Bush, Lott & Ashcroft: Shared Values Threaten Civil Rights
Bush Administration's Civil Rights Agenda Mirrors Trent Lott's
PFAW Reports on Their Views and Bush Civil Rights Record
Compiled by GayToday
People for the American Way
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Washington, D.C.--While George W. Bush and other Republican Party leaders have publicly distanced themselves from Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott in the wake of his praise for Strom Thurmond's segregationist presidential campaign, there is no substantive difference between Lott and the Bush administration when it comes to current civil rights policies.
A report released Tuesday by People For the American Way documents that the Bush administration and its Senate allies have in fact been aggressively promoting a legal and judicial agenda that would turn back the clock on many of the legal and social justice gains of the past five decades.
"It's one thing to disavow legalized segregation, but it's another thing altogether to make a commitment to supporting policies that will protect civil rights and equal opportunity," said People For the American Way President Ralph G. Neas. |
 Attorney General John Ashcroft, Sen. Trent Lott and Mr. Bush are attempting to turn back the clock, according to a report by the People for the American Way Foundation
Graphic By: People for the American Way Foundation |
"Maybe one reason the White House has still not publicly asked Lott to step down is that officials do not want to acknowledge that the Bush administration's agenda and record on civil rights enforcement and protection mirrors Trent Lott's."
"Whether or not Lott steps down or is ousted from his leadership post," said Neas, "the question for the Bush administration and Republican congressional leaders is whether they will continue to support efforts that undermine civil rights protections or will make a sharp departure from the policies they have been advocating until now."
The People For the American Way report, George W. Bush, Trent Lott and John Ashcroft: Their Shared Judicial and Legal Philosophy Would Turn Back the Clock on Half a Century of Civil Rights Principles and Protections focuses on the record of the Bush administration and in particular the Justice Department under Attorney General John Ashcroft regarding civil rights enforcement. It examines the impact of the administration's commitment to appointing federal judges and Supreme Court justices who share the states' rights judicial philosophy being pushed by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
Report by People for the American Way:
 People for the American Way's President Ralph G. Neas |
One week after Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott once again said that Americans would be better off if Strom Thurmond's segregationist 1948 presidential campaign had been successful, President George W. Bush criticized Lott's words as "wrong" and "offensive." Bush said they did not reflect "the spirit of our country" or the commitment of his administration to protecting the rights and dignity of all Americans.
But there is a yawning gap between the president's public pronouncements on equal rights and the ongoing record of his administration and Republican Party leaders. The Bush administration and its Senate allies, regardless of their intent, have in fact been aggressively promoting an agenda that would turn back the clock on many of the legal and social justice gains of the past five decades:
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President Bush's first appointment, Attorney General John Ashcroft, has a civil rights record that is every bit as appalling - if not more so - as Trent Lott's.
The Bush administration has been a full partner in the effort to resurrect, legally and politically, the "states' rights" philosophy on which the segregationists grounded their opposition to federal civil rights measures. The administration has failed to enforce civil rights laws, reversed previous DOJ positions on some civil rights cases, and nominated judges with troubling civil rights records.
President Bush has promised to appoint Supreme Court justices whose judicial philosophy matches the most extreme of these states' rights advocates - a move that would dramatically weaken the federal government's ability to protect Americans' civil rights for decades to come. The current Supreme Court has already headed down that road with a series of 5-4 states' rights rulings that dissenting justices have denounced as illegitimate, but Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas - who Bush has called his models for judicial appointees - are pushing the Court to cut back even more aggressively on civil rights protections.
At the electoral level, Republican Party candidates and operatives around the country continue to engage in a wide range of activities designed to suppress African American voter participation, from the illegal purge and disenfranchisement of thousands of predominantly African American voters in Florida in 2000 to intimidation and harassment of voters at polling places in the 2002 elections. As leader of the Republican Party, President Bush has failed to specifically condemn these tactics. The GOP's "southern strategy" to build power by encouraging and exploiting a backlash against the successes of the civil rights movement is unquestionably a part of this nation's recent political history.
Whether or not Lott steps down or is ousted from his leadership post, the question for the Bush administration and Republican congressional leaders is whether they will continue to support efforts to undermine civil rights protections or will make a sharp departure from the policies they have been advocating until now.
The Bush Justice Department and
Related Administration and GOP Civil Rights Activities
Despite President Bush's denunciation of Lott's remarks, when it comes to actions, the Bush administration and Trent Lott are on the same page. The similarity in their approach to civil rights issues is clearly reflected in the Bush Justice Department, the agency entrusted with enforcing the nation's civil rights laws. One of President George W. Bush's first actions as President was to appoint as U.S. Attorney General a man with a 25-year public record of hostility to civil rights principles and protections. Among the low points of John Ashcroft's career before becoming Attorney General:
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As Missouri Attorney General and Governor, John Ashcroft earned scathing criticism from community leaders, statewide media, and religious leaders for his persistent and unyielding efforts to obstruct school desegregation in St. Louis more than two decades after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down school segregation. Even the federal court assigned to the case criticized Ashcroft's conduct, referring to his "feckless appeals" and threatening to hold the state in contempt for his failure to comply with a court order. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch commented that Ashcroft was acting "as if segregation is here to stay."
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 John Ashcroft's record has been one of hostility towards civil rights, PFAW says |
As Governor, he refused even to sign a national bipartisan study, written by a commission to which he was appointed, that concluded that America was moving backwards in many areas in its efforts to achieve full participation by minority citizens. The leader of black legislators in the Missouri House commented that it appeared that Ashcroft's "mind frame is that of a traditional white southerner during the '60s and '50s."
As a U.S. Senator, he distorted and misrepresented the record of a highly qualified African American Missouri Supreme Court judge, Ronnie White, and misled his colleagues in the Senate in order to sabotage White's nomination to a federal district court.
He employed another litmus test issue, affirmative action, to help block a full Senate vote on the nomination of Asian American Bill Lann Lee as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, a position under the direct supervision of the Attorney General.
As a U.S. Senator, Ashcroft opposed legislation designed to end workplace discrimination (the Employment Non-Discrimination Act) and to protect vulnerable groups of Americans against hate crimes (the Hate Crimes Prevention Act). His overall Senate voting record in 1997-98, for example, was to the right of Sen. Jesse Helms.
He publicly praised the far right magazine Southern Partisan, a neo-Confederate fringe publication that promotes the view, among others, that slavery was beneficial to the enslaved Africans.
After Ashcroft's confirmation, the Bush Justice Department and the administration in general have pursued policies that threaten to undermine civil rights gains. Most troubling has been the Department's reversal of position on important civil rights issues, its failure to pursue effective civil rights enforcement, and the continuing Republican Party use of strategies to suppress African-American voter turnout with no counter-action or even criticism by the Bush administration. For example:
The Justice Department has abdicated its responsibility to Florida voters and to all Americans by whitewashing the shameful purging and disenfranchisement of thousands of Florida voters-predominantly minorities - many of whom were illegally removed from the voting rolls before the 2000 election by state officials, who were warned in advance that their over-broad purge would wrongfully remove many voters. The Department closed an investigation on the subject with the astonishing claim that there was no evidence of widespread disenfranchisement in Florida in 2000. It took a voting rights lawsuit brought by private organizations, not any action taken by the Justice Department, to produce a settlement with the state with strong provisions to prevent future disenfranchisement. It is no exaggeration to say that George W. Bush might well not be in the White House today if not for the disenfranchisement of Florida voters in 2000.
Since the 2000 election, news reports have documented significant GOP efforts around the country to suppress minority voter turnout. For example, Republican poll watchers in Arkansas reportedly drove away voters in predominantly black precincts by taking photos and improperly demanding identification during pre-election day balloting in 2002. Recent reports of voter suppression tactics also came from Louisiana, New Jersey, South Carolina, and several other states. A veteran civil rights attorney has called such Republican-sponsored efforts "the new poll tax." Yet neither Attorney General Ashcroft nor President Bush, the leader of the Republican Party, has condemned or sought to end these tactics.
The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division has reversed course in a number of discrimination cases, and has called into question the use of "disparate impact" analysis, a key method used to prove civil rights violations based on the discriminatory effect of hiring and other practices. The Department has retreated from previously held positions in a number of cases, such as a 1999 settlement in a bias case brought by New York City school custodians and the appeal of a 1997 discrimination lawsuit against a Pennsylvania transit agency in which the appeal had already been authorized before Bush appointees cancelled it. African-American farmers have claimed that the Bush administration has improperly delayed or suspended payments under a class action settlement concerning widespread discrimination by the Agriculture Department.
Civil rights enforcement in key areas has dropped significantly under Ashcroft and Bush. Between 1980 and 2000, the Civil Rights Division filed an average of 14 cases a year alleging employment discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, or ethnicity. Between January 2001 and May 2002, the department filed only two such cases.
The Bush administration has failed to support legislation to deal with racial profiling (in spite of strong rhetoric from Bush and Ashcroft that it would be an administration priority), hate crimes (Bush also opposed hate crimes legislation as Governor of Texas), or job discrimination (the Employment Non Discrimination Act).
The Bush administration supported passage of H.R. 7, a bill that contained provisions to override state and local anti-discrimination ordinances in order to allow religious groups to discriminate with federal funds. In the same speech in which he criticized Lott, Bush announced new executive orders written explicitly to allow federal social service funds to be diverted to religious groups that discriminate on the basis of religion.
In fact, administration actions since 9/11, such as a reported dragnet of up to 5000 Middle Eastern men living legally in the U.S, have raised serious concerns about racial profiling by the Justice Department itself. A former FBI executive assistant director commented that this policy "is not effective" and "really guts the values of our society, which you cannot allow the terrorists to do."
The Supreme Court and the Federal Judiciary
Even as President Bush and Republican leaders repudiate Senator Lott's statements, the Bush administration and Senate Republicans are moving to return the nation to the "states' rights" era by remaking the federal judiciary and overturning decades of Supreme Court precedents. President Bush has pledged to nominate justices and judges in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
 Bush will hope to appoint more Supreme Court justices like Scalia |
These justices have helped lead a narrow 5-4 Court majority that has already used "states' rights" rulings to seriously weaken federal civil rights and other protections by, for example, ruling that Congress cannot authorize disabled Americans to sue state governments for damages for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act. But even the current conservative majority has not gone as far as Scalia and Thomas have pushed them to go.
If President Bush makes good on his promise to fill future vacancies with justices who share Scalia and Thomas's judicial philosophy, more than 100 key Supreme Court precedents could be overturned, not only in the crucial area of civil rights, but also concerning the environment, reproductive choice, workers' rights, religious liberty, access to justice, and other areas. |
We have not seen a vacancy at the Supreme Court in more than 8 years, the longest interval between vacancies since 1823. This makes one or more Court vacancies and nominations in the next several years all the more likely, with crucial swing vote Justice Sandra Day O'Connor widely expected to step down within the next two years. Filling such vacancies with justices like Scalia and Thomas would damage civil rights protections and enshrine in law the philosophy of people like Senator Lott who have consistently opposed key civil rights principles. For example:
In a 1994 case, Scalia and Thomas strongly advocated a position that would sharply diminish the protections provided by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, overturning 30 years of Supreme Court precedent and at least three congressional reauthorizations of the Act. Four other justices criticized the Scalia-Thomas opinion, calling their position "radical" and estimating that it would have required the overturning or reconsideration of at least 29 previous Supreme Court decisions holding that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 should be interpreted broadly to prohibit racial discrimination in all aspects of voting.
Scalia and Thomas would further limit voting rights protections by ruling that the Voting Rights Act's prohibitions on race discrimination do not apply to elections for state judges and that race can never be taken into account in redistricting even to remedy the effects of past discrimination.
A Scalia-Thomas majority would dramatically restrict the government's ability to challenge racial segregation in public schools.
Scalia and Thomas would make it impossible to challenge the exclusion of jurors by race in civil cases.
A Scalia-Thomas majority would completely abolish affirmative action and other related efforts to remedy the effects of discrimination.
Scalia and Thomas would severely limit the reach and effectiveness of federal civil rights laws and agencies by ruling that the EEOC cannot sue on behalf of a victimized employee who has signed an arbitration agreement with an employer and by holding that an association that regulates interscholastic sports among private and public schools is not "state action" subject to such laws.
A Scalia-Thomas majority would allow the government to indefinitely jail immigrants who have been ordered deported, even though no other country would admit them, and would prevent legal immigrants from even challenging other deportation policies.
President Bush has already had the opportunity to appoint more than 100 judges to lifetime positions on the federal bench. At both the Justice Department and the White House, key positions concerning judicial selection have been filled with members of the ultra-conservative Federalist Society and other right-wing advocates, leading one far-right figure to describe Bush's team as "more Reaganite than the Reagan Administration." Among Bush's nominees to crucial appeals court positions are a number with a clear record of hostility to important civil rights principles and enforcement:
Judge Dennis Shedd, who was confirmed to a seat on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, was not able to identify a single instance in which a plaintiff in a civil rights or discrimination matter had won a case and obtained relief in his courtroom in more than 10 years as a federal judge.
Judge Charles Pickering was rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee on the basis of opposition to civil rights principles and ethically questionable actions he took seeking a lighter sentence in a cross-burning case.
Michael McConnell, who has been confirmed to an appeals court seat, takes a similar position to Trent Lott regarding the Bob Jones University case and contends that religious organizations should not be denied tax exemptions if they discriminate on the basis of race.
Carolyn Kuhl reportedly played a key role in convincing then-Attorney General Smith to reverse prior policy and support the granting of tax-exempt status to Bob Jones University despite its racially discriminatory practices.
Judge Terrence Boyle, a former staffer to Sen. Jesse Helms, has been severely criticized for his civil rights record, including two decisions on redistricting that were reversed by the Supreme Court.
Jeffrey Sutton has aggressively sought to limit federal protections against discrimination based on disability, race, age, sex, and religion and has praised the states' rights philosophies of Scalia and Thomas in civil rights and other cases. His nomination has been opposed by more than 250 local, state, and national organizations.
Judge D. Brooks Smith won confirmation to an appeals court seat in spite of having continued his membership in a discriminatory club for more than a decade after his confirmation to a district court seat, in violation of both federal judicial guidelines and his pledge to the Senate Judiciary Committee
Judge Priscilla Owen was defeated by the Senate Judiciary Committee after a thorough review of her record as an ultraconservative judicial activist on cases involving civil rights, reproductive choice, and workers' rights.
President Bush has threatened to renominate Judges Pickering and Owen, along with such nominees as Boyle, Kuhl and Sutton, when the Senate reconvenes. A key question next year will be whether the President will make and promote such controversial and divisive nominations, which threaten to seriously impair civil rights.
Conclusion
During the last 50 years, we have experienced a "second American Revolution," in which the promises and principles of our founding documents were made real for millions of American citizens who had been denied the ability to participate as full members of our society.
But we are now in the midst of a counterrevolution, led by legal and political ideologues who believe that the constitutional framework that has been in place since the New Deal should be overturned and the federal government should be stripped of its legal authority to act in many areas of vital national interest.
John DiIulio, who formerly headed the Bush administration's faith-based initiatives office, recently told a reporter that this White House excelled at developing simple messages for public consumption while working at the policy level to move things as far to the right as possible.
Although DiIulio was bullied into a retraction by the White House, there is no doubt that the administration continues to wear the smiling face of "compassionate conservatism" before the television cameras while trying to radically restrict the role of government in enforcing civil rights protections and ensuring equal opportunity.
In 21st Century America, it is almost ludicrous that we are in a position where elected officials such as the President win praise for having the "courage" to say that legalized segregation was wrong.
It was correct for President Bush to criticize Lott's praise for Thurmond's segregationist presidential campaign. But those words will ring hollow if the administration and its congressional allies continue to promote policies that undermine the nation's ability to make good on the American promise of equality and opportunity for all.
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