10.16.14: Vanita Gupta Nominated

President Barack Obama nominated Vanita Gupta to head the Department of Justice civil rights division. She has been described as a “trailblazer” who has been at the forefront of the movement to end mass incarceration in the US, and has had almost unparalleled success in working across the aisle despite the partisan gridlock in Washington.

Vanita Gupta, 39, the deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, was appointed on Wednesday as temporary head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, a role to which she is expected to be nominated by the end of the year.

In her new job at the Justice Department, Gupta would be flung into the hornet’s nest of voting rights at a time when controversial voter-ID laws, that have erected hurdles to democratic participation mainly in southern states, have been spawned in several states. She will also have the thorny investigation into police conduct in Ferguson related to the death of the black teenager Michael Brown and the public protests that followed.

Romero said that her role would be all the more important now that the attorney general, Eric Holder, is stepping down. “It’s clear that Holder’s legacy is in criminal justice, so his selection of Vanita signals he wants her to carry on that legacy to fruition in the last two years of the Obama administration.”