protect everybody’s rights. I’m not going to be out here politicizing the Justice Department. We’re aren’t going to let people go out here and just trample upon your rights,’ that’s all African-Americans want.”
Posted By: The SISTAHS Ministry
Friday, December 5th 2008 at 9:13AM
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