What the Establishment Gets Wrong About This Appointment
Harmeet Dhillon is being promoted to a high-profile position within the Department of Justice, per a Daily Wire exclusive citing sources familiar with President Trump's plans. The announcement has not gone through official channels yet, but the people who have already decided they hate it — and they are numerous, and they are vocal — are revealing something important about themselves with the speed of their reaction.
Dhillon is a civil rights attorney. A Sikh American woman who graduated from Dartmouth and the University of Virginia School of Law. A former San Francisco Republican Party chair who practiced in a city that treated her politics like a communicable disease and didn't stop practicing. She litigated against COVID lockdown policies when litigating against COVID lockdown policies required a certain kind of nerve. She represented clients the legal establishment considered radioactive, in venues that considered her radioactive, and she won.
That resume is, depending on your priors, either evidence that she is qualified for a significant DOJ role or evidence that she is dangerous. The critics have chosen the second option with remarkable efficiency. I'd note that the same critics spent four years telling us the DOJ needed to be more aggressive in protecting civil rights. They apparently meant a specific subset of civil rights, enforced in a specific direction. When the instrument of enforcement changes hands, the enthusiasm for aggressive enforcement disappears with remarkable speed.
The Civil Rights Division and the Question of Consistent Principles
The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division was created by the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Its mandate is to enforce federal statutes prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, sex, national origin, religion, and disability. That mandate is neutral on its face. The application has not always been neutral.
Under the previous administration, the Civil Rights Division pursued cases against school districts that maintained single-sex policies, against employers who maintained practices that produced disparate racial outcomes, and against states that enacted voting laws that the Division determined had disparate impact — regardless of intent. These are all legitimate uses of the Division's authority, if you believe the legal theories underlying them.
The consistent application of those same legal theories — disparate impact analysis, aggressive enforcement of anti-discrimination statutes, vigorous investigation of institutional practices that disadvantage protected classes — could look quite different when applied by a DOJ leadership that reads the protected class list more broadly. Viewpoint discrimination against conservatives in university settings. Anti-religious discrimination in federal employment. The application of equal protection principles to government programs that explicitly sort by race.
Harmeet Dhillon has litigated exactly these kinds of cases. That's the point. The people objecting to her appointment are objecting to the consistent application of principles they claim to support. That inconsistency is the story.
Personnel Is Policy, and This Is the Policy
The Trump administration's theory of DOJ reform is not subtle. It holds that the department has been operated as an instrument of one political coalition, that the professional class within it has resisted political direction in ways that are constitutionally problematic, and that the correction requires placing people with genuine ideological commitment — not just technical competence — in positions of authority.
That theory is contestable. Serious people disagree about the appropriate relationship between political appointees and career DOJ staff. Those are real questions worth arguing about. But the argument needs to happen at the level of principle, not at the level of "this particular appointment is illegitimate because we don't like this particular appointee's politics."
Harmeet Dhillon is qualified. She is a member of the California bar in good standing. She has litigated federal civil rights cases. She has run large organizations. The objections to her appointment are objections to her politics dressed up as objections to her credentials, and the dressing is thin. She will be a good attorney in whatever role she is assigned. And the people she will be pursuing — using the same legal tools that have been pointed in other directions for years — will have no legitimate procedural complaint about the process. Just the target.
That was always the plan. And it's working.
