Ryan J. Reilly
President Barack Obama on Wednesday appointed two new commissioners to the
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, a federal agency best know recently for its partisan focus on investigating the
New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case. The White House's move will rebalance what was intended to be a bipartisan panel which came under conservative control thanks to a move during the Bush administration to "game" the system.
Obama's appointees to the Commission are Roberta Achtenberg, a former Clinton administration official and a co-founder of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and Marty R. Castro, the president of a strategic planning company who chairs the Illinois Human Rights Commission and sits on several human rights organizations.
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Right now, the balance on the commission is three Democratic appointees versus four essentially Republican appointees (two of whom are actually "independents"), with another position unfilled. Once House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) formally reappoints Commissioner Michael Yaki, the even balance will be restored. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) sent Yaki's papers to Boehner's office in early January, but Boehner's office didn't immediately say when Yaki would be reappointed.
The Bush administration
stacked the commission with conservatives by having two of the commissioners switch their affiliation from Republican to independent. The move, said the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, was legal. But it was also, as former Commission Chairman Gerald Reynolds (a Republican appointee) acknowledged, intended to "
game" the system. The scheme unfolded in 2004, and the panel has since
focused on racism against white people and claimed that measures intended to aid minority groups are discriminatory. More recently, they've
opened up debate on their existence.
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