Civil rights post nominee may need to brace himself

In the annals of capital partisanship, their names are boldfaced: the candidates for America’s highest civil rights post who never got confirmed.

During the last Democratic administration, conservatives succeeded in blocking Senate approval of Lani Guinier and Bill Lann Lee to head the civil rights division at the Justice Department.

Now they’re gearing up to put Thomas Perez, a Maryland lawyer and President Obama’s nominee for the job, through the grinder. Senate sources have predicted that the Harvard Law graduate will be confirmed, but history suggests it won’t be without a fight.

“This is arguably the most difficult position to fill in the federal government when it comes to Senate confirmation,” said Roger Clegg, a former official in the civil rights division. “Both sides feel so strongly about the issues that the division handles.”

The more than 300 lawyers in the division enforce rights laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, sex, disability, religion and national origin. Lawyers also oversee voting-rights cases, which are likely to increase after next year’s census and the resulting redistricting.

In interviews, current and former lawyers at the Justice Department and on Capitol Hill said that under Obama and Perez, the civil rights division is likely to step up prosecutions of police misconduct and racial profiling.

The administration also may promote legislation that would give the division added responsibilities to make voter registration more uniform and make it easier for people to vote.

Other areas that may get renewed attention include conditions in prisons, mental health facilities and nursing homes. The last area could mesh with Perez’s work as a University of Maryland law professor on the relationship between healthcare and civil rights.

Perez, 47, currently serves as Maryland’s labor secretary. And his selection to be the nation’s leading civil rights enforcer came as a surprise.

Some Latino civil rights advocates reacted angrily, viewing Perez as a replacement for a highly regarded Mexican American civil rights lawyer in Los Angeles who had been expected to get the nomination. Cruz Reynoso -- the first Latino on the California Supreme Court, who also helped lead a review of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for the Obama transition -- expressed concern that the president had withdrawn the expected appointment of Thomas Saenz, an advisor to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, to avoid a confirmation fight over immigration issues.

Immigration is a minor responsibility for the division’s lawyers, but the topic is likely to be a focus in the confirmation of Perez, a Dominican American. For seven years, he was a director of CASA of Maryland, an immigrant rights group, and served as its president in 2002. That year, CASA lobbied the Maryland General Assembly against a proposal by Democratic Gov. Parris N. Glendening to make it tougher for immigrants to get driver’s licenses.

Alan Clayton, a Perez supporter, said the nominee’s association with CASA would make it harder for him to win Senate confirmation, describing the Maryland nonprofit as “very, very hard-core” on immigrant rights issues.

Perez “is going to get hit by the individuals who don’t like pro-immigration policies,” said Clayton, director of equal employment opportunity for the Los Angeles County Chicano Employees Assn.

Todd Gaziano, a lawyer who directs the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said Perez also could suffer from lingering anger over Obama’s failure to appoint Saenz, though groups that protested the decision later endorsed Perez.

“The bad blood in the water still may affect this guy’s confirmation. It may affect the enthusiasm some people have” for Perez, said Gaziano, a member of the civil rights commission.

Affirmative action, a focus of the confirmation fights of the 1990s, could also play a role.

“I was just reading a law review that Perez has written that was very favorable toward the use of racial preferences,” said Clegg, a conservative who advocates colorblind public policies. Obama “has indicated that he’s not entirely comfortable with racial preferences,” Clegg said. Perez “may be more liberal than the president himself is.”

Obama has pledged to “reinvigorate federal civil rights enforcement” and prosecute more cases of housing and employment bias and voting discrimination against blacks. His budget contains an 18% increase for the civil rights division, which had been at the center of controversy during Bush’s administration.

An inspector general’s report released this year detailed efforts by Bush appointees to replace career lawyers in the civil rights division with those who had conservative Republican credentials. Obama has promised to “restore professionalism” to the division.

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pwest@baltsun.com