Biased Rights Discussion

Biased Rights Discussion

The discussion about a political appointment process to the US Civil Rights
Commission suggests that conservatives and Republicans oppose civil rights of
persons of color. That is the only focus of the essay masquerading as reporting.
In liberal Democratic Cambridge, MA which reflects the state of
Massachusetts, civil rights of persons with disabilities are violated every day.
Democrats and Savage ignore them.
34 years after the Rehabilitation Act is law, Cambridge and Massachusetts
taxpayer funded agencies ignore city, state, and US laws which prohibit
discrimination based upon disability.
Cambridge's two full-time Affirmative Action officers focus only on hiring
persons of color ignoring complaints about their unlawful bias.
As recently as 2005, the intake office of the US Fair Housing Act office in
Boston did not know the definition of disability to accept complaints about
disability based discrimination. The Secretary of HUD and the Inspector General
of HUD did not think this was a matter of concern.
The idea of bias is truly in the eyes of the beholder. In my eyes the
Boston Globe, its editors and reporters show their prejudice against persons
with disabilities who they treat as clients and patients for the human services
corporations, the psychiatric industry, and the drug industry and as human
subjects
for the academic research industry. For the Globe, persons with disabilities do
not deserve civil or Constitutional Rights. They are not equal to persons of
color who are presented as the only group which suffers from unlawful
discrimination.

Roy Bercaw, Editor ENOUGH ROOM

Maneuver gave Bush a conservative rights panel
By Charlie Savage
Boston Globe Staff
November 6, 2007

WASHINGTON - The US Commission on Civil Rights, the nation's 50-year-old
watchdog for racism and discrimination, has become a critic of school
desegregation efforts and affirmative action ever since the Bush administration
used a controversial maneuver to put the agency under conservative control.

Democrats say the move to create a conservative majority on the eight-member
panel violated the spirit of a law requiring that no more than half the
commission be of one party. Critics say Bush in effect installed a fifth and
sixth Republican on the panel in December 2004, after two commissioners, both
Republicans when appointed, reregistered as independents.

"I don't believe that [the law] was meant to be evaded by conveniently switching
your voter registration," said Commissioner Michael Yaki, one of the two
remaining Democrats.

The administration insists that Bush's appointments were consistent with the law
because the two commissioners who reregistered as independents no longer counted
as Republicans. The day before Bush made the appointments, the Department of
Justice approved the move in a memo to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales's
office.

Other presidents have been able to create a majority of like-minded
commissioners, but no president has done it this way. The unusual circumstances
surrounding the appointments attracted little attention at the time. But they
have had a sweeping effect, shifting the commission's emphasis from
investigating claims of civil rights violations to questioning programs designed
to offset the historic effects of discrimination.

Before the changes, the agency had planned to evaluate a White House budget
request for civil rights enforcement, the adequacy of college financial aid for
minorities, and whether the US Census Bureau undercounts minorities, keeping
nonwhite areas from their fair share of political apportionment and spending.
After the appointments, the commission canceled the projects.

Instead, the commission has put out a series of reports concluding that there is
little educational benefit to integrating elementary and secondary schools,
calling for closer scrutiny of programs that help minorities gain admission to
top law schools, and urging the government to look for ways to replace policies
that help minority-owned businesses win contracts with race-neutral
alternatives.

The conservative bloc has also pushed through retroactive term limits for
several of its state advisory committees. As a result, some longtime traditional
civil rights activists have had to leave the advisory panels, and the commission
replaced several of them with conservative activists.

The commission has also stopped issuing subpoenas and going on the road to hold
lengthy fact-finding hearings, as it previously did about once a year. The
commission had three planned hearings in the works when the conservative bloc
took over and canceled them. Instead, the panel has held only shorter briefings,
all but one of which was in Washington, from invited specialists.

Commissioner Abigail Thernstrom, who dropped her GOP registration six weeks
before Bush's appointments, said the selection of conservatives to the state
civil rights advisory committees provided "intellectual diversity." She also
said the commission's recent briefings and reports have been rigorous.

"They are completely balanced in a way they haven't been for years," said
Thernstrom, a former member of the Massachusetts Board of Education who until
recently lived in Lexington.

A core mission of the Civil Rights Commission is to use its bipartisan
fact-finding power in racial disputes to "gather facts instead of charges [and
to] sift out the truth from the fancies," as Senate majority leader Lyndon
Johnson said in August 1957.

In its early days, the commission's work of collecting evidence of voter
discrimination and police brutality laid the groundwork for major civil rights
laws. But the panel has stayed on the sidelines in recent controversies with
civil rights overtones.

For example, the panel did not investigate allegations that black neighborhoods
in Ohio received too few voting machines in the 2004 election or the murky
circumstances surrounding a racially charged assault case in Jena, La.

Kenneth Marcus, the commission's staff director, said the panel has not issued
subpoenas because they are time-consuming and "disrupted" its relations with
other government agencies.

Marcus also said that members of the panel considered investigating the 2004
Ohio election dispute, but decided it would not be "the best use of their
resources." The commission staff, he added, was recently briefed by the Justice
Department about the Jena case and is monitoring the situation.

Democrats say Bush's appointments threw the commission out of balance, violating
the bipartisan intent of the law that forbids the panel from having more than
four members of one party. Five commissioners must agree before the agency
approves a report or recommendation.

But Marcus, a Bush appointee, said "it's not true" that the panel has become a
party instrument.

"The commission is guided by four Republicans, two independents, and two
Democrats, which is consistent with the statute governing the agency," Marcus
said. "Certainly, we have a majority of conservatives right now, and that
majority is taking the commission in a direction that is different than what
we've seen in the past."

The commission - half appointed by the president and half by congressional
leaders - has been under a 6-to-2 control by both liberals and conservatives
before. Especially since the 1980s, presidents and lawmakers have tried to tilt
the panel by appointing independents who shared their party's views on civil
rights.

But until Bush's 2004 appointments, no president used reregistrations by sitting
commissioners to satisfy the law that forbids presidents from appointing a fifth
commissioner of the same party. Bush's move , represented an unprecedented
"escalation" in hardball politics, said Peter Shane, Ohio State University law
professor.

No court has ever ruled on the meaning of the political balance law, which does
not say whether a commissioner's party identity is fixed at appointment, or
whether a commissioner who reregisters no longer counts toward the party cap.

In a two-page memo Dec. 6, 2004, the day before Bush's appointments, the Justice
Department said it was "clear" that it only matters what commissioners say their
party identity is when a president makes appointments.

But Peter Strauss, an administrative law professor at Columbia University, said
he believed a court would reject the administration's interpretation, especially
if a judge decided that a commissioner reregistered "to manipulate the process"
rather than because his or her ideology sincerely changed.

One of the extra Republican slots opened Oct. 27, 2004, when Thernstrom asked
the town clerk of Lexington to change her voter registration to independent from
GOP. Six weeks later, Bush promoted Thernstrom to be the commission's vice
chairwoman.

Thernstrom acknowledged speaking with the White House about the impending
vacancies.

"The discussion was who were the possible candidates and what did their [party]
identification have to be," she said.

But Thernstrom said that no one asked her to reregister and that her decision
had nothing to do with making space for another Republican. Instead, she said,
she decided she would be "most comfortable" as an independent, having registered
as a Democrat and as an independent in times past.

In more recent years, Thernstrom had been a consistent Republican. She voted in
the March 2000 and March 2004 Republican primaries, gave $500 to the Bush-Cheney
campaign in July 2004, and on Oct. 18, 2004, published an op-ed in the Wall
Street Journal calling herself a Republican appointee - just nine days before
she dropped her Republican registration.

The other GOP slot opened in 2003, when Republican Commissioner Russell
Redenbaugh switched to independent. He had been an independent when Senate
Republicans first appointed him to the commission in 1990, but registered GOP
before being reappointed because, he said, "I felt it was dishonest to call
myself an independent when I was so clearly a conservative."

Redenbaugh said he switched back to independent in 2003 because he leans
libertarian, and the GOP's stance on social issues annoyed him. He called Bush's
use of his switch to appoint a Republican "inappropriate" and "wrong."

Redenbaugh resigned in 2005, dropping the conservative majority to five. In
early 2007, Senate Republicans restored the 6-to-2 bloc by appointing Gail
Heriot, a member of the conservative Federalist Society who opposes affirmative
action.

Heriot was an alternate delegate to the 2000 Republican National Convention and
was a registered Republican until seven months before her appointment. In an
interview, Heriot said her decision to reregister as an independent in August
2006, making her eligible to fill the vacancy, "had nothing to do with the
commission."

"I have disagreements with the Republican Party," she said. Asked to name one,
she declined.