In this ‘woke’ environment, President Joe Biden’s nominations seem untouchable. He’s nominating the most unqualified ex-Obama era figures for several key positions within the White House. The latest questionable nominee is Kristen Clarke, who has been advanced by the Senate Judiciary Committee to run the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice. While her confirmation is not certain, there’s a handful of key Democrats who have yet to support her role.
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin has yet to confirm a vote for Clarke, who has a notoriously troubling record of purely racial politics and anti-police activism. She even participated in advocacy matters for infamous convicted police killer Mumia Abu-Jamal and wrote a 2020 Newsweek op-ed piece headlined “I Prosecuted Police Killings. Defund the Police—But Be Strategic.” She defended the piece and said she did not actually want to ‘defund the police,’ although there are three lines where she mentions “investing less in the police.”
Sen. Ted Cruz said her disdain for law enforcement is evident and that she has spent her life on the “extreme left-wing,” starting off by hosting a highly controversial speaker at Columbia University as a student. Cruz said she was the most radical nominee Biden has ever put forward in the federal government and that America needs leaders that fairly enforce the law.
Manchin has publicly expressed that he is a ‘centrist’ and doesn’t want Clarke anywhere near the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division with race-related matters. On the other hand, Clarke has expressed support for slavery reparations and called it the nation’s acknowledgment of white supremacy and “their continuing impact on African Americans in all aspects of society.”
Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski, who are all considered swing votes, have yet to express their support of Clarke to run the civil rights department. Clarke would need two votes out of the four ‘swing vote’ senators to be confirmed.
Clarke told Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Joe Manchin that she regretted the “tone” she took with them when she attacked them on social media. She wrote that it was “shameful” Murkowski had voted to confirm Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and said that Manchin’s Martin Luther King Day tweet was full of “hollow words” because he’d voted to confirm Jess Sessions, former attorney general to Donald Trump.
“In retrospect, I regret the tone I occasionally took,” she wrote. Clarke said she’d planned to “turn down the volume and lower the temperature” in the future.
State officials and reporters are also feeling like they’re living through Obama’s third term. President Biden recently picked Catherine Lhamon, a former Obama staffer, to head Civil Rights in his education department. If confirmed, she would have a say in how the federal government addresses LGBTQ rights, sexual misconduct, and racial discrimination in the nation’s schools and colleges.
Joe Cohn of the Foundation For Individual Rights in Education said the Lhamon nomination is a return to “old, failed policies” and that she would be put in the same position to undermine the due process rights of students accused of sexual misconduct during the Obama Administration. Lhamon has pressured institutions to restrict constitutionally protected speech and take the rights of all students into account by removing due process and pushing the lens of race and gender to override the law. She has also pushed for government-based schools.
This is more evidence of a far-left infiltration of our government and nominations nobody wanted. It seems like President Obama is trying to push us through Obama’s third term, policy-wise and personnel-wise. Lhamon, Tandem, and Clarke, are only a few unpopular candidates Biden nominated for positions within the administration, but they won’t be the last.
