Doug Jones may have lost his Alabama Senate reelection bid, but he’s in the running to become President-elect Joe Biden’s attorney general. Yet with the summer’s racial unrest still on the minds of many black leaders, some have voiced their preference for candidates they say can better fight for police and criminal justice reform, as well as expanded voting rights.
NAACP President Derrick Johnson has been one of the black community’s more vocal advocates pushing Biden to name diverse nominees and appointees after they helped him win the White House.
During a TV appearance Wednesday, Johnson touted the credentials of Uber chief counsel Tony West, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, and President Trump-fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates. West, an Obama-era associate attorney general, is also Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’s brother-in-law.
“We need someone with courage,” Johnson told MSNBC. “Someone who can walk in the door, day one, and command the respect of the DOJ employees and move forward.”
He added, “It’s not enough just to restore the norm. It is much more important to be aggressive to ensure that equal protection under the law is asserted for everyone.”
Johnson didn’t mention Jones, who lost his Senate seat on Nov. 3 to ex-Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville. An NAACP spokesperson didn’t respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for clarification.
Rev. Al Sharpton listed the same possibilities as Johnson on the same network. When quizzed on Jones, Sharpton only said he “could meet” his standard for an acceptable choice, but he favored a black contender.
A sense of urgency to secure greater diversity in what are widely seen as the Biden Cabinet’s top four posts — secretary of state, treasury secretary, defense secretary, and attorney general — increased after Biden chose Antony Blinken as his chief diplomat and Janet Yellen to head the Treasury Department. Both Blinken and Yellen are white, though Yellen could be the first woman confirmed to her job.
Black activists are determined to continue pressuring Biden, despite his announcing retired four-star Gen. Lloyd Austin, who is black, as his pick to lead the Pentagon. He had already selected Linda Thomas-Greenfield as his United Nations ambassador, a role he’s set to re-elevate to the Cabinet, and Ohio Rep. Marcia Fudge for the Department of Housing and Urban Development as well.
In a tacit acknowledgment of their weakened bargaining power, the NAACP on Tuesday implored Biden to appoint a civil rights “czar.”
“The NAACP calls on the incoming Biden administration to create a new position — National Adviser to the President on Racial Justice, Equity and Advancement,” the organization said in a statement after meeting with Biden earlier Tuesday.
The NAACP compared the role to that of John Kerry, who will be Biden’s special envoy for climate change.
Jones is often feted for his record as an Alabama U.S. attorney. In that office, he led the state and federal response to Eric Rudolph’s 1998 Birmingham abortion clinic bombing. And that same year, he prosecuted Ku Klux Klan members Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry over the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.
Yet former prosecutors told NPR this week they believed the DOJ would benefit from an attorney general who understood the department. That person, they argued, could best assess its civil and criminal enforcement cases to see whether there were matters that should have been pursued but were not.
More pushback, however, may have emanated from Jones’s unpopularity in pockets of his home state.
Janet May is a past Democratic National Committee member, who campaigned for Jones ahead of his 2017 special election against embattled Republican judge Roy Moore. The pair was vying to replace then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the Senate. In a brief interview with the Washington Examiner, she reiterated concerns over Jones’s perceived interference in Alabama Democratic Party internal politics in 2018.
Jones and DNC chairman Tom Perez allegedly intervened in the ADP’s leadership elections after a Jones-backed candidate lost to an ally of local party power-broker Joe Reed. The DNC stepped in and enforced rules requiring representation of Hispanic, Asian, youth, gay, and disabled ADP members. The effort diluted the influence of their black counterparts.
May described the conflict as a “urinating contest” between Jones and Reed. Afterward, she “came to look at him more as a prosecutor than a civil rights activist.”
“The unity of the party was sacrificed for egos, power grabs, and political status and influence,” she said.
Biden told reporters he would reveal his attorney general “this week.” Aides have extended that deadline to before Christmas.
