“A Threat to Our Domestic Institutions”
High times for a racial ambulance chaser.

By John J. Miller, NR’s national political reporter
From the April 2, 2001, issue of National Review

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.