President Obama has appointed Debo Adegbile to replace Tom Perez as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Perez was confirmed to be Secretary of Labor without a single Republican vote. Adegbile hails from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, an organization that has pushed a radical racial agenda including attacks on election integrity measures, opposition to criminal background checks for hiring, and racial hiring quotas for state and local governments.
Here is a brief Adegbile filed on behalf of the “Black Student Alliance” arguing that a white applicant was properly denied admission to the University of Texas Law School because she was white.
While overseeing the NAACP LDF, the organization offered legal representation to Mumia Abu-Jamal, the murderer of Philadelphia police officer Danny Faulkner. (See video of LDF lawyers addressing a pro-Mumia crowd and discussing LDF’s legal representation of Mumia.)
If you thought Tom Perez was a radical, Adegbile’s background promises to bring even more racially radicalized policies to the Justice Department.
Perez (L) and Adegbile (R)
Adegbile’s name was mentioned as a possible nominee to the federal bench. Because of his advocacy for racialist policies, such a nomination would face serious confirmation difficulties. But in Eric Holder’s Justice Department, nakedly racialist policies are standard fare, and Adegbile will fit right in.
This is an an-your-face nomination. This is the White House sending a message to Republicans and conservatives that the radical racial policies of the Justice Department will continue full speed ahead. (I documented many of those pre-2011 actions in Injustice). Any thought that Obama would moderate as a lame duck with collapsing poll numbers vanishes with the Adegbile nomination.
As expected, the reaction from the civil rights industry has been glowing. A press release:
Adegbile is one of the nation’s leading civil rights attorneys. In addition to a lengthy resume of public service, he has argued two of the most important civil rights cases of the 21st century when he twice defended the Voting Rights Act in the Supreme Court.
One of those two cases related to Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, the provision which gave the federal government the power to oversee elections in 15 states, a power it abused, and a power the Supreme Court terminated in June 2013. DOJ is currently trying to place Texas and North Carolina back under federal control.
Incidentally, Adegbile lost both of the Voting Rights Act cases he argued in the Supreme Court. Although he suffered only a partial defeat in NAMUDNO — where the Court empowered the petitioner the right to seek a bailout that Adegbile and the NAACP insisted was unavailable to entities like NAMUDNO — he ultimately experienced a devastating loss in Shelby County when the Court invalidated the coverage formula under Section 5 of the VRA as unconstitutional.
But in the Obama Justice Department, the law is not as important as the cause. And with Adegbile, the cause is racialist.
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