3 Reasons Why the Radical Anti-Discipline Policies at DOJ Will Outlast the Obama Era

3 Reasons Why the Radical Anti-Discipline Policies at DOJ Will Outlast the Obama Era

January 8th, 2014 - 7:19 am
by J. Christian Adams

Today the Drudge Report covers the Justice Department’s racialist attack on school discipline policies. The DOJ policy is based on the idea that school discipline policies are racially discriminatory because black students comprise a greater percentage of students disciplined than their percentage in the general population. Call it exceeding the bad-behavior quota.

That this four-year-old federal policy exists wasn’t news. I covered it in my 2011 book Injustice. What is newsworthy is how these radical racialist education policies will outlast the Obama administration, and Republicans are ill-equipped to reverse it even if they win the White House.

As I wrote in Injustice:

The DOJ’s reasoning goes like this: if minorities face school discipline at rates greater than their overall percentage in the population, then the school is engaging in racial discrimination. As Civil Rights chief Tom Perez explained, “Black boys account for 9 percent of the nation’s student population, but comprise 24 percent of students suspended out of school and 30 percent of students expelled.” This preposterous racial bean-counting is an affront to the very concept of individual responsibility.
In January 2011, Perez announced that the DOJ would use a “disparate impact” analysis on school discipline cases to determine whether discipline policies were racially discriminatory. Thus, if blacks were disciplined in higher percentages than their share of the population, the DOJ would bring a lawsuit to stop the discipline policy. The new policy was on display at a DOJ conference on September 27 and 28, 2010, entitled “Civil Rights and School Discipline: Addressing Disparities to Ensure Educational Opportunity.” Attorney General Holder addressed the gathering and sought to “better understand the causes, and most effectively remedy the consequences, of disparities in student discipline.” Perez then complained that minority “students are being handed Draconian punishments for things like school uniform violations, schoolyard fights and subjective violations, such as disrespect and insubordination.”

Some might argue American schools have already allowed far too much disrespect and insubordination among students. That Tom Perez gives quarter for these acts illustrates the cultural demographic he and his fellow Obama political appointees seek to protect—the disrespectful and insubordinate.

We’ve come to expect this sort of policy from Eric Holder of protecting the lawless and misbehaving. The New Black Panther voter intimidation case dismissal was mere prologue.

Republicans in Congress have shown minimal skill in stopping these radical racialist programs. Instead of defunding the components of the DOJ that perpetrate these lawless policies, they continue to vote for spending resolutions and budgets that fuel them.

And even if the GOP takes control of the Justice Department in 2017, it will take an attorney general willing to roll up his or her sleeves and clean out the mess inside the Civil Rights Division that is fueling these nutty and lawless policies. Only a few GOP figures understand the scope of the problem and have the courage to correct it. Among them are people like Representatives Louie Gohmert and Trey Gowdy and Senators Jeff Sessions and John Cornyn.

Here are three reasons why even these four would struggle in 2017 to reverse this lawless nuttiness:

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1. Imbedded Radicals at DOJ

Republicans make an enormous mistake to assume that Eric Holder is behind every bad idea and the bad policies end when the GOP takes control. Wrong. PJ Media has reported over the last three years about the radical transformation of the civil service taking place inside the Justice Department. These are career civil servants who cannot be removed from their positions easily, if at all. The radical anti-discipline policies are the concoction of the Educational Opportunities Section at the DOJ Civil Rights Division.

The Educational Opportunities Section has been filled up with radical leftist lawyers who will continue to push these policies from the ground up, even in a Republican administration. I saw it firsthand when I worked as a DOJ lawyer in the Bush administration. The best the GOP leadership could do in many instances was put out leftist fires. Debates over Supreme Court briefs and election policies always met with a well-entrenched chorus of leftist lawyers pushing policies at odds with the administration, and often the rule of law. Political overseers have ablative will. They can only resist so much.

Better yet, look at the biographies of the lawyers hired from 2009-2011 in the Education Opportunities Section. PJ Media went to court to obtain their resumes.
Their backgrounds are a stew of racial grievance, representing al-Qaeda terrorists, abortion radicalism, “Black Student Movements” and United Nations race activism directed at the United States. Now they are writing federal policies against school discipline.
They are also suing school districts. Consider Meridian, Mississippi. The DOJ pushed these nutty anti-discipline policies on Meridian in a federal lawsuit — and Meridian caved to DOJ demands. You can read the consent order here. (Consent = Meridian voluntarily agreed to the federal order curtailing school discipline.)

It’s no accident that the attorneys behind the Meridian school discipline case are among those we featured in the PJ Media expose. The crackpot background of Section Chief Anurima Bhargava is too long and nutty to be repeated here. Click the link for details. Even during the next GOP administration, Bhargava will have a job.

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2. Fear of Career

The second reason the GOP will have a hard time rolling back the radical Obama-era policies at DOJ is because many of those appointed to political positions will have a fear of the career DOJ employee. During the Bush years, when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales faced criticism from left-wing blogs and Democrats in Congress, his response, like Meridian’s, was to cave. He pushed power down, into the hands of these long-term career bureaucrats. Worst of all, he was proud of it, and spoke openly about how important they were. A number of other political appointees at the time advised him to do this.
Gonzales ignored the advice of those who told him to fight back against the left-wing attacks.

Depending on who the next GOP president is, expect some political appointees to be named who are afflicted with fear of the career DOJ employee. Instead of reversing these radical Obama-era polices, they will enshrine them and make them permanent through acquiescence. Instead of boldly reversing these lawless policies, deference to institutional continuity will be more important to the ill-chosen political appointee.

As an aside, the mantra during the Alberto Gonzales era was not to respond to attacks coordinated by Democrats in Congress and far-left blogs. “That would just prolong the story,” I heard many times. They were stuck in a 1990s model of the news cycle. Let’s hope the next GOP administration learns something from the combat effectiveness of the Holder regime.

3. Consent Decrees

The final reason that the next GOP administration will have a hard time undoing the nutty radical policies of the Obama-era DOJ is the existence of consent decrees. These consent decrees don’t vanish just because President Obama will in 2017. They remain in force, and the next administration will still have to enforce them.

By now, those first learning about the radical racialist school discipline policies at DOJ should be more concerned about how they will be undone, rather than that they exist.

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2...inglepage=true

This is Part 5 of the Every Single One expose of the Department of Justice.

Every Single One: The Politicized Hiring of Eric Holder’s Education Section

All 11 new hires to the Justice Department's Education Section have far-left resumes — which were only released following a PJMedia lawsuit. (This is the fifth in a series of articles about the Justice Department's hiring practices since President Obama took office. Read parts one, two, three, and four.)by

August 17, 2011 - 12:00 am

Over the last two weeks, PJMedia has published a series of articles about the hiring practices of the Civil Rights Division at the Obama Justice Department. Today’s installment relates to the Education Section: this Section has enormous power over issues such as race-based preferences in college scholarships, decades-old desegregation orders, and the federal response to racially motivated violence that plagues American schools.

Recently, the Obama administration concluded that school discipline is often racially discriminatory merely because black students are disciplined at rates higher than their overall percentage in the population. The division has launched a campaign that undermines basic American traditions of right and wrong by attacking school discipline. When you read the radical backgrounds of lawyers in the Education Section below, you’ll see why.

The PJMedia series has demonstrated that, rather incredibly, every single one of the career attorneys hired since Obama took office has a fringe leftist ideological bent and nearly all have overtly partisan pasts. Every single one. The left still doesn’t get it: they brazenly think this is perfectly acceptable. They don’t understand that attorneys who don’t have a militant agenda are also capable of enforcing federal civil rights laws, even if they represented defendants. That’s what good attorneys do, ethically. Acting Assistant Attorney General Loretta King rewrote hiring guidelines in 2009, resulting in hiring committee members being forced to toss any resume that did not describe a radical background.

King didn’t believe that lawyers who represented defendants in civil rights cases also have expertise in the law. What they lacked, of course, was the correct ideological and partisan fervor. And so resume after resume hit the trash can, unless the applicant was a committed leftist.

With solid reporting that is gleaned in large measure from the resumes the Department of Justice released only after being nailed with a federal lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act, each of PJMedia’s articles has demonstrated with greater and greater clarity the hypocrisy of attacks on the Bush Civil Rights Division. The legacy media has, so far at least, ignored the stories. Just as was the case with the outrageous dismissal of the New Black Panther Party lawsuit. Indeed, predictable corners of the legacy media have served as government mouthpieces on this issue. The public won’t be so easily hoodwinked.

PJMedia launched its series last week with a piece by Hans von Spakovsky on the Voting Section, which I elaborated on the next day. These radicals will be enforcing election law in 2012. PJMedia Washington Bureau Chief Richard Pollock then followed with a remarkable piece on attorneys hired into the Civil Rights Division’s immigration shop, a section formally known as the Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices. One attorney there chained himself to a tree for days in a protest, and another was sanctioned $1.7 million by a judge in a prior stint at DOJ before being rehired. Von Spakovsky authored the latest segment, which focused on the Division’s Special Litigation Section.

Eleven new attorneys have been hired into the Education Section since President Obama entered the White House and Eric Holder took office.

Anurima Bhargava: Ms. Bhargava was hired as the new chief of the Section after working for the previous six years at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Although her days were likely busy there, she managed to find time to make a $250 contribution to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. She also produced the “Jazz for Obama” concert back in October 2008.
During her tenure at the NAACP LDF she litigated cases across the country seeking to defend and expand the use of racial preferences and racial quotas in public secondary schools and universities. One of the highlights of her work was her coordination of the filing of amicus briefs and other advocacy efforts in support of two Supreme Court casesin which liberal coalitions insisted that local schools be permitted to assign public students to different schools on the basis of race. Fortunately, the Supreme Court rejected this argument as unconstitutional.
In remarks to the United Nations Forum on Minority Issues (yes, such a waste of time and money really does exist) just before joining the Justice Department, Ms. Bhargava described how imperative it was for schools to promote “integration and social cohesion” by considering race, language, immigration status, and religion in placement decisions. Imagine what your communities would be like if courts actually permitted government bureaucrats to engage in such racial engineering.
One wonders if she has even read the Constitution. This woman is running the Education Section.
When it comes to the rights of non-traditional minorities, like whites, Ms. Bhargava’s ideology of inclusion begins to crumble. Indeed, after the Bush Civil Rights Division negotiated a consent decree with Southern Illinois Universityto end racially discriminatory paid fellowships for which white graduates were told they were not eligible based on their skin color, Ms. Bhargava publicly blasted the decision as “hinder[ing] the legitimate efforts of colleges and universities to create equal educational opportunity.”
And some deniers still think this Justice Department will enforce the law to protect all Americans from racial discrimination.
Shortly thereafter, she was ironically honored for her aggressive battles to prevent state referendums (i.e., real democracy at work) opposing racial preferences. Once again, rights for me, but not for thee.
Her prior work experience includes a fellowship with the ACLU and service as the field director for the election campaign of ultra-liberal Democratic Congressman Steve Rothman of New Jersey. In addition, she remains a member(along with the militant Lani Guinier) of the Advisory Board of the Center for Institutional and Social Change, whose must-see website is testament to the detached dribble of left-wing activism. The group states that “through a multi-level systems approach, [its] research develops the capacity to sustain and ‘scale up’ initiatives aimed at building the ‘architecture of inclusion.’” It adds that its “collaborative projects develop frameworks, strategies, and roles designed to maximize the impact and influence of initiatives that advance full participation, innovative public problem solving, and institutional reimagination [sic!] — a set of linked goals we refer to as ‘institutional citizenship.’”
Now Ms. Bhargava gets to impose that Orwellian “institutional citizenship” on the rest of us from her new perch in the Civil Rights Division.

Torey Cummings: Ms. Cummings joined the Education Section as a trial attorney from a large private practice law firm, where she performed significant pro bono work representing terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay and death row inmates. This is a trend among new Holder DOJ employees. Never mind the fact every detainee can obtain a highly qualified federal public defender, these attorneys rushed to represent America’s enemies for free. She previously worked as a staff attorney for Legal Services of Eastern Missouri and as a project assistant at the Wellesley College Centers for Women, where she was able to utilize her social work degree.

Tamica Daniel: Ms. Daniel comes to the Section only a year out of Georgetown’s law school, where she was the diversity committee chair of the law review, volunteered with the ACLU’s Innocence Project, and participated in the Institute for Public Representation Clinic. For those in the real world, diversity committees are groups set up to hector for race-based outcomes in hiring employees and student matters. It is an entity with close cousins in South Africa’s apartheid regime and other dark eras in history.
While working on her law degree, she also attended Georgetown’s Public Policy Institute and wrote her master’s thesis on how race and income desegregation are responsible for minorities’ low educational attainment in Seattle public schools. During one law school summer, she interned at the left-wing Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs under the direction of Joseph Rich, a partisan activist who formerly was the chief of the Civil Rights Division’s Voting Section. She spent another summer interning at the liberal Poverty and Race Research Action Council, where she devoted most of her time providing research support for a paper on the constitutionality of race-conscious housing policies. She found time as well to author a law review article arguing for greater use of disparate impact theories in fair housing litigation.
The Civil Rights Division’s FOIA shop curiously redacted all of Ms. Daniel’s “community service and involvement” on her resume. In light of her employment experience, one can only imagine what she was up to in her spare time.

Amanda Downs: Ms. Downs joined the Section from the Maryland Public Defender’s Office, where she worked since graduating law school. While a law student, she also interned at the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center.
Her other activities on her resume were redacted by DOJ.
We do know, however, that she was the Division attorney who commenced a ridiculous lawsuit last year against the Mohawk Central School District in New York on behalf of two transvestite students, one of whom liked to wear a pink wig and make-up and another who favored wigs and stiletto heels. When the male students were told to remove their distracting ensembles in light of the governing dress code, Ms. Downs and her colleagues stepped in, claiming that the school district had engaged in federal sex discrimination. Never mind that, as has been written before, the courts have flatly rejected the notion that laws banning discrimination based on gender also ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. For Ms. Downs and her new colleagues, legal precedent is a mere inconvenience. And therein lies the central danger in hiring militants instead of attorneys who will respect legal precedent.
The militants who have been hired seek to move the law. This DOJ won’t hire people who simply seek to enforce the law.

Thomas Falkinburg: After spending ten years investigating purported civil rights violations at Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights — a notorious hotbed of liberal activism — Mr. Falkinburg transferred to the Justice Department’s Education Section once President Obama took office. This wasn’t the first time he sought to leave the Department of Education. He had earlier applied for an FBI Intelligence Analyst position but was upset because the salary he allegedly was offered didn’t match his inflated Department of Education compensation. So what did the aggrieved left-wing bureaucrat do? He sued, of course.
He commenced a federal action in the Northern District of Georgia, claiming that the FBI had improperly revoked a supposed job offer after he complained about the salary terms. Proceeding without an attorney, he frivolously sought a writ of mandamus asking the court to order FBI Director Robert Mueller to appoint him as an Intelligence Analyst at GS-13, Step 5. Not amused by the legally silly request, the court granted the government’s motion to dismiss. Mr. Falkinburg wasted more of the court’s resources with a motion for reconsideration, but it was promptly denied as well.
An attorney who considers a government job an entitlement? Perfect for the Civil Rights Division. But Eric Holder should be on alert if he dares withhold any of Mr. Falkinburg’s civil service raises.

Melissa Michaud: Ms. Michaud was hired into the Education Section as part of Attorney General Eric Holder’s Honors Program, which brings young attorneys straight to the Department of Justice from law school or judicial clerkships. And it is easy to see why. Ms. Michaud worked during law school for Legal Aid of North Carolina, was a member of the Carolina Public Interest Law Organization, served as the Projects Coordinator for the University of North Carolina Pro Bono Board, and interned at the EEOC. She also spent three years with Teach for America.

Nicholas Murphy: Mr. Murphy is another hire from Eric Holder’s Honors Program at DOJ, fresh out of a federal judicial clerkship with a liberal Clinton appointee in Philadelphia. While a law student, Mr. Murphy interned at the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, where he focused on the organization’s efforts to restore the voting rights of convicted felons. He also interned for the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn and the Public Defender’s Service in Washington, served as a research assistant at the general counsel’s office at Teach for America, and volunteered with the Prisoner’s Legal Assistance Project. Meanwhile, his self-drafted personal statement at his law school’s alumni website highlighted his partisan political ambitions. Just what we need: another political activist bureaucrat biding his time in the federal civil service.

Kathleen Schleeter: Holder’s Honors Program has also brought Ms. Schleeter to the Education Section. During law school, she worked as a Program Assistant for the National Women’s Health Network, which identifies as its primary mission “ensuring that women have self-determination in all aspects of their reproductive and sexual health” (read: promoting abortions); indeed, the organization’s executive director and policy director are both former senior staffers at the National Abortion Rights Action League. Ms. Schleeter also served on the editorial board of the Virginia Journal of Social Policy and the Law and as president of the Public Interest Law Association.
Mehgan Sidhu: Ms. Sidhu worked for approximately four years at a plaintiff’s civil rights firm in Baltimore before joining the Education Section. During law school, she clerked for the ACLU of Maryland, interned at the Children’s Defense Fund (the aggressively liberal organization headed by Hillary Clinton pal Marian Wright Edelman), and participated in the AIDS and Child Welfare Clinic. Any school district targeted by Ms. Sidhu that thinks it is going to receive a fair and balanced investigation is kidding itself.

Joseph Wardenski: Like his new colleagues, Mr. Wardenski, a contributor to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, has a rich activist background that will serve him well in this administration’s Civil Rights Division. Although he worked very briefly as an associate at a large law firm in New York, where he seemed to spend an extraordinary amount of time on pro bono criminal defense and voting rights matters, Mr. Wardenski cut his legal teeth as an intern at the NAACP LDF. There he helped research and draft memoranda designed to give convicted felons the right to vote and to ensure that public schools could racially engineer the assignments of students from one location to another. He previously interned as well at the Urban Justice Center, a left-wing advocacy organization that seeks to monitor and report on what it characterizes as “economic human rights violations” in the United States.

On his resume, Mr. Wardenski proudly notes his service as president of the Princeton College Democrats, co-chair of “OUTLaw” (the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender association) at Northwestern University Law School, and education policy director for an uber-liberal Colorado politician (Jared Polis) who is now a Democratic congressman and member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. He also highlights the law review article he authored in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology in which he argued that the Supreme Court’s Lawrence v. Texas sodomy decision must be interpreted to include rights for teenage homosexuals. He does not, however, reference another public report he drafted on behalf of a group called “Gay Men’s Health Crisis” which criticized the FDA’s prohibition on blood donations from certain at-risk homosexual groups.

Mr. Wardenski now spends much of his time as one of the Justice Department’s representatives on the Steering Committee of the Obama administration’s “Federal Partners in Bullying Prevention” campaign. As both Peter Kirsanow of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity recently pointed out, the legal predicate for this federal response to bullying is extremely weak. But as we have seen time and again from Eric Holder’s Justice Department, the law is often little more than a distraction.

Ryan Wilson: Rounding out the Education Section’s new crop of attorneys is Mr. Wilson. Prior to joining the Civil Rights Division, he labored as a staff attorney for an organization called Advocates for Basic Legal Equality in Ohio, which “promote[s] systemic change on behalf of individuals and groups of low-income people in the areas of civil rights and poverty law” by “seek[ing] to change policy, laws, and regulations at local and state levels.” Before that, he was an attorney at Legal Aid of Western Ohio in its Homelessness Prevention Project.
During law school, he worked as a research fellow at the ultra-liberal Center for Civil Rights and as a student attorney at the University of North Carolina Juvenile Justice Clinic. Meanwhile, in his undergraduate days, he was president of the University of North Carolina’s chapter of the NAACP, a member of the Young Democrats, and a participant in the “Black Student Movement.”
Just as is true of the new career attorneys hired into every other Section of the Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration, every single one of these new civil servants — without exception — is an undeniable liberal. Not a one is even apolitical, let alone conservative.
None of this is to suggest that liberals should be precluded from working in the Division. Indeed, the Bush administration hired attorneys all across the political spectrum, including some of the most fervent left-wing ideologues who now occupy the leadership positions in many of the Sections across the Division. At a certain point, though, the patently ridiculous claims by Eric Holder and his subordinates that no ideological litmus test is being employed in hiring are no longer going to pass the laugh test, even if they say so under oath before Congress, and even with their most ardent supporters in the media. Capitol Hill is going to take notice. Perhaps even the Inspector General’s Office, too, although that office’s ability to produce a politically balanced report is yet to be seen. But the days of Eric Holder being able to lie to the public with impunity are coming to an end.
Here’s the good news. With the budget disaster facing the next (Republican) president, these recently hired radicals may not yet have vested. The administration can implement a reduction in force (RIF) and walk the least senior lawyers right out the door.

J. Christian Adams is an election lawyer who served in the Voting Rights Section at the U.S. Department of Justice. His New York Timesbestselling book is Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department (Regnery). His website iswww.electionlawcenter.com. Follow him on Twitter @electionlawctr.

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Every Single One: The Politicized Hiring of Eric Holder’s Immigration Office

All five new hires to the Justice Department's immigration office have far-left resumes — which were only released following a PJM lawsuit. (This is the third in a series of articles about the Justice Department's hiring practices since President Obama took office. Read parts one and two.)
by
RICHARD POLLOCK
August 12, 2011 - 12:00 am

Earlier this week, PJM commenced a series of articles highlighting the army of new attorneys hired for the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division by the Obama administration. PJM based its reporting on resumes that were finally turned over following a lengthy Freedom of Information Act battle with the Department.

The intent of the request was to examine the hiring practices of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. During the Bush administration, left-wing activists claimed that by hiring conservatives Bush was “politicizing” the Civil Rights Division.

Five years ago, the Boston Globe created a political storm when it filed a FOIA request for resumes from the Bush administration. The newspaper claimed the attorney general was “quietly remaking the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division” by filling it with moderate and conservative lawyers. For the Globe, this was a scandal of monumental proportions. After the Globe article was published, this claim was repeated by left-wing activists across the country.

This time, however, now that the Obama resumes are finally public, the mainstream media has gone silent.

They claim there is no story here, that the Civil Rights Division has simply hired civil rights liberals.

We are not surprised by their omissions in reporting the facts. In our series, we decided to simply present all the facts in detail, as an objective observer would have a difficult time accepting their conclusion.

We first focused on the Voting Section, with an exhaustive article by Hans von Spakovsky and a follow-up by DOJ whistleblower and PJM contributor J. Christian Adams. Both highlighted the hiring of activists who have embraced radical political agendas far outside of the legal mainstream.

Today we turn to the Civil Rights Division’s immigration office — a unit formally known as the “Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices,” although it is nearly always referred to by its acronym “OSC.” This section is responsible for enforcing the anti-discrimination provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act, and it spends the bulk of its time seeking to protect “green card” holders from employment discrimination.

As the OSC profiles attest, many of these new attorneys are overtly hostile to enforcement of our country’s immigration laws. Some have devoted their careers to militant left-wing movements, including anarchist and anti-corporate campaigns. One new hire was even part of an organization that endorsed indicting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with war crimes. But the common thread among the new hires is previous activity fighting for illegal aliens, even against the police and law enforcement. These lawyers now control the levers of state power to pursue their political agendas.

Also worrisome: OSC ran a substantial grant program, doling out approximately $750,000 every year to immigration advocacy organizations that educate the public about the statutory protections afforded to documented workers. Scores of immigration advocacy groups are handsomely subsidized by the taxpayer. They include such groups as the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services in Dearborn, Michigan, the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, the Legal Aid Society of New York, and the National Immigration Law Center. (One of the grant applicants during the Bush years was the now-discredited ACORN, although its applications were consistently denied.) In one of the few sensible cost cutting decisions that Congress has made lately, the grant program has been suspended.

Five attorneys have been hired into OSC since Attorney General Holder took office, each one more radical than the next.

Elizabeth Hack: Ms. Hack was hired as the Special Litigation Counsel for OSC, the Section’s number two ranking official. A long-time Democratic activist, she contributed $2,500 to Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential election cycle, the maximum amount permitted by law, as well as another $500 to his political action committee back in 2006.
Ms. Hack’s real problem occurred while she was a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division in the mid-1990s. During that period, she was co-lead counsel in the Division’s infamous disparate impact lawsuit against the city of Torrance, California, in which she claimed that the city had discriminated against minorities in the hiring of police officers and firefighters. The district judge (a Jimmy Carter appointee) ultimately threw out the case and sanctioned the Division more than $1.7 million for pursuing an action that was entirely devoid of merit.
The case was such a stain on the Justice Department that the House Judiciary Committee convened a special oversight hearing to probe the Civil Rights Division’s shameful conduct. The testimony of Torrance’s attorney from Latham & Watkins at the hearing is nothing short of stunning for what it reveals about the shoddy work by Ms. Hack and her colleagues on the trial team.
Now Ms. Hack has been welcomed back.

Ronald Lee: Mr. Lee joined the Civil Rights Division after having served as a senior staff attorney at the liberal Asian American Justice Center. This organization is connected at the hip with Democratic Party officials and is so out of touch with its constituency that it proudly touts on its website its support of “affirmative action across the board.” (Try convening a group of Asian high school students who have benefited from affirmative action. It will be a very lonely room.)
During his time with this group, Mr. Lee spoke publicly about his opposition to Arizona’s SB1070 law that makes it a state crime for illegal aliens to commit federal immigration violations while in the state. His remarks reflected a level of naiveté and ignorance of both the statutory text and governing legal precedent.
On his resume, Mr. Lee proudly references his service as president of his law school chapter of the American Constitution Society (the liberal counterweight to the Federalist Society). He also notes he served as an editor of the activist Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy.

Seema Nanda: Ms. Nanda comes to the Division from her previous position as a supervisory attorney in the National Labor Relations Board’s “Division of Advice.” The highlight of her tenure there — according to her own resume — was her guidance on a case called Mezonos Bakery in which she advocated for the back pay rights of illegal aliens. For those not steeped in labor law, this was a decision in which the NLRB essentially cast aside a 2002 Supreme Court decision holding that illegal aliens had no such rights.
Ms. Nanda has served as chair of the Board of Directors of both the Refugee Women’s Alliance and the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum. She also contributed $1,500 during the 2010 election cycle to Raj Goyle, a far left Democratic congressional candidate in Kansas (and former staffer at the Center for American Progress) who was ultimately trounced in the general election.

Phil Telfeyan: Mr. Telfeyan joined the Civil Rights Division straight out of a judicial clerkship and only a year after graduating law school. But his emotional liberal activism has overshadowed his legal traits. He penned an article in the Harvard Law Review titled “Never Again Should a People Starve In a World of Plenty.” The piece was panned as little more than soft ideological dribble, with one prominent blogger characterizing it as a “rather embarrassing, bleeding-heart Case Comment” and another calling it a “sanctimonious and silly moral screed.”
Mr. Telfeyan’s entire motivation for the article was his opposition to a statue on the Harvard campus which he equated with the cruelty of intergenerational inequality. As it turns out, he was fantastically wrong. Indeed, the statue actually paid homage to the victims of the Irish potato famine. Mr. Telfeyan was forced to apologize, but not before his arguments about society’s moral obligations were blasted by critics as “unserious, unexamined, unedited, and unschooled — accurate only in the gentle, non-judgmental playground of his mind.”
Nor were his activities at Harvard anything new. Indeed, the Harvard Crimson published a story on him that highlighted his activism. The Crimson described his personal frustration that he could not participate in the violent 1999 protests in Seattle in which anarchists sought to physically destroy the city based on their bizarre opposition to the World Trade Organization.
The paper went on to note that Mr. Telfeyan “claims to have staged his own protest senior year at Mira Loma. His high school tried to stop Pajama Day, a popular school spirit activity. Telfeyan reacted by going on a hunger strike and chaining himself up to an oak tree for three days. He reports that he was not completely tied up, and could have left at any time, but the move was symbolic.”
This is a Department of Justice employee.
Mr. Telfeyan’s other activities were redacted from the resume released by the Civil Rights Division in response to our FOIA request. One can only imagine what else he must be involved in.

Liza Zamd: Saving perhaps the best for last, we come to Ms. Zamd, who arrived in the Civil Rights Division after having served as a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow at a German immigration organization called PRO ASYL and at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. The latter organization describes on its website how “human rights are often violated or ignored through ruthless corporate business practices for the sake of economic gain” and laments that “those responsible are rarely called to account.” It trumpets the fact that war crimes charges were requested in Germany against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld by fringe groups on the Left.

Before joining these radical outposts, Ms. Zamd worked as a staff attorney at Casa de Maryland, the same institution at which current Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez once served as president. Casa de Maryland is a far left-wing advocacy organization that generally opposes the enforcement of federal immigration law. As Hans von Spakovsky recounted, the group “has encouraged illegal aliens not to speak with police officers or immigration agents; it has fought restrictions on illegal aliens’ receiving driver’s licenses; it has urged the Montgomery County (Md.) Police Department not to enforce federal fugitive warrants; it has advocated giving illegal aliens in-state tuition; and it has actively promulgated ‘day labor’ sites, where illegal aliens and disreputable employers openly skirt federal prohibitions on hiring undocumented individuals.”

Ms. Zamd’s stint at Casa de Maryland was preceded by her service as Policy Counsel for the militantly liberal National Partnership for Women and Families (NPWF). While working as Policy Counsel for this organization, Ms. Zamd played an active role in trying to scuttle Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court confirmation by preparing materials claiming he was hostile to women and sharing those materials with the Senate Judiciary Committee. She has boasted of authoring a key part of the NPWF’s strident report titled “Tipping the Balance: The Record of Samuel Alito and What’s at Stake for Women.”

And what of Ms. Zamd’s views on immigration enforcement? Well, she was quoted in the Washington Examinercriticizing the arrests of illegal aliens in Anne Arundel, Maryland, claiming that “they are just victims of the broken immigration system.” Huh? She also penned an article at the annual Hispanic law conference on how to advocate for the employment rights of illegal aliens.

Meanwhile, before law school, Ms. Zamd worked as a Section 8 housing specialist at the American Red Cross in New York City and then later as a loan disbursement officer at ACCION New York, a non-profit micro-lending organization that serves minority and women clients who traditionally have little access to credit.

Filling OSC with such activists is right in line with the general immigration policy that Attorney General Holder has pursued. The Department of Justice has refused to enforce the federal immigration laws with any vigor. And it has not hesitated to launch assaults on states that have dared to challenge our weak immigration enforcement.
The American public has a right to expect that our federal bureaucrats will be enforcing the law in a non-partisan and race-neutral manner. Yet if their hiring decisions are any record, they have shown that ideology and politics prevail at the U.S. Department of Justice.

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