Raw Story
Using a questionable, unprecedented maneuver President Bush has installed a solid Republican majority on a supposedly bipartisan civil rights panel, leading it to abandon racial justice and civil rights cases in favor of arguing against school integration and affirmative action.
The eight-member US Commission on Civil Rights has served for half a century as the nation’s watchdog against racism and discrimination. Neither party is meant to have more than four members, but Bush effectively “installed a fifth and sixth Republican on the panel in December 2004, after two commissioners, both Republicans when appointed, reregistered as independents,” Charlie Savage reported in the Boston Globe Tuesday.
“I don’t believe that [the law] was meant to be evaded by conveniently switching your voter registration,” Commissioner Michael Yaki, one of the two remaining Democrats, told the paper.
(Original Article)