How Trump Can Convert A Key Identity Politics Agency Into A Tool For Equality Under The Law

Under a newly elected Republican president, convention would have it that the storied Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice will be quieted and overseen by a caretaker appointee. What if the reverse happens?

Donald Trump defies convention. His comeback election as 47th president is historically unconventional. The Musk-RFK-Rogan-Gabbard coalition he assembled is politically unconventional. Nominating the brilliant and incisive Matt Gaetz as attorney general is institutionally unconventional. So, here’s hoping the Trump 47 Civil Rights Division will be unconventional as well because robust legal protection of Americans’ most basic civil rights has never been more needed.

Launched by Eisenhower in 1957 to counter “massive resistance” to Brown v. Board of Education, the CRD has long since lost sight of its mission to secure universal civil rights. It has mired itself in far-left, arcane civil rights causes like racial quotas, radical policing reform, and transgender ideology and targeted ideological opponents.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is an example of the targets CRD selects. To obey export control law requirements forbidding disclosure of sensitive information to foreign nationals, SpaceX limited its hiring to U.S. citizens and green card holders. It nevertheless hires many legal immigrants. That didn’t stop the division from suing SpaceX for discriminating against nominal “asylum seekers,” the millions of whom have no plausible prospect of winning that status. For SpaceX, it’s a Catch-22 seemingly designed to punish Elon’s high profile.

CRD also whipsaws municipal police and jails and school systems with pattern and practice investigations — stymying disciplinary and enforcement practices in some and condemning the chaos resulting from disciplinary neglect in others. The division signals its abortion fervor with harsh FACE Act prosecutions for obstructing abortion clinics but acts sparingly and lightly on threats and vandalism against pregnancy counseling centers.

The “LGBTQI+ working group” litigates to turn Title IX and other sex-discrimination prohibitions on their head, opposing state laws protecting girls’ competition in sports, privacy in bathrooms and locker rooms, and children from pharmaceutical and surgical sterilization. While playing small ball on such pet causes, the division ignores or lags the big picture on large-scale issues of election integrity and our most basic constitutional rights, like free expression and equal protection.

Under Donald Trump, CRD’s Voting Rights Section could rediscover that voting and clean elections are a civil right for everybody. Voters are fed up with the serial schemes by government officials to interfere in our elections. In 2016, it was Jim Comey and the Clinton-orchestrated fake Russian dossier. In 2020, elections rules gamesmanship by state officials and 51 former intelligence officials spiking the Hunter Biden laptop story. This year saw politically targeted criminal prosecutions and other litigation conspicuously timed to keep Trump out of the White House.

This must stop, and the CRD should stop it. Federal or state officials instigated or facilitated these schemes. Investigating them is squarely within the mission of the CRD, and nothing would have a more salutary impact on the country than to deter repetition by finally holding some of the schemers accountable.

Free speech too is a civil right. In a House Judiciary subcommittee last year, I asked Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Kristen Clarke whether the CRD would respond to the facts of Missouri v. Biden, depicting federal agency censorship of Americans’ social media activity that the trial judge wrote was “arguably … the most massive attack on free speech in United States history.” Her answer: “Congressman, I’m not familiar with this litigation.”

Hopefully, Donald Trump’s appointee won’t be so clueless. CRD should investigate and prosecute wayward government officials — state or federal — who seek under color of law to censor the public discourse of the American people. The division’s reinforcement of free speech principles here at home would resound around the globe.

Even for the founding mission of ending racial discrimination in America, the Civil Rights Division needs to break free of outdated ideology and get in the game. The division waged its own “massive resistance” to Chief Justice Roberts’ 2007 observation that “[t]he “way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” CRD fervently supported race quotas in college admissions until the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions decision revealed the irony that the Civil Rights Division has itself perpetuated race discrimination forbidden by the Constitution.

Even then, the Biden administration persisted in spreading race-conscious DEI and “equity” policies throughout the federal government, and the Civil Rights Division facilitated doing so. Donald Trump should reverse those policies on Day One. And his assistant attorney general for Civil Rights should turn CRD’s investigative and litigation resources to the task of finally wiping out race-conscious policies “root and branch” at recalcitrant institutions like Princeton, Duke and Yale … or wipe out endowments in the process.

The time has come for an unconventional Civil Rights Division. The country is ready.

Rep. Dan Bishop is an attorney and the U.S. representative for North Carolina’s 8th congressional district since 2019.