President Donald Trump's pick for head of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division has caused an outcry over his past work, The Hill reports.
Eric Dreiband, a D.C.-based labor attorney, served as general counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in President George W. Bush's administration, represented R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. in an age discrimination suit, and the University of North Carolina in defending the law banning transgender people from using the bathroom of their gender identity.
"Mr. Dreiband is not simply unqualified for the extraordinary responsibility of leading the nation's civil rights enforcement: he is morally unfit for the job," Mara Keisling, the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, told the Hill in a statement.
"Dreiband has devoted most of his career to defending corporations in employment discrimination cases and advocating for weaker antidiscrimination protections in the workplace," the NAACP Legal Defense Fund wrote in a statement in August, according to CNN. "He also has a troubling lack of experience, having done no significant work in other issue areas central to the Division's mission, including urgent priorities like voting rights and policing reform."
The head of the division under President Barack Obama, Vanita Gupta, called Dreiband "woefully unqualified" for the position, saying he "does not have the qualities needed to lead," in a statement last June.
"Dreiband has devoted the vast majority of his career to defending corporations accused of employment discrimination. He has opposed important legislation to safeguard our civil rights. And he has no known experience in most of the Civil Rights Division's core issue areas, such as voting rights, police reform, housing, education, and hate crimes. He is the wrong person for the job."
The Senate Judiciary Committee must schedule a vote on Dreiband's nomination, but cannot do so until he submits written responses to questions from the committee, which he will likely do on Wednesday.
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