civil rights division

Massive Justice Department Attack on Banks?

by Hans Bader on September 2, 2011 · 15 comments

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Legal

A monumentally-destructive Justice Department attack on banks may soon occur. Earlier, I wrote about how the Obama Justice Department is now forcing banks to make risky loans (in the name of “fair lending”), thus planting the seeds of a future financial crisis. In response, I received an e-mail from a former Justice Department lawyer who told me that the Justice Department’s HCE (Housing and Civil Enforcement Section, Civil Rights Division) is planning to block foreclosures across America (“across the whole [banking] sector”), even for irresponsible deadbeats who deserve to be foreclosed upon, citing racial disparities in foreclosure rates (which generally exist between black and white borrowers due to causes unrelated to intentional discrimination — as the Supreme Court has observed, racial disparities often occur for reasons completely unrelated to racist decision-making, as it has noted in cases like Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., Watson v. Fort Worth Bank & Trust,  and United States v. Armstrong).

He wrote that “there is a unit in the HCE section headed by a nut running this. They are next going to BLOCK foreclosures based on this theory. It is part of an administration wide-strategy to stop foreclosures.  I’ve heard from people who have participated in the internal meetings.” He also asked that I not print his name yet, but allowed me to pass on the content of his e-mail.

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Many New Job-Killing Regulations from the Obama Administration

by Hans Bader on August 30, 2011 · 1 comment

in Economy, International, Legal, Regulation

Andrew Stiles describes “Ten Job-Destroying Regulations” from the Obama administration that will wipe out hundreds of thousands of jobs. Another job-killing regulation is the Obama administration’s recent demand that trucking companies employ alcoholics as truckers rather than assigning them to less safety-sensitive positions — a demand that will lead to costly lawsuits against trucking companies by accident victims, and thus discourage anyone from setting up new trucking companies.

Still another is the Obama EEOC’s current practice of suing some employers who consider applicants’ arrest records and criminal convictions in hiring — a practice it is now considering broadening, through agency guidance further restricting consideration of applicants’ criminal histories in hiring decisions. If you were thinking of starting a new business, wouldn’t you be less likely to do so if you thought you would have no freedom as to whom you could hire, and no freedom to consider someone’s dangerousness or the content of their character before hiring them? If you don’t hire a criminal, the EEOC may sue you for “disparate impact”; but if you do hire the criminal, you may later be sued under a state law for “negligent hiring” if the criminal harms someone on the job or while doing errands for your company.

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Obama Justice Department Uses Americans with Disabilities Act to Harm the Disabled, Risk Lives, and Undermine Safety

by Hans Bader on August 9, 2010 · 1 comment

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, Health and Illness, International, Labor, Legal, Mobility, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Privacy, Regulation, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

“Amazon.com . . . tried to sell a talking Kindle reader, but” the Justice Department “said it couldn’t because the button to make the Kindle talk didn’t have braille.  Never mind that books neither talk nor have Braille buttons telling them to talk.”   Obama’s radical appointees at the Justice Department, like Tom Perez, think that it’s better to have NO accommodation for the disabled, then an imperfect accommodation.  The Obama Justice Department also used the threat of suing under the Americans with Disabilities Act to prevent colleges from using Kindle to lighten “the textbook load on their student body by moving to e-book formats.”  Blocking Kindle harms people with chronic back problems.

The Obama Justice Department is also threatening South Carolina with a lawsuit over an anti-AIDS program that saves lives in the state’s prisons.  South Carolina tests incoming inmates for AIDS, and “half of those tested never knew they were infected.  The testing policy saves lives because treatment starts immediately, at state expense.”  The Administration ridiculously claims this is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy.  But the Supreme Court has made clear that prisons have broad powers to restricts’ inmates rights to  protect health or safety, or to promote any other legitimate correctional or penological purposes.  (Indeed, the Supreme Court’s decision in Beard v. Banks says that prisons can even restrict what inmates read.  South Carolina is not trying to do anything that extreme.)

The Obama administration also claims that the policy violates the disabled-rights laws, even though it saves lives, because it provides “separate living facilities” for prisoners with AIDS.  South Carolina’s program “has worked so well since 1998 that there has only been a single transmission of HIV/AIDS to a single prisoner.”  In other prison systems, many lives have been lost due to transmission of HIV to previously uninfected inmates.  The Obama Justice Department’s demand could thus result in many deaths.

The Obama Administration’s claim is flatly inconsistent with a federal appeals court ruling that held that even a tiny risk of HIV transmission can justify sweeping anti-AIDS measures like not employing a surgeon with AIDS, given the lethal nature of AIDS.  (See Doe v. University of Maryland Medical System Corp., 50 F.3d 1261 (4th Cir. 1995).)  That ruling is binding precedent in South Carolina, and it rejected challenges under both the Americans with Disabilities Act and its sister statute, the Rehabilitation Act.

Moreover, South Carolina is not trying to go nearly as far as the federal appeals court held was permissible, in its sensible measure to save lives–it is not firing anyone, just housing them separately.  Prison officials are given more leeway to take HIV-positive status into account than employers are, given the extra deference that courts give to prison administrators. Even the most liberal federal appeals court upheld a policy of denying inmates who tested positive for HIV access to food service jobs.  (See Gates v. Rowland, 39 F.3d 1439 (9th Cir. 1994).)

The Obama administration also wants to use the Americans with Disabilities Act to regulate the Internet.  It also has signed an international treaty on disabilities-rights that could undermine American sovereignty.

Deferring to the Justice Department, the most-liberal federal appeals court recently ruled against Chipotle in a lawsuit that will lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages and attorney fees–and a catch-22 against the company, which must lower its employee counter tops to make them easier for disabled patrons to view (to satisfy the ADA), but must simultaneously keep them high to comply with worker-safety rules.  (Ironically, the court’s ruling in Antoninetti v. Chipotle conflicted with one of its own past rulings, violating the rule that a panel of an appeals court cannot contradict an earlier panel.  It also rewarded nuisance litigation.)

Justice Department Lawyer Resigns Due to Politicization of Justice Department; Obama Administration Defies Civil Rights Commission

by Hans Bader on May 20, 2010 · 1 comment

in Culture, Legal, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

A career Justice Department lawyer has resigned after the Obama administration defied a subpoena from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.  The Commission is investigating the Administration’s politically-motivated dismissal of a voter intimidation lawsuit against members of the racist, anti-semitic New Black Panther Party.  Career justice department lawyers brought and won the lawsuit, which was then dismissed by political appointees in the Justice Department, so that they could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Members of the New Black Panther Party, one of whom was an Obama campaign poll watcher and local Democratic official, used nightsticks and racial epithets to drive white voters away from the polls in a Philadelphia precinct. But the Obama administration killed a successful lawsuit against them, dismissing it after career Justice Department lawyers had already obtained a default judgment against the defendants  (As a result of the dismissal, the only consequence for the defendants was a temporary injunction telling just one of the three defendants not to repeat his crimes in Philadelphia for a short period of time.)  The New Black Panther Party, which attacks what it refers to as “bloodsucking Jews,” is recognized as a racist, anti-semitic hate group even by liberal civil-rights groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center.

After the case was dismissed, the Civil Rights Commission began investigating the Obama administration’s actions.  The administration ordered the career attorneys who had worked on the lawsuit to remain silent and not comply with the Commission’s investigation (contrary to federal law, which mandates that “all Federal agencies shall cooperate fully with the Commission“), and refused either to comply with the Commission’s subpoenas, or to bring a motion to quash the subpoena (which is the appropriate step to take if a subpoena is somehow invalid).  This left the subpoena and one of the career lawyers “in limbo” and in apparent violation of the law, forcing him to run up thousands of dollars in legal bills.  (The other lawyer was transferred to the civil-service equivalent of Siberia to take him “out of reach of the subpoena power of the Civil Rights Commission.”)

Justice Department attorney J. Christian Adams, who helped bring the lawsuit, “resigned in obvious disgust” at its dismissal and the administration’s stonewalling.  The other career lawyer most responsible for bringing the voter intimidation case, former Voting Rights Section Chief Christopher Coates, has a liberal pedigree: he was formerly with the “Voting Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.”  Yet both Coates and Adams have been depicted as “right-wing activists“ by “liberal media outlets“ and unnamed Obama administration officials–apparently because those officials “don’t believe the voting rights laws should ever be enforced against blacks and other minorities.”

(The idea that the civil rights laws do not protect whites or apply to minorities was rejected by a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in 1976, in an opinion authored by the black justice and civil-rights icon Thurgood Marshall.  See McDonald v. Santa Fe Trail Transportation Co. There are limited to exceptions to bans on race discrimination for affirmative action, but they do not apply to voting, as the Supreme Court made clear in its 7-to-2 ruling in Rice v. Cayetano (2000).  In his 2008 campaign, Obama promised “change,” and apparently that change includes a departure from basic legal norms that even liberal judges like Thurgood Marshall, and liberal lawyers like Christian Adams and Christopher Coates took for granted.  If you want to work in the Obama Justice Department, you had better disagree with the Supreme Court.)

“Career lawyers pursued the case for months, including obtaining an affidavit from a prominent 1960s civil rights activist who witnessed the confrontation and described it as ‘the most blatant form of voter intimidation’ that he had seen, even during the voting rights crisis in Mississippi a half-century ago.” But Obama’s political appointees at the Justice Department overruled them, dropping the case after victory was already assured because “the court had already entered a default judgment against the” Black Panthers. Thanks to that outrageous decision, the only result of the case was a meaningless injunction telling one of the three defendants not to commit such crimes again (and telling him not to commit such crimes only until 2012, and not barring him from committing such crimes in his home city, but rather barring such crimes only in Philadelphia).

As the Washington Times notes,

The Voting Rights Act is very clear. It prohibits any ‘attempt to intimidate, threaten or coerce’ any voter or those aiding voters. The explanation for moving to dismiss the case is shocking. According to the Department of Justice: ‘These same Defendants have made no appearance and have filed no pleadings with the Court. Nor have they otherwise raised any other defenses to this action. Therefore, the United States has the right … to dismiss voluntarily this action against the Defendants.’ In other words, because the defendants haven’t tried to defend themselves, the Justice Department won’t punish them. By that logic, if a murderer doesn’t respond to the charges, he should be let free. That’s crazy. The Obama Justice Department did take one action against one of the four defendants: It forbade him from again ‘displaying a weapon within 100 feet of any open polling location’ in Philadelphia. Given that it already was illegal to display a weapon at a polling place and that he was not even enjoined from carrying a weapon at polling places outside of Philadelphia, it is hard to see what this order accomplished. We asked the Justice Department if it was unable to provide any explanation for dropping the case. Justice press aide Alejandro Miyar merely said: ‘That is correct.’ Multiple times we asked both the department and the White House to comment on charges that the dismissals represented political bias. We received no substantive response. Hans Von Spakovsky, a legal scholar at the Heritage Foundation and a former commissioner at the Federal Election Commission, tells us, ‘In my experience, I have never heard of the department refusing to take a default judgment… . If a Republican administration had done this, it would be front-page news and every civil rights group in the country would be screaming about it.’ Consider that the behavior of the defendants was so bad that witness Bartle Bull, a former Robert F. Kennedy organizer who did extensive legal work on behalf of black voters in Mississippi, testified it was “the most blatant form of voter discrimination I have encountered in my life.’ Eric Eversole, a former litigation attorney with the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, told us: ‘It is truly unprecedented for the Voting Section to voluntarily dismiss a case of such blatant intimidation. The video speaks for itself.’ We couldn’t agree more. After the 2000 Presidential election, Democrats complained about voter intimidation in Florida by pointing to a police car that had been two miles away from a polling place. The police didn’t do anything to anyone, but their presence was deemed sufficient to vaguely intimidate people en route to the polls. In this case, the New Black Panther Party actually blocked access to a poll. Unlike the Florida incident, this case involving the New Black Panthers screams out for tough justice. Instead, the Obama administration looks the other way. This all but invites racial violence at future elections.

In 2008, Obama disingenuously complained about the supposed “politicization” of the Justice Department under Bush. But Obama has politicized the Justice Department far more than Bush was accused of doing. Obama’s Justice Department has given a green light to unconstitutional bills pushed by liberal congressmen that even liberal Justice Department attorneys have conceded are unconstitutional. It has been deafeningly silent about blatant voter fraud and voter intimidation committed by black officials, chronicled in a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. And it did little to prevent violations of the voting rights of overseas soldiers and sailors that may have tipped election results in the Minnesota Senate race (which provided the deciding vote in the Senate for passage of the costly new health care law) and the New York special Congressional election.

Left-Wing Attorney General Ashamed of End to Discrimination

by Hans Bader on March 17, 2009 · 1 comment

in Legal, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

A federal appeals court recently upheld an injunction barring a county official from continuing to prevent people from voting based on their race. The unanimous ruling in United States v. Brown (5th Cir. 2009) was a victory for the Justice Department, which brought the case back during the Bush Administration.

But Eric Holder, Obama’s new attorney general, is ashamed of the decision, and his Justice Department is keeping mum about it. The Justice Department refused even to issue a press release announcing the decision, even though it is customary to issue press releases after all Justice Department wins.

Why the deafening silence? Because the victims of the blatant and massive voting discrimination in Noxubee County, Mississippi, were whites prevented from casting ballots in Democratic primaries by the black political boss who ran the county. (A few blacks also had their voting rights violated).

Holder’s attitude is so small-minded and parochial that it is an embarrassment to the Justice Department.

It has been more than 30 years since a unanimous Supreme Court ruled in McDonald v. Santa Fe Trail Transportation Company (1976) that all races — including whites –are covered by the civil-rights laws. That ruling, which allowed white employees to challenge their race-based firing, was authored by the Supreme Court’s first black justice, Thurgood Marshall, who had earlier successfully argued the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down school segregation in 1954.

But apparently, the principles of the liberal icon Thurgood Marshall are just too “right-wing” for this left-wing administration. (And for many left-wing “career” Justice Department employees in the Voting Rights Section and Civil Rights Division, who refused to work on the suit against voting discrimination in Noxubee County because the victims were white. Only because of the persistence of Bush appointees like Hans Von Spakovsky did this case ever see the light of day).

Holder is simply blind to reality. He can’t accept the reality of even blatant discrimination against white people. Meanwhile, he also refuses to accept the possibility of innocence when white people are accused of hate crimes, citing examples of white people being acquitted in state court as a justification for passing a broad new federal hate-crimes law, which would allow people found not guilty in state court to be retried in federal court.

Ironically, Holder claims that Americans are a “nation of cowards” on matters of race.

Top Obama Adviser Blames America for 9/11, Says America Is Racist

by Hans Bader on November 1, 2008 · 20 comments

in Legal, Sanctimony

Top Obama adviser Charles Ogletree says that America is to blame for 9/11 and that Americans are stupid.  He also says that America is a racist country, and that Americans will only vote for Obama because he is half-white.

Ogletree, a Harvard law professor, will likely be the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Rights Division during the upcoming Obama Administration.  He has attracted controversy in the past for plagiarism and his association with Al Sharpton.  (The Washington Examiner declared him a “dim bulb”).  He is a leading proponent of race-based reparations.

Charles Ogletree Declared “Dim Bulb” for Calling America Racist

by Hans Bader on October 31, 2008 · 10 comments

in Legal, Personal Liberty, Sanctimony

The Washington Examiner today declared Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree, a top adviser to Obama and likely future Assistant Attorney General, to be the “dim bulb” of the day for his racially-charged remarks branding America as a racist country:

“During an Oct. 25 panel discussion on race at Harvard, this top Barack Obama adviser said the U.S. should still be considered a racist nation even if the Illinois Senator is elected to the White House because Obama ‘happens to be biracial.’   So even if a majority of Americans vote for him, it won’t count.  WHY IT’S DIM:  Ogletree’s comments conjured up the discredited ‘one drop rule’ laws adopted by many Southern states during the Jim Crow era that were used to segregate the races.  CURE: Take Martin Luther King Jr.’s advice and judge people by their character, not their color.”  (Washington Examiner, Oct. 31, 2008, at page 15).

Even if you vote for Obama, you’re still probably a racist, according to Professor Ogletree. White America won’t vote for blacks, Ogletree argues, and Obama’s election is possible only because he’s partly white.  Even Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, in his endorsement of Obama, was more optimistic about race relations than Ogletree.

The ABA Journal predicts that Ogletree, who has long advocated race-based reparations, will be the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration.

Ogletree is controversial for his history of plagiarism and association with Al Sharpton.