Trump is erasing civil rights laws in ways Reagan couldn't

History may not repeat itself, but it is loudly rhyming in the calls from conservatives for President Donald Trump to promote Harmeet Dhillon at the Justice Department.

Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, has been among the fiercest culture warriors in an administration crowded with them. On every major aspect of civil rights law - employment, education, voting, policing - she has inverted her division's mission from protecting marginalized minority groups to eradicating those protections.

Dhillon is the spiritual successor to William Bradford Reynolds, who held the same position for President Ronald Reagan. Reynolds also led a counterrevolution against traditional civil rights enforcement and was rewarded when Reagan in 1985 sought to promote him to associate attorney general, the Justice Department's third-ranking position. That's the same job Dhillon's supporters want Trump to place her in - if he doesn't lift her all the way to attorney general.

But when Reagan attempted to elevate Reynolds, the Republican-controlled Senate rejected his promotion. That was a milestone in the resistance from prominent Republicans inside Congress (led by Senator Bob Dole) and the Cabinet (including Labor Secretary Bill Brock) that repeatedly frustrated the efforts of administration conservatives to uproot civil rights laws.

The unlikelihood that any comparable Republican opposition would develop to a Dhillon promotion today underscores the GOP's civil rights transformation. Today, almost all Republicans insist the real threat to equal opportunity is any measure to ensure greater inclusion of groups that remain marginalized, even as American society inexorably grows more diverse and disparities persist.

Today's conservatives are resurrecting the positions that Reynolds and his allies in the 1980s could not muscle past the internal GOP opposition in Congress and the Cabinet.

Reynolds, the field commander for the 1980s counterattack, was a wealthy corporate lawyer with minimal experience in discrimination law when Reagan named him to the civil rights job. In a tenure marked, like Dhillon's, by widespread resignations of career attorneys, Reynolds succeeded in shifting department enforcement policy rightward on employment, housing, school busing and sex discrimination. But Reynolds' most ambitious initiatives were stymied by an alliance between Democrats and Republicans in Congress and the administration itself.

One defeat came in 1985 when Reynolds and other administration conservatives sought to repeal President Lyndon B. Johnson's landmark 1965 executive order 11246 requiring federal contractors to implement affirmative action plans for hiring women and racial minorities. After intense internal resistance from most of the Cabinet - as well as a letter of opposition from 69 senators, including Dole and 22 other Republicans - Reagan ultimately refused to rescind it.

An even bigger loss came on voting rights. In the 1980 Mobile v. Bolden decision, the Supreme Court significantly narrowed the Voting Rights Act. The court ruled that election laws could not be overturned solely because they had a discriminatory effect, but only with proof that they were drafted with overt discriminatory intent - a much tougher standard to satisfy.

When Congress moved to restore the "results" standard in the voting rights law, Reynolds - supported most ardently by a young Justice Department lawyer named John Roberts - led the Reagan administration's opposition. But after Dole crafted a compromise that reaffirmed the results standard and the Republican-controlled Senate approved his plan by a bipartisan vote of 85-8, Reagan backed down and signed it.

Congressional Republicans joined with Democrats to stymie Reynolds a third time in 1988. The issue revolved around overturning another Supreme Court decision, the 1984 Grove City ruling significantly weakening enforcement of Title IX's prohibition against discrimination on grounds of sex in education. This time Reynolds and other conservatives convinced Reagan to veto the initial legislation reversing the decision, but Congress overrode his veto, with support from nearly half of Senate Republicans.

Today, the Trump administration, with Dhillon leading, has revived many of Reynolds' failed crusades. "The seeds were out there in the 1980s for what would be introduced in the Trump administration," says Ralph Neas, a former GOP Senate aide who led the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights during Reagan's presidency.

One day after returning to office, Trump revoked the LBJ executive order on hiring that Dole, Brock and other GOP moderates preserved. In the Louisiana v. Callais case at the Supreme Court, the administration is arguing that Dole's results test for the VRA is unconstitutional if it requires the creation of congressional and legislative districts expressly designed to elect racial minorities. And the administration has upended Title IX enforcement to focus on restricting rights for transgender young people.

The GOP's civil rights pushback against Reagan reached its peak in the 1985 vote when a bipartisan Senate Judiciary Committee majority blocked Reynolds' promotion, and the White House could not muster enough support to elevate him through a discharge position, even though Republicans held 55 seats. (Reynolds remained in the civil rights job until Reagan left office.)

Dhillon's offensive, by contrast, has unfolded with barely a peep from congressional Republicans. Systematically, she is dismantling the civil rights legacy not just of Democrats, but the Republicans who stood in the breach the last time the nation's commitment to equal opportunity faced this grave of a threat.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Ronald Brownstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He is a CNN analyst and the author or editor of seven books.

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This story was originally published April 23, 2026 at 4:17 AM.