A rights watchdog muted

[Dover]

A rights watchdog muted

The New York Times Wednesday, December 15, 2004

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights cannot legislate or regulate. What it can do is hold hearings and make a terrible racket if the government is not enforcing the laws of the land forbidding discrimination in voting, employment and housing.
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The panel is a watchdog, exactly as President Dwight Eisenhower intended when he persuaded Congress to establish it in 1957. Mostly it has been run on a part-time basis by academics like the first chairman, John Hannah, then president of Michigan State University; the Reverend Theodore Hesburgh, who was president of Notre Dame University; and, most recently, by Mary Frances Berry, the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania. The panel helped create momentum for the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 and for the creation of civilian review boards to ease tensions between the police and minorities in the 1970s.
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Watchdogs occasionally bite, of course. While some presidents have tolerated this, others have not - including President George W. Bush, who has now appointed Gerald Reynolds, a conservative African-American lawyer, to succeed Berry as commissioner.
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An equal-opportunity critic, Berry has harangued presidents of both parties for nearly 25 years. What finally did her in, apparently, was a 166-page report criticizing Bush's leadership on civil rights that appeared in draft form on the commission's Web site before the election. It was ultimately rejected by the commission's conservative majority, but Berry sent it to the White House anyway with a plea to Bush to "embrace the core freedoms and values enshrined in our civil rights laws."
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Bush is unlikely to get such lectures from Reynolds, an energy company lawyer who briefly ran the Office of Civil Rights at the Education Department. Reynolds has described affirmative action as a "big lie," is generally opposed to preferential treatment for members of minorities and has said civil rights groups overstate the problem of discrimination. This approach may make for warmer relations with the White House, but it hardly seems likely to keep the commission on the leading edge of the struggle for civil rights....cont'd

http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/14/opinion/edrights.html