Vanita Gupta: The Civil Rights Division Head Libertarians Could Love?

A drug-war
denouncing, prison-reform crusading, longtime civil-rights attorney

is President Obama’s new pick to head the Justice Department’s
civil rights division. Venita Gupta, 39, will take over as
acting assistant attorney general for civil rights next week, and
the White House will likely propose making it permanent within the
next few months, according to The Washington Post.

Gupta has
called the drug war “disastrous”, the asset forfeiture program
“broken”, and police militarization “out of control”. She supports
marijuana decriminalization and eliminating mandatory minimum
sentencing. “It’s time for states to end the costly criminalization
of marijuana and recalibrate sentencing laws so that the punishment
actually fits the crime as opposed to a politician’s reelection
agenda,”
she wrote in a September op-ed for CNN. 

The civil rights
division—which has been without a permanent head for more than
a year—was created in 1957 “to uphold the civil and constitutional
rights of all Americans” and investigates claims of discrimination
based on race, sex, disability, religion, etc. It’s the division
that
handles voting rights cases, helped end segregation in the
South in the ’60s, and is currently
looking into the police department in Ferguson, Missouri. The
division’s “about” section, however, contains words that will to
strike terror into any libertarian’s heart: “Since its
establishment, the Division has grown dramatically in both size and
scope…”.

Throughout the past few decades, its work has been largely
unimpressive. “Under President George W. Bush, the division was
plagued by scandal, largely due to leadership that was intent on
keeping ‘commies’ and ‘crazy libs’ off the staff,”
writes George Washington University law profesor Michael Selmi
in Politico magazine. In the Obama years,

… the nature of the cases brought by the division has not
differed much from the Bush administration. In some areas the
number of filings in traditional civil rights cases appears to be
down—in some areas down significantly. The vast majority of the
cases the division pursues involve individual victims of
discrimination and very few major reform-oriented cases have been
filed over the last six years. 

Under Eric H. Holder, however, the department has initiated
double the number of
investigations into police departments than it did under
his predecssors. Gupta’s record sparks hope that this focus on
civil rights abuses perpetuated by the state will continue. At the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Gupta served as deputy legal
director and director of the organization’s Center for Justice.
Before that she was an attorney for the ACLU’s Racial Justice
Program and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Her work
includes aiding federal and state reform initiatives concerning
drug policy, immigration, policing, sentencing, prisons, and
overincarceration.

In her first case, Gupta helped overturn the drug convictions
and lengthy sentences of 38 defendants in Tulia, Texas. This year,
Gupta has been working with Families Against Mandatory Minimums,
the American Bar Association, and others
on the Clemency Project 2014, which aims “to restore the
integrity” of the federal clemency process.

Gupta is also known for being able to work across partisan
divides. At the ACLU, Gupta was able to work together with the
American Legislative Exchange Council—a conservative group that
hasn’t always been ACLU-friendly—on sentencing reform. Grover
Norquist told the Post that she “has played a strong role
in the left-right cooperation in criminal justice issues,” and the
National Rifle Association’s former president David Keene said she
“both listens to and works with people from all perspectives to
accomplish real good.”