 hese
are glory days for Mary Frances Berry. After years of neglect, the
head of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is back in the news. The
voting mess in Florida last November is one of the best things ever
to happen to her. Thanks to her commission's subpoena powers, she's
been able to pull off a feat that other left-wing activists could
only dream of doing: dragging Gov. Jeb Bush and Florida secretary
of state Katherine Harris in front of her panel and treating them
with the full dose of disrespect they deserve for denying Al Gore
the presidency. When Bush showed up for his grilling in the ballroom
of a Holiday Inn on January 11, the governor had barely leaned into
his microphone — "I didn't get to have an opening remark, but
I'm pleased that you're here and . . ." — before Berry cut him
off. "If you have any opening remarks, you will submit them for
the record, and we're sorry we don't have time," she snapped.
It was difficult to hear Bush complete his sentence: ". . . we
welcome you to Tallahassee." Berry spent the entire time treating
him with contempt, and then denounced Harris's testimony as "laughable."
There was another hearing a month later, in Miami, and Berry has promised
more still. She says she'll subpoena Bush again for a new round of
browbeating. She's loving every minute of it.
Mary Frances
Berry is one of the ambulance chasers of the civil-rights movement.
Every hiccup in American race relations finds her sprinting to the
scene, ready to exploit and agitate. When New York City police officers
shot an unarmed Amadou Diallo, she was there — and her pliant commission
banged out a hasty and half-baked report on brutality just as the
would-be Senate race between Hillary Clinton and Mayor Rudy Giuliani
was intensifying. When Jesse Jackson screamed about the suspensions
of black high-school students who rioted in Decatur, Ill., she threw
the credibility of her commission behind the bogus charges. When
the country was treated to a black-church-burning scare — a hoax
— she went into hysterics. She hollered about racism, and simply
couldn't stomach the thought that certain conservatives were willing
to help. When the Christian Coalition offered to pay for rebuilding
efforts, she said, "You have the very people who created the
context for the fires rushing over and saying, `Let us help you
put them out."'
Now she has
targeted the Sunshine State, and people are paying attention. At
the commission's meeting on March 9, she boasted that her panel
is the only branch of the government at any level conducting an
investigation of voting — rights abuses in Florida. She promises
a full report by the first week of June, but there's no question
what it will find. "Voter disenfranchisement appears to be
at the heart of the issue," she said, reading from a statement
the commission then adopted, even though it failed to cite a single
example of intentional discrimination on the part of any Florida
official. Commissioners Russell Redenbaugh and Abigail Thernstrom
objected, but Berry gaveled them into silence.
Berry has gone
on the warpath against the Bush brothers before. Last spring, she
attacked Jeb Bush's plan to phase out race-based admissions at Florida
colleges and universities. (Bush's proposal is "no substitute
for strong, raceconscious affirmative action," she said.) She
was so desperate to attack Bush, she violated commission rules by
failing to announce in the Federal Register that her statement would
be discussed at the next monthly meeting and instead pushed it through
on less than a week's notice — so that its release would coincide
with a legal action taken by the NAACP and NOW She rejected an offer
to meet with Bush before putting out the statement, and later penned
an article for the now-defunct black — activist magazine Emerge
on Bush's "One Florida" plan. It was entitled "Jeb
Crow."
Berry insists
that she's on a "factfinding" mission in Florida, but
her crusade is plainly partisan. Last fall, she protested the presidential-election
result when it was still uncertain. "We are either in a position
in the next few weeks — those of us who believe in the cause of
human rights near and far — of having to mobilize, nudge, and use
our elbows to make sure that Al Gore stays on the right path,"
she said at a community college in New York on November 17. "Or
we're in a position of having to mobilize for an all-out campaign
to make the Bush administration disavow some of the things that
they stood for [in the campaign]." Since then, her anger has
only grown. "The fundamental bedrock of our country has been
torn asunder," she declared on January 15 in St. Louis. "We
have a duty, and I think that Martin Luther King would agree, that
this [election result] is an important issue, a threat to our domestic
institutions."
Berry is something
of an expert on threats to our domestic institutions. In Long Memory,
a book she coauthored in 1982, she said, "Blacks shared so
many of the economic goals of the Communists that many of them might
be described as fellow travelers." Yet "blacks remained
cool to the Communists .... Subjected to a massive barrage of propaganda
from the American news media, few of them knew about Russia's constitutional
safeguards for minorities, the extent of the equality of opportunity,
or the equal provision of social services to its citizens."
About black Americans in the 1960s, she noted, "The threat
of genocide was real. It was roughly comparable to the threat faced
by the Jews in the 1930s."
So Berry has
been out of touch with reality for some time. Even Democrats know
this. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights would have been a perfect
venue for President Clinton's race initiative several years ago,
but Clinton sidestepped it entirely. That was a sensible choice:
Not only has Berry damaged the commission's integrity, she has allowed
it to suffer painful levels of incompetence. In 1997, the General
Accounting Office labeled it "an agency in disarray."
Nobody in the White House or Congress has bothered to push for a
funding increase in years, despite fastpaced government growth;
the commission's budget has stalled at a bit under $9 million.
As the Bush
administration gets around to replacing leftover Clinton personnel
at the commission — specially the vital staff-director position
— Berry's grip on its activities will loosen. The commission might
even begin to take on the bipartisan cast it was meant to have when
it was created in 1957 (right before the black-genocide threat).
But Berry will fight hard to keep that from happening, and to stay
in personal control. In fact, she's secretly hatching her most brazen
power play yet — one that may cause President Bush an enormous headache
a few years from now.
Each of the
body's eight commissioners is supposed to serve a term lasting six
years, with appointments coming separately from the White House
and both parties in Congress. Berry has been on the commission for
nearly two decades, and her latest term began when Clinton named
her to one of the presidential slots. She technically succeeded
Connie Homer, whom the first President Bush had picked for the job
in the final hours of his presidency. Homer's term expired on December
5, 1998. These were busy days for Clinton-impeachment by the House,
a trial in the Senate — and he didn't get around to Berry until
January 26, 1999. But Berry's six-year term didn't actually begin
that day. The clock started ticking the moment Horner departed,
nearly two months earlier. In other words, Bush will have the ability
to select her successor. But when the federal Plum Book, which lists
every political job in government, came out this winter, it said
Berry's service will conclude on January 21, 2005 — one day after
the next inauguration. The source of this datum is the commission
itself, which means that Berry is consciously trying to put herself
out of Bush's reach. Yet the White House clerk's office, staffed
by career bureaucrats, confirms that its records show Berry's term
ending in December 2004. The Bush White House will want to resolve
this discrepancy on its own terms, and soon. Berry surely intends
to cry racism when a fight breaks out, and Bush won't want to be
heading into retirement when that happens.
The whole thing
hinges on who wins the next election, of course. If Bush prevails,
it won't much matter if Berry stays on for a few extra weeks. But
if he doesn't, and this problem hasn't been righted, he may be denied
a small but meaningful opportunity to shape the government he leaves
behind.
So remember:
When Mary Frances Berry goes meddling in Florida, she isn't just
trying to embarrass the Bush brothers. She's fighting for her job.
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