Acrimony over blocked pick for rights job
WASHINGTON — Should a lawyer be disqualified from public service for representing a client like a cop killer? The question arises after the Senate rejected President Obama’s candidate to be the government’s chief civil rights attorney.
The White House, attorneys and civil rights groups argued that a bipartisan vote Wednesday blocking Debo Adegbile from advancing toward confirmation set a troubling precedent that could dissuade lawyers with aspirations to serve in government from taking on unpopular clients or working for unpopular causes.
“The fact that his nomination was defeated solely based on his legal representation of a defendant runs contrary to a fundamental principle of our system of justice,” Obama, a lawyer himself, argued after the final vote.
Adegbile spent much of his career at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where he argued before the Supreme Court that Mumia Abu-Jamal’s conviction for killing a Philadelphia police officer should be overturned because of discrimination in jury selection. AbuJamal is now serving a life sentence without parole.
The National Fraternal Order of Police urged senators to oppose Adegbile for his advocacy in the case. All 44 Republicans and eight Democrats voted against his nomination as head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, likely dooming the nomination in what Obama called a “travesty based on wildly unfair character attacks.” It was unknown what the next steps the White House will take with the nomination
Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, a lawyer, voted no because Adegbile “would face such visceral opposition from law enforcement on his first day on the job.” But Coons also said he embraces “the proposition that an attorney is not responsible for the actions of their client.”
Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, said senators had a right to probe Adegbile’s work because it was for an advocacy group.
“They tried to bring racial politics into this murder of a police officer, and not only that, they used it to try to try to make the false claim that we have an entirely racist judicial system and they used it to raise money,” he said. “I don’t know of any private attorneys who use their representation of clients to try and raise money for their organization. It is very much on point to be able to criticize him for the kind of representation they provided.”
The Adegbile vote was the latest example of changing standards for legal nominees that reflects increasing politicization of the nomination process. Adegbile’s backers point out that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts aided in the representation of Florida Death Row inmate John Ferguson, convicted of killing eight people.