Blindsided
A civil-rights travesty from the Civil Rights Commission.

By John J. Miller
June 5, 2001 1:35 p.m.

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.