We’ve known for quite some time that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights — for a half-century, the government’s chief watchdog for racism and discrimination — has been undermined and politicized by the Bush administration. The commission has gone from a stalwart defender of integration and affirmative action to criticizing school desegregation and looking the other way on federal enforcement of civil rights laws.
What’s less clear is how the Bush gang pulled this off. By law, the eight-member commission cannot have a majority from either political party. When Bush took office, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights had four Democrats and four Republicans. Bush could replace members who left, but he couldn’t stack the panel with far-right ideologues.
Or so we thought. In 2004, two Republicans on the commission suddenly re-registered their party affiliations to “independent,” just as Bush appointed two more Republicans to the panel. The result, the Boston Globe’s Charlie Savage explained today, put the agency under conservative control, with four Republicans, and two up-until-recently Republicans.
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.
Of course they did. The commission had been effectively gutted by a cheap trick intended to circumvent the law.
The result has been a right-wing sea-change when it comes to the federal government’s approach to protecting civil rights and preventing racial discrimination.
[T]he 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.
Among the allegations the new-and-not-improved Commission on Civil Rights decided to ignore were voting-machine irregularities in black neighborhoods in Ohio in the 2004 election cycle. The members of the panel decided it would not be “the best use of their resources” to pursue the matter.
To be fair, previous presidents have used like-minded independents to create an imbalance before, but there’s never been an instance in which members already on the commission re-registered to help stack the deck. Bush’s move represented an unprecedented “escalation” in hardball politics, said Peter Shane, Ohio State University law professor.
Well, maybe these Republicans experienced a sincere change of heart? Maybe they felt compelled to re-register as independents because of a heartfelt ideological change? Not so much.
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.
The mind reels.