Kristen Clarke: No ordinary racialist radical

May 29, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff

want to give Christian Adams Power Line’s last word on Kristen Clarke’s fitness to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Christian, after all, has had the misfortune of dealing with Clarke (I have not). And Christian’s assessment of Clarke encompasses the issue of voting — something I did not discuss in my many posts about her.

Here is some of what Christian has to say about Clarke:

Clarke is no ordinary racialist radical. . .She brings a reputation for being racially greedy. I have some personal experience with her on this point.

In 2007, I was working on what would become the Voting Rights Act case of United States v. Georgetown School Board. I was one of the lawyers who spent many days in South Carolina investigating violations of the Voting Rights Act. Georgetown had a voting-age black population of 34 percent but the at-large elections for school board resulted in no blacks ever being elected to the nine at-large seats. While there is no right to proportional representation, in theory, blacks could conceivably have won three of nine seats.

Regardless, they had none, and in a school district where the students were almost majority black, this created a system that stoked discontent and lack of responsiveness. . . .

The plan adopted in a DOJ settlement agreement created three majority-black districts out of seven (two seats remained elected at large) where it was likely a black preferred candidate would be elected. . . .

The DOJ team got wind that Clarke—representing the NAACP—was shadowing the DOJ lawyer interviews in the field with local African-American stakeholders, disrupting the progress the DOJ was making and urging locals to hold out for four or more black seats. Four seats out of seven (or nine) would have been well in excess of the general proportion of the black population. Clarke wanted more black seats than the law would allow and was willing to disrupt a settlement that created three black seats where none had existed before.

Christian expects more of the same from Clarke, now that she has the power of the U.S. government behind her:...........Garland has personally vouched for Clarke as “a person of integrity.” But Christian points out:

Garland hasn’t spent much time around her. Lawyers at the Voting Section who worked with her characterize her as a brutish and uncouth racial activist. She seethed racial animosity toward whites (who were not liberals) and Southerners.

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