Senate blocks civil-rights nominee

Pryor, 6 other Democrats vote no on choice for Justice post

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, accompanied by Sen. John Barrasso, speaks after Wednesday’s vote blocking Debo Adegbile to lead the Justice Department’s civil-rights division. McConnell had questioned Adegbile’s fitness for the job.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, accompanied by Sen. John Barrasso, speaks after Wednesday’s vote blocking Debo Adegbile to lead the Justice Department’s civil-rights division. McConnell had questioned Adegbile’s fitness for the job.

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Senate blocked President Barack Obama’s nominee to lead the Justice Department civil-rights division after Republicans and law-enforcement groups objected to his role in the case of a Black Panther activist convicted of killing a white Philadelphia police officer.

By a 47-52 vote, the Senate on Wednesday fell short of the majority needed to cut off debate and move to a confirmation vote on Debo Adegbile’s nomination to be assistant attorney general for civil rights.

Both senators from Arkansas voted no.

Patrick Creamer, spokesman for U.S. Sen. John Boozman, said the senator “likes to give the president leeway with his nominations, but the Adegbile nomination crosses the line. He has built his legacy supporting radical causes and is unfit for the job.”

U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor said in a statement that he thought Adegbile was too divisive to be effective.

“After hearing fierce opposition from the law enforcement community about this nomination, I had serious doubts about whether Adegbile would be able to work cooperatively and effectively with law enforcement and other stakeholders. Therefore, I could not support this nomination,” he said.

The vote marked the first time the Senate had blocked or rejected an Obama nominee since Democrats forced a rules change in November to require a simple majority instead of 60 votes to limit debate on most presidential appointments. In addition to Pryor, seven other Democrats joined all Republicans in blocking the nominee.

The Fraternal Order of Police and other law enforcement groups opposed Adegbile’s nomination, citing his role as a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Inc. helping overturn Mumia Abu-Jamal’s death sentence for the murder of the white police officer.

That decision to vacate the death sentence was made a quarter-century after the conviction of Abu-Jamal, aBlack Panther activist who has become known as a jailhouse author. He’s now serving a life sentence after prosecutors declined to retry the case.

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat in the chamber, said he was “very disappointed” that Adegbile’s nomination was defeated even after direct appeals from Obama administration officials to members of their own party.

Adegbile was “eminently well qualified” and should have been confirmed, Durbin said.

In a statement after the vote, Obama said the Senate’s failure to confirm Adegbile is a “travesty based on wildly unfair character attacks against a good and qualified public servant” whose qualifications are “impeccable.”

Senate Republicans cited the Philadelphia case in their opposition to the nominee.

Adegbile’s “advocacy on behalf of the nation’s most notorious cop killer calls into question his fitness for the powerful government position he seeks,” Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said in a floor speech.

Later, McConnell said Obama wouldn’t have tried to push through the nomination under the old rules that required 60 votes. In the end, Adegbile “was too difficult for even seven Democrats to swallow.”

The Democrats who joined Republicans in blocking the nomination were Pryor, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Chris Coons of Delaware, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, John Walsh of Montana and Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. Reid switched his vote to no so he could have the procedural standing to file a motion to reconsider cloture.

Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, issued a statement criticizing the vote as a demonstration of “the worst elements of our political system.”

“Unhinged rhetoric trumped substance, racialized language triumphed over thoughtful discourse, and our legal and political system will pay the price,” he said.

Democrats defended Adegbile’s record, maintaining that like all lawyers, he can’t be blamed for the actions of his client, who was convicted more than two decades before he got involved in the case.

Adegbile didn’t become involved until after a federal district judge in 2006 had overturned the death penalty, Democrats maintained. His role was limited to filing briefs with the 3rd U.S. Court of Appeals, which in 2011 upheld the lower court’s decision that struck down the death sentence.

Republicans argued that Adegbile joined a cause that inaccurately portrayed Abu-Jamal as a victim of a racially biased criminal-justice system.

In his floor speech, McConnell said Adegbile overstepped his role as a courtroom advocate by attending rallies for Abu-Jamal and in statements issued by the Legal Defense Fund.

He said that in a 2011 news release the group portrayed Abu-Jamal as a “symbol” of “racial injustice” and that his conviction and sentence were “relics of a time and place that was notorious for police abuse and racial discrimination.”

In a statement, Attorney General Eric Holder said Adegbile’s “record was either misunderstood, or intentionally misrepresented for the sake of politics.” The vote is “a very dangerous precedent” when “individual lawyers can have their otherwise sterling qualifications denigrated based solely on the clients that their organizations represent.”

Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Adegbile is a senior counsel, said those who know him well “can’t recognize the caricature some are trying to paint” of Adegbile.

Raised by a single mother through periods of homelessness in New York, Adegbile is a graduate of Connecticut College and New York University’s law school. He was a child actor on Sesame Street in the 1970s.

Information for this article was contributed by James Rowley and Kathleen Hunter of Bloomberg News and by Sarah D. Wire of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Front Section, Pages 4 on 03/06/2014

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