Berry Bad Behavior
Berry Bad Behavior Last week the White House made a down payment on President Bush's promise that due-process protec-./tions would be extended even to the most fanatic current enemies of U.S....
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...Kirsanow is the commission's fourth Republican, and thus a mortal threat to Mary Berry...
...No, we don't mean the Justice Department's December 11 indictment of Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged "twentieth man" in the New York and Washington terrorist plots...
...The Bush administration has wisely declined that invitation, and has sued Victoria Wilson instead...
...policy...
...Congress knew perfectly well what it was doing in 1994 when it amended that law—an attempt, according to contemporaneous Judiciary Committee records, merely to eliminate "unnecessary procedural provisions" while "retain[ing] the current organization structure" of "staggered terms...
...The report was completed on schedule...
...Mary Berry is a freakish anomaly in the permanent-insider culture of Washington politics...
...turnover among senior civil servants on the commission's staff has been epidemic...
...Before we get to the particulars, some necessary background: Congress chartered the Civil Rights Commission in 1957 as an executive branch "clearinghouse" on American race relations...
...They are quite wrong about that, we think...
...Which is lunacy, really: This is just a personnel dispute, after all, and Berry's position is plainly illegal...
...Earlier this month, the Higginbotham/Wilson term having duly expired, President Bush named Cleveland attorney Peter Kirsanow as a replacement...
...George W. Bush is not a Democrat...
...Commission on Civil Rights—for "malfeasance in office," consistent with a provision of the agency's charter that unquestionably remains the law, right there in black and white...
...Technical amendments Congress made to her agency's charter in 1994, she points out, removed an explicit instruction about how to handle mid-term vacancies on the commission...
...By the early 1980s, the commission having long since Since Bill Clinton made her chairman, Mary Frances Berry has run the Civil Rights Commission like a third-world potentate...
...During which time the agency did a slow dissolve from irrelevance to incompetence to outright embarrassment—its "research" increasingly indistinguishable from interest-group agitprop...
...But Democratic party leaders have consistently ignored this rule in Berry's case, propping her up on the apparent assumption that her continued presence on the Civil Rights Commission does them some partisan good...
...It is important to point out, for reasons that will become obvious in a moment, that the idea for this scheme of staggered terms, according to an official House of Representatives report on the 1983 "reauthoriza-tion," came from Mary Frances Berry, a 1980 Carter appointee to the commission...
...During a telephone conversation two weeks ago, Berry told an astonished White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez that armed federal marshals would be required to physically remove Victoria Wilson from the commission and secure Peter Kirsanow in her place...
...Character flaws like these ordinarily make for a justly abbreviated political career...
...We have in mind, instead, a move announced the day before: the administration's decision to forgo a military tribunal in favor of regular federal district court proceedings against Mary Frances Berry...
...But a Democratic Congress seized on that plan as evidence of alleged Republican hostility to racial and ethnic minorities and women...
...In January 2000, President Clinton had appointed New York book editor— and Berry ally—Victoria Wilson to the civil rights panel "for the remainder of the term expiring November 29, 2001," a slot left open by the death of commission incumbent Leon Higginbotham...
...Cowed by the charge, the Reagan White House effected a full-bore retreat and approved a humiliating 1983 "compromise" in which the Civil Rights Commission was deliberately insulated against future such threats to its "independence...
...We'd say the Bush administration has responded to her provocations with altogether remarkable restraint...
...Simple: During the Clinton years, the White House and Hill Democrats were careful to stack the commission with nominal "independents" who wouldn't count against this legal ceiling but could nevertheless be depended on to cast their votes as Mary Berry wished...
...For one thing, she has managed to survive on the federal payroll through a quarter century and five presidencies despite having accumulated a record of rhetorical irresponsibility, devoid of compensating accomplishment, that would make Al Sharpton blush...
...Except that he is...
...Berry's "argument," such as it is, is preposterous...
...When it does, if not before, President Bush should at long last remove Mary Frances Berry from the U.S...
...Berry has lately holed herself up at 624 Ninth Street, N.W., in Washington, D.C., headquarters of the radical cell she leads, otherwise known as the "U.S...
...And Peter Kirsanow isn't entitled to serve at all...
...In other words, so long as there was a Democratic president exercising control over four commission appointees, Berry's rule was absolute...
...Therefore, Berry continues, there is no longer any such thing as a mid-term vacancy, and every new commissioner is entitled to a full six years...
...Who has responded by refusing to seat him at commission business meet-ings—and by somehow persuading a puppet-like Victoria Wilson to stick around in his place...
...But the "cease to exist" part was delayed for . . . well, several decades, actually...
...Under its authorizing statute, the commission was to deliver a report on that subject by the end of 1959, and two months later it would "cease to exist...
...Specifically, the administrative structure of the agency was amended by law to provide for a strictly bipartisan group of eight commissioners, four each appointed by the president and Congress, and all serving staggered, six-year terms...
...That Berry is being supported in her war against the government by congressional Democrats, on the other hand, is . . . well, we're not sure what to make of that, but it's nothing to be proud of...
...You can probably guess the rest...
...Furthermore, Berry is widely loathed for her propensity to call people who frustrate her whims "racists" or "Uncle Toms...
...Victoria Wilson, in particular, is entitled to serve until January 2006...
...Thus, too, the much bally-hooed "discrimination hotline" the commission established for Muslim and Arab Americans in the aftermath of September 11, which for some reason connected callers to a dating service promising introductions to "exciting people...
...From there she has vowed to resist the authority of American law by any means necessary...
...And Mary Frances Berry knows perfectly well what she is doing today: violating the law so as to destroy, for her own convenience, the same system of staggered terms she herself proposed, again for her own convenience, in 1983...
...It will take many months, no doubt, but the White House will win this case...
...So Mary Frances Berry, more or less predictably, has decided to ignore the law that grants him authority to depose her dictatorship...
...Thus, the recent series of substance-free commission "studies" purporting to criticize the civil rights records of prominent Republicans who just happen to be involved in nationally significant election races...
...outlived its usefulness, the Reagan administration proposed finally to suspend its operations...
...How, you ask, if the Civil Rights Commission's authorizing legislation forbids more than half its members from belonging to a single political party, has Mary Frances Berry been able to have her way with the agency to such an extent...
...the only thing Democrats have earned from their alliance with Mary Frances Berry is shared responsibility for the abject collapse of an already dysfunctional federal agency...
...President Clinton knew perfectly well what the law was when he appointed Wilson to the commission for an abbreviated two-year term...
...True professionals do not flourish in such an environment...
...And, consequently, what limited work the agency has managed to produce these past few years reflects little more than Mary Frances Berry's defective personality: her peculiar combination of single-minded extremism and rank ineptitude...
...Since being made chairman by President Clinton in 1993— against the stated wishes of her commission colleagues— Berry has run the place like a third-world potentate, employing "haphazard or nonexistent" management rules, in the words of a devastating 1997 General Accounting Office audit, to crush even the mildest dissent...
...Commission on Civil Rights...
Vol. 7 • December 2001 • No. 15
