George Will: Retire the Civil Rights Commission

George Will asks an important question about the Civil Rights Commission in his column today, "Why not retire the commission?" Even though its budget is a paltry $9 million by Washington standards and is now in conservative control under the leadership of Gerald Reynolds, he has two important reasons for eliminating the organization:

One is that someday Democrats will again control the executive branch and may again stock the commission with extremists -- [Mary Frances] Berry celebrated Communist China's educational system in 1977, when she was assistant secretary of education; she made unsubstantiated charges of vast "disenfranchisement" of Florida voters in 2000 -- from the wilder shores of racial politics. The second reason for terminating the commission is that civil rights rhetoric has become a crashing bore and, worse, a cause of confusion: Almost everything designated a "civil rights" problem isn't.

The previous Chairman of the commission, Mary Frances Berry, enjoyed a career that, according to Will, "mixed tawdry peculation, boorish behavior and absurd rhetoric." Incidentally, this is the same woman who was Chancellor at the University of Colorado when the brilliant decision was made to hire Ward Churchill. (She now proudly teaches at my alma mater, The University of Pennsylvania - I'm so proud.)