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 t's
bad enough that Mary Frances Berry leaked the U.S. Civil Rights
Commission report on the Florida vote to the Washington Post
and New York Times before she had collected formal responses
to it from public officials like Gov. Jeb Bush and Secretary of
State Katherine Harris. It's also a small outrage that Abigail Thernstrom,
the commission's sole Republican, didn't receive a copy until this
morning — some hours (or days?) after certain handpicked members
of the press got to pore over it. And the report itself is a disgrace:
A partisan attack on the legitimacy of President Bush's election
from a body that failed to uncover a single example of actual voter
discrimination, despite having nearly seven months to do so.
But in the
midst of all this is an indignity that must not be lost: Commissioner
Russell Redenbaugh is blind. Although he is technically an independent
member of the commission, he is a Republican appointee who forms,
with Thernstrom, a small voting bloc that often futilely opposes
Berry's majority of six Democratic members. Like Thernstrom, Redenbaugh
didn't get a chance to see the report until this morning — except
that "seeing" isn't really how he absorbs information.
Every commissioner has a special assistant, but Redenbaugh's is
the only one who must read all relevant commission documents to
her boss. Perhaps later today Redenbaugh will hear about the report's
section on the problems disabled voters faced in Florida, particularly
the ones with visual impairments — this is an actual piece of the
commission's latest work.
On May 22,
Redenbaugh sent a memo to Berry asking her when he might have a
copy of the Florida report. For months, its public release has been
set for this Friday, at the commission's next meeting. But he received
no response from Berry.
This morning's
New York Times — whose story on the report is actually quite
good, as opposed to the Washington Post's sensationalized
front-page treatment — quotes Thernstrom as calling the early release
"a procedural travesty."
Considering
the way this so-called civil-rights commission has dealt with its
single disabled member — couldn't someone have given a draft a week
ago? — it is also a civil-rights travesty. Berry had the unbelievable
gall to keep this report out of a blind man's hands so that she
might control what others see.
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