Good morning. It is my honor to call to order this hearing of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Today, we will hear from the Honorable Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice.
It has been almost a year and a half since this Committee last conducted oversight of the Civil Rights Division. Among all of the important work done by the Department of Justice, the work of the Civil Rights Division is uniquely important. The Civil Rights Division is charged with enforcing our laws providing the rights of all citizens, regardless of race, creed, religion, sex or national origin, to participate in civic life. It underpins our entire way of life because, where civil rights are not protected, equality, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are denied.
The preamble to the United States Constitution, our national charter, states that the first two purposes of our national government are “to form a more perfect union” and to “ensure justice.” There is no better shorthand for the mission of the Civil Rights Division.
The Civil Rights Division is responsible for ensuring voting rights for every American. It protects equal access to housing, lending and employment, regardless of sex, race, religion, or national origin. It safeguards members of our armed services from discrimination based upon the hardships that accompany active duty. It provides that disabled Americans are not precluded from participation in civic life, from the marketplace, or from the workplace.
Today, since the passage of the Mathew Shepard Hate Crime Prevention Act of 2009, the Civil Rights Division also protects the rights of gay, lesbian and transgendered Americans to participate as full citizens in our country without fear of violence borne of bigotry.
So it should. Equality for all is supposed to mean equality for all.
The struggle for civil rights for all Americans is a part of our national story. The thirteenth,fourteenth and fifteenth Amendments established formal equality for all Americans by 1870. Real-world equality, sadly, lagged behind. It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that Congress took up its charge to turn the promise of those reconstruction amendments into real progress for African Americans and, frankly for Americans of many different backgrounds. Since that time, we have made great progress, even as we have expanded the mission of the civil rights laws beyond state action and into the economic sphere.
Over the past 10 days, however, people in my state received a sad reminder that the battle against the sort of overt racism that marred this country so greatly in our past – a battle that many Americans hope and believe that we have won – still rages on. Over the Labor Day weekend in Newark, Delaware, two teens placed a cross, which read, “burn in hell” among other racial epithets, on the lawn of an African American family. Although police in New Castle County quickly arrested two young suspects, the homeowner was, understandably, not comforted. He said, “I don’t want this to continue to happen, especially in this neighborhood, in this state or anywhere else. I want hate to go away.”
Like the homeowner, I was caught off guard. Incidents like these are not supposed to happen in our country today. But I was reminded that the vast majority of our country has moved beyond these acts and attitudes only due to the vigilant work of those who have come before us.
Without objection, I would enter into the record articles from the Delaware News Journal from September 5 and September 7, describing the incident in Newark.
Although the perpetrators appear to have been caught, we cannot letthat be the end of it. Especially in the area of hate crimes, we need leaders and members of the community to stand up and say that these abhorrent acts do not represent us and they will not be tolerated. That is why we are here today.
Congress has an important role to play in oversight of all Executive Branch activities, of course, but when it comes to civil rights, it is critical that both branches are on the same page — that we are working together, hand in hand, to fight for that perfect union.
We’ll work on eradicating discrimination from our laws. We need you, Mr. Perez, to work on stopping it in our communities.
I look forward to hearing from Mr. Perez regarding the work that he has done at the Civil Rights Division since being confirmed to that office almost two years ago. Mr. Perez inherited a division that had undergone significant upheaval. I hope to hear that Mr. Perez has reinstituted hiring procedures at the Division strictly on the basis of merit. I hope to hear about the work of the Division in fighting more insidious forms of institutional discrimination through disparate impact cases brought under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. I look forward to hearing what the Division has done to extend the promise of equality to all Americans, regardless of race or sex, but also regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.
Finally, I would like to spend some time examining what the Division is doing to make sure that our service men and women, the people who risk their lives to defend our way of life, have the ability to vote without burden and are not discriminated against in housing, lending, employment or elsewhere.
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