Kristen Clarke, a longtime voting rights advocate, is well on her way to becoming the first woman and the first woman of color to lead the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division since it was created in 1957. "The U.S. Senate has voted 50-48 to advance the nomination of @KristenClarkeJD to serve as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights," the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund tweeted on Tuesday. "The next step is a confirmation vote by the Senate.”
And with Democratic control in the upper chamber of Congress (and the lower too, for that matter), there’s little Republicans can do to block Clarke’s confirmation. Still, that hasn’t stopped them from trying. Sen. Ted Cruz tweeted on Tuesday: “Democrats discharging Kristen Clarke’s troubled nomination from the Judiciary Committee is a grave error. As I’ve said repeatedly, she is a radical extremist with a laundry list of concerning issues plaguing her nomination that go far beyond her support for defunding the police.” That laundry list has all of two items on it, one based on Republicans’ inability to detect satire and another stemming from a misattributed quote.
Cruz and other Republicans have been circulating a quote from writer Amiri Baraka and attributing it to Clarke simply because she forwarded an email from Baraka in 1999. In the email, Baraka called police the Ku Klux Klan, which by the way is hardly a radical comparison to anyone with a more in-depth understanding of Black history. But accuracy of the comparison notwithstanding, Clarke didn’t make it.
Democrats in the Senate Judiciary Committee called Cruz out for his deception in a Twitter thread on May 13. "Senator, this letter clearly shows the quote you've attributed to Kristen Clarke is not hers,” they tweeted in the thread. “In this email, she's transmitting a submitted poem as part of her part-time student job’s administrative responsibilities. This Committee honors debate but will NOT stand for deception.”
Another unfortunate senator from Texas tried to dabble in deception last month during Clarke’s confirmation hearing. Sen. John Cornyn asked if while a student at Harvard University she “argued that African Americans were genetically superior to ah [sic] Caucasians."
Clarke responded: “No senator, I believe you’re referring to an op-ed that I wrote at the age of 19 about the Bell Curve Theory, a racist book that equated DNA with genetics and race. As a Black student at Harvard at that time we took grave offense to this book. It was co-authored by a Harvard professor. (...) And this op-ed opened with a satirical reference to the statement that you just noted.”
”What I was seeking to do is hold up a mirror,” Clarke added, “and put one racist theory alongside another to challenge people as to why we were unwilling to wholly reject the racist theory that defined the Bell Curve book.”
So basically Clarke has had the moral grounding that makes her especially fit for the Department of Justice gig at least since she was a student at Harvard. I’m sure that wasn’t the point Cornyn was trying to make, but that’s exactly the one his gotcha question allowed Clarke to underscore.
In Sen. Mazie Hirono’s words from a tweet last Thursday, "Republicans are smearing Kristen Clarke because they’re afraid she’ll actually enforce the civil rights laws."
Deval Patrick, the first Black governor of Massachusetts and assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division under former President Bill Clinton, said in an op-ed for The Hill that Clarke’s nomination "should be a no-brainer — presuming you respect the mission of the division."
“Clarke has made a career of just such acts of patriotism. She has handled a wide variety of civil rights cases and achieved meaningful results, mastering the substance of civil rights law,” Patrick wrote. “Significantly, she has also approached the work as a problem solver, firm in her support of her clients and cause, but able to listen to and actually hear her adversaries.” She has earned the support of “civil rights advocates and police organizations, underrepresented minorities and business leaders,” Patrick pointed out. “Let that sink in,” he wrote. “At a moment when hyper-partisan division poisons nearly everything in politics, Clarke has earned the respect and support of friend and foe alike.”
Learn more about Clarke’s background from her own opening remarks at her confirmation hearing:
RELATED: Senate Republicans put their full hostility to Black women on display at Kristen Clarke confirmation
RELATED: Texas senator's big 'gotcha' moment in DOJ confirmation hearing made him a laughingstock
And with Democratic control in the upper chamber of Congress (and the lower too, for that matter), there’s little Republicans can do to block Clarke’s confirmation. Still, that hasn’t stopped them from trying. Sen. Ted Cruz tweeted on Tuesday: “Democrats discharging Kristen Clarke’s troubled nomination from the Judiciary Committee is a grave error. As I’ve said repeatedly, she is a radical extremist with a laundry list of concerning issues plaguing her nomination that go far beyond her support for defunding the police.” That laundry list has all of two items on it, one based on Republicans’ inability to detect satire and another stemming from a misattributed quote.
Cruz and other Republicans have been circulating a quote from writer Amiri Baraka and attributing it to Clarke simply because she forwarded an email from Baraka in 1999. In the email, Baraka called police the Ku Klux Klan, which by the way is hardly a radical comparison to anyone with a more in-depth understanding of Black history. But accuracy of the comparison notwithstanding, Clarke didn’t make it.
Democrats in the Senate Judiciary Committee called Cruz out for his deception in a Twitter thread on May 13. "Senator, this letter clearly shows the quote you've attributed to Kristen Clarke is not hers,” they tweeted in the thread. “In this email, she's transmitting a submitted poem as part of her part-time student job’s administrative responsibilities. This Committee honors debate but will NOT stand for deception.”
Another unfortunate senator from Texas tried to dabble in deception last month during Clarke’s confirmation hearing. Sen. John Cornyn asked if while a student at Harvard University she “argued that African Americans were genetically superior to ah [sic] Caucasians."
Clarke responded: “No senator, I believe you’re referring to an op-ed that I wrote at the age of 19 about the Bell Curve Theory, a racist book that equated DNA with genetics and race. As a Black student at Harvard at that time we took grave offense to this book. It was co-authored by a Harvard professor. (...) And this op-ed opened with a satirical reference to the statement that you just noted.”
”What I was seeking to do is hold up a mirror,” Clarke added, “and put one racist theory alongside another to challenge people as to why we were unwilling to wholly reject the racist theory that defined the Bell Curve book.”
So basically Clarke has had the moral grounding that makes her especially fit for the Department of Justice gig at least since she was a student at Harvard. I’m sure that wasn’t the point Cornyn was trying to make, but that’s exactly the one his gotcha question allowed Clarke to underscore.
In Sen. Mazie Hirono’s words from a tweet last Thursday, "Republicans are smearing Kristen Clarke because they’re afraid she’ll actually enforce the civil rights laws."
Deval Patrick, the first Black governor of Massachusetts and assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division under former President Bill Clinton, said in an op-ed for The Hill that Clarke’s nomination "should be a no-brainer — presuming you respect the mission of the division."
“Clarke has made a career of just such acts of patriotism. She has handled a wide variety of civil rights cases and achieved meaningful results, mastering the substance of civil rights law,” Patrick wrote. “Significantly, she has also approached the work as a problem solver, firm in her support of her clients and cause, but able to listen to and actually hear her adversaries.” She has earned the support of “civil rights advocates and police organizations, underrepresented minorities and business leaders,” Patrick pointed out. “Let that sink in,” he wrote. “At a moment when hyper-partisan division poisons nearly everything in politics, Clarke has earned the respect and support of friend and foe alike.”
Learn more about Clarke’s background from her own opening remarks at her confirmation hearing:
RELATED: Senate Republicans put their full hostility to Black women on display at Kristen Clarke confirmation
RELATED: Texas senator's big 'gotcha' moment in DOJ confirmation hearing made him a laughingstock