After Main Justice broke the news last month that the White House was vetting an obscure Capitol Hill staffer for U.S. Attorney in Alabama’s Southern District, Rep. Artur Davis diplomatically declined to comment.
Artur Davis (gov)
The White House’s elevation of House ethics committee staffer Kenyen Brown for the post was a diss to Davis. The Harvard-educated African-American pol is trying to modernize Alabama and move beyond its polarizing racial politics. As he gears up to run for governor next year, aiming to break his own racial barrier in the Deep South state, Davis has also tried to professionalize the U.S. Attorney selection process, moving away from the rank partisan politics that defined it during the Bush administration.
Toward that end, Rep. Davis formed a highly credentialed search committee, and ultimately recommended Vicki Davis (no relation), an African-American Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District as his first choice for the Southern District; and a white former magistrate judge named Patrick Sims, now in private practice at at Cabaniss, Johnston, Gardner, Dumas & O’Neal in Mobile, as his second choice.
But after Davis ran into vetting problems (click here for our previous report), the White House completely skipped over Sims. It’s our information that Sims wasn’t even called to Washington for an interview. The view of many in the Alabama legal community is that Sims was simply the wrong color. Alabama’s other two prosecuting districts are slated to be filled by whites (Joyce Vance in the Northern District and Joe Van Heest in the Middle District). The White House, it appears, was bound and determined to have at least one black U.S. Attorney in Alabama. And the 39-year-0ld Kenyen Brown – although he has few ties to the Alabama establishment – fit that bill: He is African-American.
Nothing againt Kenyen Brown, who by all accounts is a fine fellow.
But now, the Mobile-Press Register reports that Artur Davis has broken his silence. In an interview with the newpaper’s Sean Reilly, Davis came out publicly swinging for Vicki Davis, saying:
“There is certainly nothing that has surfaced that in any way suggests that Vicki Davis is not qualified to be the U.S. Attorney or has anything other than the highest level of character and integrity.”
Moveover, Mobile attorney Tom Haas wrote in a letter to Obama yesterday that the 50 members Mobile Area Democratic Association support Vicki Davis.
“Her credentials are so outstanding that we cannot believe that there is any individual more qualified,” he wrote in the letter obtained by The Press-Register.
Haas told the Press-Register that his group doesn’t have any hard feelings towards Brown. They just don’t know much about him, he said. Brown worked for the Senate Ethics Committee from 2000 until last year, when he took a job with the House ethics panel, officially known as the Committee on Standards on Official Conduct. He was an assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District and a prosecutor in the Montgomery County district attorney’s office before coming to Washington.
The irony here is great. The country’s first African-American president, who hardly talked about racial issues in his campaign, is now undermining the fellow African-American Democrat on a racial issue, even though Davis headed up the Obama campaign in Alabama. What’s more, Attorney General Eric Holder’s own sister-in-law, Vivian Malone Jones, played a storied role in Alabama’s civil rights struggles. Jones, who is now deceased, was one of two of the first African Americans to enroll at the University of Alabama in 1963, only to be blocked by then-Alabama Gov. George Wallace.
Is the White House’s thinking here that Alabama will never vote for a Democrat for president, so it’s okay to treat Davis like this? Politics sure ain’t for the faint-hearted. Artur Davis told The Press-Register that the White House will likely nominate a U.S. Attorney in the next few weeks to fill the vacancy left by the resignation of Deborah Rhodes in April.
