WASHINGTON ― The Senate voted Thursday to verify Harmeet Dhillon to run the Civil Rights Division on the Division of Justice, placing one in every of President Donald Trump’s personal authorized advisers and somebody with a protracted report of attacking voting rights in command of defending these rights for thousands and thousands of People.
The Senate confirmed Dhillon by a vote of 52 to 45. Each Democrat voted no. Each Republican voted sure, apart from one: Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Her workplace didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark as to why.
Three senators missed the vote, although it wouldn’t have modified the result of Dhillon’s affirmation. They have been Sens. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ailing.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
A former California Republican Occasion official, Dhillon has been Trump’s authorized adviser for the final 4 years. Throughout his 2020 marketing campaign, she perpetuated his lie that the election was stolen from him and unfold false claims about persistent voter fraud in Pennsylvania, a state that Trump legitimately misplaced to Joe Biden.
Her regulation agency, Dhillon Regulation Group, has filed greater than a dozen lawsuits throughout eight states geared toward difficult voting rights, election processes or the power of Trump to look on 2024 ballots in states that disqualified him due to his function in inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, riot.
Along with her assault on voting rights, Dhillon has assailed LGBTQ+ rights and ladies’s reproductive rights, referring to medical doctors who carry out gender-affirming care as “butchers” and referring to abortions as “killing children in the womb.”
Simply forward of Dhillon’s vote, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ailing.), who’s the highest Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, stated DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is “often called the ‘crown jewel’” of the division, because it enforces landmark legal guidelines that prohibit discrimination.
“It is the duty of the head of this division to protect the civil rights of every American,” Durbin stated on the Senate ground. “I cannot and will not support a nominee whose record suggests she is more likely to attack civil rights than defend them.”
Dhillon disregarded questions on how she’d determine when to sue over state legal guidelines that discriminate towards voters throughout her Senate affirmation listening to in February. It is a core accountability of her new job.
When Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) famous that 13 states instantly handed legal guidelines that made it tougher to vote after the Supreme Courtroom struck down a part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 ― particularly, states together with Texas, Georgia and Arizona closed 1,688 polling stations inside six years of the court docket choice ― Dhillon stated there was no proof these actions discriminated towards folks.
“I disagree with the premise of your question that all of these measures that Georgia and other states took to improve confidence of all citizens in voting in fact had any form of discriminatory impact,” Dhillon informed Hirono.
“That is the crux, isn’t it, as to whether or not these laws have an anti-discriminatory effect?” the Hawaii senator interjected. “And you obviously do not think so.”
Civil rights teams condemned Dhillon’s affirmation after the vote.
“Harmeet Dhillon is not a civil rights lawyer and has no business leading the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division,” stated Lena Zwarensteyn of The Management Convention on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of greater than 240 nationwide civil and human rights teams.
“Senators who voted to confirm Ms. Dhillon have failed their constituents and our country,” Zwarensteyn stated in a press release. “This confirmation is insulting, and it should alarm everyone that an election denier is now in charge of enforcing the Voting Rights Act, that an anti-LGBTQ+ activist is now tasked with protecting the civil rights of LGBTQ+ people in America, and that yet another one of Trump’s personal lawyers is now in a leadership role at the nation’s signature agency for the enforcement of our federal civil rights laws.”
The Management Convention helped cross the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which created the Civil Rights Division on the Justice Division and licensed the place that Dhillon will now maintain.
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“We are resolved to fight on – every day – for fundamental rights and for the future of our multiracial democracy at a time when the DOJ is brazenly and shamefully attacking them,” Zwarensteyn stated. “The civil rights community will be watching.”
