President Trump has appointed trailblazing voting rights attorney J. Christian Adams to the United States Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR).
Last week, Trump announced the appointment of Adams to the USCCR, an addition welcomed by Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton and USCCR Commissioner Peter Kirsanow.
“Glad to see that [President Trump] appointed the excellent civil rights attorney J. Christian Adams to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission,” Fitton wrote in a post. “The Left’s unhinged attack shows that he will be a great addition!”
In a piece for National Review, Kirsanow wrote that Adams’ appointment — along with Stephen Gilchrist’s appointment — indicates “outstanding reinforcements” are arriving following seven years of a left-wing majority on the Commission.
Kirsanow called Adams’ work on elections and voting “outstanding.”
Adams, who is president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, served in the DOJ’s Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division from 2005 to 2010. In 2008, Adams was awarded the Special Commendation for Outstanding Service at the DOJ for his work on voting rights cases.
“People have a civil right to wear a campaign hat without being socked in the mouth,” Adams told Breitbart News. “You shouldn’t live in fear of violence because you support somebody for president.”
“If you live in Baltimore or Chicago or the Bronx, you should be able to pursue your business without it being suffocated by corrupt city administrators,” Adams said.
He has brought cases under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to clean up voter rolls in states like Florida, Indiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Texas.
Adams’ most recent groundbreaking case came in Guam when he fought for ten years on behalf of minorities to win them equal voting rights in Davis v. Guam.
In that case, Adams represented U.S. Air Force Major Dave Davis, who was not allowed to register to vote in a Guam election because he did not have the right ancestry. At the time, Guam had passed a law limiting voting rights to “native inhabitants” or their blood relatives.
Ultimately, Adams won the case. Adams told Breitbart News he did the work pro bono and, while leftist civil rights organizations were silent, the Trump administration stepped in to provide support for the case in December 2017.
“The ACLU was awol. The NAACP was nowhere,” Adams said. “These are the groups who now criticize me. I’ll put my record up against my critics any day of the week. They never even issued an amicus brief to support the case. That’s how pathetic they are.”
“The Trump administration came to the aid of the disenfranchised voter while the ACLU hid and sat on the sidelines,” Adams continued. “So you can imagine when someone accuses me of being against civil rights, I don’t remember them appearing on the other side of the earth to work on the case I was working on.”
Adams has also litigated on behalf of black Americans in cases such as United States v. Town of Lake Park. In that case, black Americans in Lake Park, Florida, accounted for 40 percent of the voting-age population, but no black candidates have ever won their election since the area was incorporated in 1923.
In 2009, the case was settled and Lake Park officials discontinued their use of at-large methods in electing its local commission, which had been found to dilute black Americans’ votes in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
“There are people who at the DOJ do not want to enforce the Voting Rights Act in small towns,” Adams said. “If you live in a small town as an African-American, you should have the same voting rights under the Voting Rights Act as everyone else.”
Adams has also brought cases on behalf of white American minorities. In United States v. Ike Brown, Adams alleged that Chairman of the Noxubee County Democratic Executive Committee Ike Brown had used voter discrimination tactics against white residents to keep black elected officials in office.
In 2007, a federal judge ruled in favor of the white residents, concluding that Noxubee County officials had “the most extreme case of racial exclusion seen by the [DOJ] in decades.”
“Civil rights should apply to everybody,” Adams said.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.