(Jan. 25) 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….
[The full column is here.]
