Prepared Floor Statement of Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa
Ranking Member, Senate Judiciary Committee
The nomination of Debo Adegbile to be Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Mr. President, I’d like to share my concerns regarding Mr. Adegbile’s nomination, and explain why I’ll be voting “No.”
I want to begin by saying that I believe this nominee possesses high moral character and personal integrity. I’ve met him. And I’m also aware that he has been working on the Chairman’s staff for the last few months.
Unfortunately, I’ve reached the conclusion that this nominee isn’t the right pick to lead the Civil Rights Division.
First of all, it’s no secret that I believe the last individual to lead this office – the current Secretary of Labor -- was very political and extremely committed to a host of political causes.
Of course, I don’t expect President Obama to nominate conservatives to be his political appointees. But as we all know, these are important jobs. The individuals who hold them wield a tremendous amount of power on behalf of the Department of Justice.
So, I expect the President’s nominees to be liberal. And in the vast majority of cases the President is entitled to have people of his choosing serve in these important positions.
But, the Senate must provide its advice and consent.
And in my view, the President’s nominee can’t be so committed to political causes, and so devoted to political ideology, that it clouds his or her judgment.
This is particularly important here, given that this office, under the leadership of the last Assistant Attorney General, was marked by controversy.
And those controversies, in my view, were directly linked to that individual’s deep commitment to a host of liberal causes. At the end of the day, I believe that clouded his judgment.
With that brief bit of background, I’d first note that there is bipartisan opposition to the nomination.
And as I’ll discuss in a few minutes, there is also widespread opposition from the law-enforcement community.
Seth Williams, a Democrat and the Philadelphia District Attorney, opposes this nomination. Many of the largest national law-enforcement organizations, including the Fraternal Order of Police and the National Association of Police Organizations, vigorously oppose the nomination as well.
This opposition is based on the nominee’s record.
And the nominee’s record, in my view, demonstrates the nominee has a long history of advocating legal positions far outside the mainstream.
I believe it’s a record that demonstrates he is simply too deeply committed to these liberal causes to be an effective and fair leader of the Civil Rights Division.
I’m not going to mention every aspect of the nominee’s record that I find troubling. But I will mention a few.
His record on First Amendment issues should give us all pause. For example, in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC, the nominee advocated for a position that would have infringed on the free-exercise rights of religious organizations.
More specifically, he argued that a church didn’t have the right to freely hire or fire individuals who were responsible for conveying the church’s message and carrying out its religious mission.
That is at the core of what religious freedom means in the Constitution.
In fact, the nominee’s view was a dramatic departure from established First Amendment jurisprudence. In fact, it was so outside the mainstream that the Supreme Court unanimously rejected it, 9-0.
Likewise, the nominee’s views on the Second Amendment were out of step with the law. In Heller, he argued “The Second Amendment does not protect an individual right to Keep and Bear Arms for purely private purposes.” He also argued that “the right protected by the Second Amendment is one that exists only in the context of a lawfully organized militia.”
The Supreme Court, of course, rejected that view as well.
I’ve also been disappointed by the answers the nominee provided to a number of my questions.
For example, I’ve asked whether he believes that voter-ID requirements, which have been upheld by the Supreme Court in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, are the modern-day equivalent of a poll tax.
I asked this question for several reasons. First of all, according to press reports, he said as much in 2005 during a discussion in Georgia regarding voter ID laws. According to press reports, he called voter ID cards “a modern poll tax.”
This matters of course, because poll taxes are unconstitutional. But, the Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter ID law as constitutional in Crawford in 2008.
So, if the nominee continues to believe voter-ID laws are the modern-day equivalent of a “poll tax,” and is firmly committed to that principle, I’m concerned he’d look for creative ways to undermine and challenge those laws, notwithstanding Crawford.
It goes without saying, of course, that a significant part of this job is the enforcement of voting-rights laws. And that enforcement power should be entrusted only to someone we are confident will apply the law in an even-handed way.
I’ve also repeatedly asked the nominee whether, if confirmed, he’d commit to implementing the recommendations made by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General regarding the hiring processes in the Civil Rights Division.
That report exposed a hiring process that was structured in a way that systematically screened out conservative applicants.
But the nominee won’t commit to implementing the recommendations that would address those issues so the Office has the benefit of an ideologically diverse group of lawyers.
That concerns me.
Again, this is a Division of the Department of Justice that needs a clean break from the political partisanship that plagued the Office under the last Assistant Attorney General.
Finally, I’d like to address the nominee’s involvement in – and representation of – Mumia Abu-Jamal.
To understand why the nominee’s involvement in this case is so concerning to many of us, a bit of history is in order.
Mr. Abu-Jamal is this country’s most notorious cop-killer.
The facts of the Abu-Jamal case are well known and cannot be seriously disputed. Back in December 1981, Abu-Jamal – then known as Wesley Cook – gunned down Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner.
Abu-Jamal first shot Officer Faulkner in the back, and then several more times in his chest at close range. As Officer Faulkner lay dying in the street, Abu-Jamal stood over him and shot him in the face.
At the hospital a short while later, Abu-Jamal boasted that he had shot a police officer and said he hoped the officer would die.
Ballistics evidence proved that Officer Faulkner had been shot with the .38-caliber revolver that was registered to Abu-Jamal and found at the scene along with spent shell casings.
No serious observer of this case can question the overwhelming evidence of Abu-Jamal’s guilt.
Based on that evidence, Abu-Jamal was tried. A jury including white and African-American jurors convicted him and sentenced him to death.
Nonetheless, over the course of the next 25 years, opponents of capital punishment and other critics of our justice system have elevated Mr. Abu-Jamal to celebrity status.
Those critics have charged that the conviction was tainted by racial discrimination. They’ve slandered police officers and prosecutors.
And they’ve leveled accusations of police abuse.
They’ve even organized rallies that portrayed Abu-Jamal as the victim.
Amazingly, Mr. Abu-Jamal’s campaign has been somewhat successful. He has actually convinced a lot of people that he is a “political prisoner.”
And his fame wasn’t confined to the borders of this country.
The French went so far as to name a street after him in a suburb of Paris.
In fact, it became such a high profile issue that in 2006, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan resolution, 368 to 31, condemning the murder of Officer Faulkner and urging this French town to change the name of its street.
And I must say, the disgust with Mr. Abu-Jamal’s celebrity status isn’t defined by partisanship. In fact, five of today’s Senate Democrats were in the House of Representatives in 2006.
Four of those five voted in favor of this Resolution.
In short, this case is about much more than hyper-technical legal challenges to the imposition of the death penalty.
It has become a cause.
So, it’s with that background that I’d like to discuss the nominee’s involvement in this matter.
In 2009, Mr. Adegbile was Litigation Director for the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. And it was in that role that he worked as an advocate on Abu-Jamal’s behalf.
The nominee and the Legal Defense Fund first got involved when they volunteered as an amicus, and then later as lead counsel in Abu-Jamal’s post-conviction proceedings.
In this first phase, LDF alleged that the Philadelphia prosecutors discriminated against African-American jurors in the jury selection process during Abu-Jamal’s trial.
After the Third Circuit rejected that argument, the nominee submitted an amicus brief to the United States Supreme Court urging the court to take the case, and hear the same arguments.
The court declined to hear the case.
After this effort failed, in 2011, the LDF signed on as Abu-Jamal’s lead counsel for his post-conviction challenges.
It was at this point that the nominee again challenged the conviction in the Third Circuit. But this time, under a different theory.
The nominee argued that the jury instructions were constitutionally infirm. The Third Circuit agreed, and the Supreme Court refused to hear further argument.
Keep in mind that Abu-Jamal has never run the risk of lacking adequate legal advice: highly motivated attorneys, law professors, and legions of activists have represented him over the years.
They’ve filed literally hundreds of motions and briefs on his behalf.
So this isn’t a case of the nominee and the LDF intervening to vindicate the rights of an indigent defendant who had been denied a due process.
Nor is this a case of the lawyer stepping in to defend an unpopular client who couldn’t otherwise find a lawyer.
Abu-Jamal has enjoyed the zealous representation of some of the country’s best lawyers for almost three decades.
In short, this is NOT John Adams defending the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre.
That’s not what was happening here.
The first attempt to challenge the conviction was unsuccessful, so the nominee and the LDF redoubled their efforts and mounted a second challenge under a different theory.
This was a cause in search of a legal justification.
And we know this, of course, because the statements and press releases that LDF made at the time confirm this understanding.
The nominee’s colleague and co-counsel, explained the Legal Defense Fund’s motivation for getting involved in the case at a rally for Abu-Jamal in 2011.
She said:
“There is no question in the mind of anyone at the Legal Defense Fund that the justice system has completely and utterly failed Mumia Abu-Jamal and in our view that has everything to do with race and that is why the Legal Defense Fund is in this case.”
In fact, when the LDF signed on as lead counsel in 2011, their press release declared “Abu-Jamal’s conviction and death sentence are relics of a time and place that was notorious for police abuse and racial discrimination.”
Again, this was a cause.
It was a cause premised on the notion that this country’s most notorious cop-killer, Mumia Abu-Jamal, was a victim.
And the police officers, prosecutors, and the entire judicial system – were to blame.
At bottom, that is why the law enforcement community is so staunchly opposed to this nomination.
That’s why the Fraternal Order of Police called this nomination, a “thumb in the eye of our nation’s law enforcement officers.”
That’s why the Philadelphia District Attorney, Seth Williams, wrote this in his letter of opposition:
“Despite the overwhelming evidence of guilt, [his lawyers] have consistently attempted to turn reality on its head, arguing that Abu-Jamal was framed and that it was he, rather than Officer Faulkner who was the victim of racism.”
District Attorney Williams went on to say that,
“Aside from being patently false, moreover, these claims are personally insulting to me. As an African American I know all too well the grievous consequences of racial discrimination and prejudice. I also know that Abu-Jamal was convicted and sentenced because of the evidence, not because of his race.”
And finally, that’s why Maureen Faulkner – whose husband was murdered by Abu-Jamal – wrote two letters to the Judiciary Committee.
That’s why she wrote this:
“Officers who knew Danny, and who, like him, put their lives on the line everyday, must now witness Adegbile, a man proud to have chosen to aid the murderer of their friend, singled out for honors and high office by the government of the United States. It is an abomination to now reward Mr. Adegbile, as if he had done something wonderful.”
Mr. President, for the reasons I’ve outlined here, I can’t support this nomination. I just don’t believe he is the right nominee to lead this office at this time.
I will oppose his nomination and I urge my colleagues to do the same.
I yield the floor.