President Biden’s nomination of respected federal judge Merrick Garland as attorney general should not excuse his nomination of leftist Kristen Clarke to head the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.
Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, has drawn fire from Jewish groups and from Fox News personality Tucker Carlson for things she did and said a quarter of a century ago while a student at Harvard University, including a letter in which she argued that extra melanin in the brains of black people give them “superior physical and mental abilities” to those of whites, whose “pineal glands are often calcification or non-functioning.”
It’s usually reasonable, however, to give people a pass for mere college-age stupidity. The problem with Clarke is that she continued her left-wing version of racialism once she moved into positions of great influence. When working at the DOJ and with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, she repeatedly tried to influence the department in ways detrimental to colorblind justice under the law.
At the DOJ, she tried to keep Alabama from implementing a DNA testing program for felons, even though the state began the program through a direct grant from the Justice Department itself, pursuant to federal legislation. She worked to keep department prosecutors from serving as election observers. And while with the Legal Defense Fund, she blasted the department for pressing a case against a man named Ike Brown, who ran a black political machine in Mississippi’s Noxubee County that was notorious for its hardball tactics and racial animus toward white people. Even after Brown was caught and found liable in U.S. District Court for multitudinous, fraudulent voting-related practices that were flagrant violations of the Voting Rights Act, Clarke argued that the case should never have been filed.
But Clarke’s most egregious lack of judgment came when she reportedly pressured the newly installed Obama Justice Department political team to drop the already-won case against two members of the New Black Panther Party who menaced voters at a Philadelphia polling place with police-style baton weapons while hurling racial epithets. It was an infamous, nationally controversial decision. In interviews and letters with the Washington Times, Clarke and her team at the Legal Defense Fund variously made a distinction between “talking about” the case with DOJ lawyers and weighing in on the case but then denied that any such “communications” took place.
Yet Justice Department lawyer Christopher Coates told others that the Legal Defense Fund had indeed agitated for dismissing the case, and his colleague Christian Adams wrote that Clarke received “same-day service” on a FOIA request when she “sought the dismissal” of the case.
Not a single Republican, and no Democrat with pretenses of moderation, should vote to confirm Clarke for the Civil Rights Division unless she clears this up. Did she try to get the Panther case dismissed? Does she think it should have been dismissed? Does she agree with those in the Obama Justice Department who averred that civil rights cases should never be brought against black perpetrators? Does she believe laws requiring the removal from voter rolls of the names of dead people should not be enforced because they do nothing to help Democratic turnout? Will she aggressively pursue civil rights and voting rights cases, no matter which race is supposedly implicated, advantaged, or hurt? Does she still think it was wrong to bring a case against the notorious Ike Brown?
And, for that matter, what was she thinking when she wrote that balderdash back in college about the genetic superiority of black people due to melanin? Does she still believe it’s helpful, in either direction, to assert some sort of biological basis for differing treatment of black and white people?
Clarke’s record screams of a desire for racial vengeance rather than of sober support for equal justice under the law. Unless she can convincingly prove otherwise, she has no business heading up the Civil Rights Division.
