Nomination of Kristen M. Clarke

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Madam President, I rise today to oppose the nomination of Kristen Clarke to be the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division.

As I have said multiple times, I am not here to call into question Ms. Clarke's motives, nor am I here to call into question whether she is a good person. In fact, I am willing to assume and even concede, for purposes of our conversation today, that she is a good person and that her motives are good. It is not my job as a Member of the Senate to go beyond that, but I do have some very serious concerns reflected in Ms. Clark's record, concerns that, regrettably, she has failed to rebut.

First, given the importance of the Civil Rights Division to the enforcement of our Nation's anti-discrimination laws, I am concerned about past instances in which she has publicly pushed the Department of Justice to not pursue egregious instances of voter intimidation.

Ms. Clarke criticized the Department of Justice's decision to prosecute Ike Brown for voter intimidation and suppression. As a reminder, in that case, the case involving Ike Brown, a Mississippi Democratic official engaged in rampant vote manipulation and absentee ballot fraud.

Rather than praising the Justice Department's successful prosecution of the case, she criticized the decision, stating that some of the claims were ``weak.'' When asked point-blank whether she agreed with DOJ's decision to prosecute two members of the New Black Panther Party who, by the way, showed up to a polling place wielding a billy club, she demurred, saying:

I believe the leadership of the Justice Department had the prerogative to bring the cases that it deemed appropriate to bring.

Well, that is a completely nonresponsive answer. It is a little like saying Congress has the prerogative to pass the legislation that it deems appropriate to pass.

In short, Ms. Clarke was unwilling to decry outrageous voter suppression and intimidation when Democrats were implicated. She showed no corresponding hesitancy in challenging commonsense election security laws, like voter identification requirements, passed by Republican State legislatures.

Indeed, she has frequently challenged State election laws attempting to paint ballot security measures as categorically racially discriminatory, which raises the question: Does Ms. Clarke, in fact, oppose all voter intimidation or just voter intimidation against certain groups? When the position the nominee is applying for involves being the head of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice--the very division that is responsible for overseeing voter rights laws--that is not a question that you want to have to ask.

Second, Ms. Clarke has shown a troubling disregard toward certain constitutional rights. A few years ago, she decried the Trump administration's creation of a Religious Liberty Task Force, saying that the goal was ``to make it easier for people to use religion to mask their discriminatory goals. Shameful.''

I would remind Ms. Clarke that the very first sentence of the Bill of Rights safeguards the very religious freedoms that she accuses of ``masking discriminatory goals.''

Again, late last year, Ms. Clarke attacked the Supreme Court's decision in Roman Catholic Diocese v. Cuomo, saying the Court's ruling wrongly privileged ``religious freedom above all else.''

Now, by way of reference here, just to set the context straight, that decision in the Supreme Court's ruling in Roman Catholic Diocese v. Cuomo simply stated that commonsense proposition--one that is, in my view, unremarkable--that the government must treat mosques and synagogues and churches the same way that it treats liquor stores and acupuncture clinics

Statements like these give religious Americans like myself pause. Why should we believe that she will defend the civil rights, including the religious rights of all Americans, not just those with whom she happens to agree?

Finally, I am worried about Ms. Clarke's failure adequately to address her troubling history of inflammatory statements and irresponsible activism.

In college, she wrote an article stating that ``Melanin endows Blacks with greater mental, physical, and spiritual abilities--something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards.''

Not surprisingly, she was asked about this at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. And when she was asked about it at her hearing, she claimed this statement was meant to be satirical. But at no point--not during the hearing, not in connection with followup questions for the record--did Ms. Clarke ever acknowledge the obvious; that these statements were unacceptable, regardless of whether she intended them to be satirical.

Likewise, rather than express regret for her decision to participate and assist in a conference defending cop killers and domestic terrorists in law school, she merely said that she ``provided logistical support.'' That contradicts the statements made by numerous speakers at the conference who personally thanked her for her efforts.

In preparation for that same conference, Ms. Clarke recommended that an article entitled ``Mumia, `Lynch Law,' and Imperialism'' be included in the conference newspaper and discussed in connection with one of the panels.

That article contains some of the most inflammatory anti-police rhetoric I have ever seen. Here is a quote from it, an actual quote: ``The Klan is now the Police, with Blue uniforms replacing the sheets and hoods. The corrupt racist Judges, are petty Klan administrators.''

When asked about her promotion of this article in her questions for the record before the Judiciary Committee, Ms. Clarke stated that she ``ha[d] no independent recollection of that email.''

Now, once again, we have here a complete nonanswer. Ms. Clarke declined to explain, much less take responsibility for, associating herself with extraordinarily, obscenely dangerous rhetoric.

Moreover, if Ms. Clarke were to be confirmed, she would be responsible for overseeing pattern and practice investigations of law enforcement agencies, which makes her unexplained, inexcusable involvement with anti-law enforcement activities all the more troubling.

I would also point out that the article's author, Amiri Baraka, was-- like Professor Martin mentioned a moment ago--famously anti-Semitic. On one occasion, he wrote, in reference to Jews, that he had ``the extermination blues.'' So, again, we have Ms. Clarke casually associating herself with a virulently anti-Semitic thinker.

Ms. Clarke also denied on the record that she had served on the editorial staff of a college journal with Amiri Baraka. But a simple Google search of ``Kristen Clarke'' and ``Amiri Baraka'' shows that when she was an assistant editor of that journal, Amiri Baraka was a contributing editor. Her denial of this easily verifiable fact is hard to understand.

Now, let's be perfectly clear. I don't bring any of this up to suggest that all of it is unforgivable. Look, everyone has, from time to time, said or done things that they later come to regret, but let's keep in mind what we are looking at here. Ms. Clarke, herself, is asking us to apply a very different standard to her than we have applied to others--a different standard, in many ways, than she has asked be applied to others.

In 2019, her name appeared on a letter sent by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, where she sat on the board of directors of that organization, opposing the nomination of a lawyer named Ryan Bounds, who had been nominated to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. That letter stated that, ``[w]hile [Bounds] recently apologized for those comments''--comments that had come up in connection with his confirmation proceedings--``the timing of that apology suggests it is one of convenience rather than remorse, offered in a last-ditch effort to salvage his nomination.''

In her hearing testimony, Ms. Clarke provided no explanation for why we should overlook her extraordinarily controversial activities and statements while she was a student. Rather, she attempted to minimize or, in some cases, even evade her actions.

Ms. Clarke's history of irresponsible actions and words didn't end with law school. In 2019, she signed a letter defending Tamika Mallory, a woman who stated that ``white Jews'' ``uphold white supremacy'' and associated herself with Louis Farrakhan.

When pressed on this point, she gave no explanation for her statement of support, other than saying that the letter ``denounce[d] . . . antisemitism.''

Now, I am confused. How can a letter defending a woman accused of making anti-Semitic statements actually be a letter that is denouncing anti-Semitism? Either anti-Semitism is bad or it is not. You can't have your cake and eat it too. The way I read that letter, I don't see the letter as saying, yes, that statement was bad, but there are other circumstances that should be considered. Instead, I see a wholehearted defense of the individual herself.

Likewise, just last year, Ms. Clarke wrote an article titled ``I Prosecuted Police Killings, Defund the Police--But Be Strategic.''

When pressed about this by my colleagues on the Judiciary Committee, Ms. Clarke, once again, sought to evade responsibility, saying that she has ``developed a practice of being deferential to editors on title selection.'' But I don't think that is how this works. The article does, in fact, have her name on it. Even if she were deferential, the fact that she is describing herself as deferential here suggests that she did, in fact, make a conscious decision to defer. She didn't say: I had absolutely no choice in it. I didn't see the title. She just said that she adopted a practice of being deferential.

In any event, you can hardly blame the editor for the title that he or she chose. Ms. Clarke wrote three times in that piece--three times-- ``We must invest less in police.''

In short, Ms. Clarke's record reflects a consistent pattern of inflammatory statements and actions, followed by a disclaimer of responsibility and a lack of candor and remorse. Moreover, her record gives us reason to doubt that she will defend the civil rights of all Americans, not just her political allies.

For these reasons, I regretfully cannot support her nomination.

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