Biden’s decide for prime U.S. civil rights lawyer, Kristen Clarke, faces fraught process

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Joe Biden’s candidate to head the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights, Kristen Clarke stands ready to take on the role at a difficult time in American history.

FILE PHOTO: Kristen Clarke, Joe Biden’s candidate for Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Department, speaks as Biden announces his Justice Department nominations at his interim headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, USA on Jan. 7, 2021. REUTERS / Kevin Lamarque

Clarke will face a Senate hearing this week as hate crimes against Asian Americans are on the rise, Republican-led lawmakers are pushing bills that constituencies claim will disenfranchise black voters, and former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin becomes put on trial for murdering a black man, George Floyd.

Clarke will appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday with Todd Kim, Biden’s nominee to head the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

Kim, like Clarke previously, worked in the Department of Justice, which he is now nominated to lead. Most recently, he was an assistant attorney at the US Department of Energy.

Former colleagues say Clarke’s experience both as a Justice Department attorney and as the executive director of a major civil rights organization qualified them to rise to the challenge.

“If you were to invent a candidate from scratch … you’d come up with Kristen or someone very, very close,” said Justin Levitt, a former colleague who teaches law at Loyola Law School.

Clarke has spent a good portion of her career advocating voting rights.

Ernest Montgomery, a Calera, Alabama city councilor said he was impressed with Clarke when he met her in 2010.

Montgomery intervened in Shelby County against Holder, a 2010 proxy case that arose out of a dispute over whether states and counties should seek federal clearance or approval before re-electoral constituencies. He became involved in the lawsuit as a third party attorney after the city redrawn the boundaries of his district and watered down the black voice.

Clarke, then an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, represented him and spoke out in favor of calling for the state’s preliminary investigation into redistribution as a crucial protection of the constitution to eradicate discrimination against minority voters.

“She did an excellent job,” said Montgomery.

The lower courts sided with Clarke’s view on preclearance, but in 2013 the Supreme Court reversed and pitted a core portion of the 1965 Suffrage Act to ease civil rights attorneys’ discrimination against color voters.

Clarke has headed the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law since 2016. Arguably the most intense time in this job occurred around the 2020 presidential election, when former President Donald Trump refused to admit Biden and made unsubstantiated claims of election fraud.

“It was non-stop,” said Clarke’s colleague on the Legal Committee, Jon Greenbaum, of the group’s voting work in 2020. “It was a high stake.”

Clarke’s nomination is expected to dominate much of Wednesday’s confirmation hearing. Some Republicans are ready to rush after conservative media launched a series of attacks on them from her time as a student at Harvard University.

One focused on comments in her college paper intended as a parody of blacks with “greater mental, physical, and mental abilities” to counter the controversial 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” which argued between race and intelligence were.

Another group claimed without evidence that Clarke was anti-Semitic, based on a speaker she invited to an event on college campus decades ago, and that they “believe that single black mothers raise criminals.”

Clarke is a divorced, single black mother, and her comments were about the challenges black families face when trying to raise children without a father figure.

Attorney General Merrick Garland tried to beat back some of the criticism in his February confirmation hearing.

“I don’t think she’s anti-Semitic,” said Garland, who is Jewish. “I don’t think it’s discriminatory in any way.”

Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Scott Malone and Dan Grebler