A federal civil rights commission meeting devolved into chaos last week as Democrats went to great lengths to block a study on whether crime disproportionately impacts minorities — and, by implication, whether soft-on-crime policies create a civil rights issue by subjecting poor blacks to high crime rates.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights consists of eight commissioners, four liberals and four conservatives. But Republicans say Democrats “double-crossed” them by breaking a deal they had made to vote for the report. “Frankly, the four of us feel like we were chumps, that we agreed to the anti-Asian briefing on the condition that we also have a crime victims” report, conservative commissioner Gail Heriot said Friday.
“We were double-crossed, plain and simple,” Republican Commissioner Christian Adams added. The question of who suffers from crime is “an issue that has broad agreement is an important issue in the United States, and it is not a difficult lift,” he said. “I don’t think it’s even controversial.”
Democrats were so adamant in blocking the study on crime victims — which applies standard Democrat logic about any policy that results in “disproportionalities” being evidence of a policy’s racism — that two Democrats newly nominated to the commission by President Joe Biden refused to rectify the “double-crossing” by their predecessors even though they knew it meant their confirmation as chair and vice chair would be blocked.hen-Chair Norma Cantu threw out a series of objections to it, ranging from comparing it to the Tuskegee Experiments — in which the U.S. let blacks die of syphilis — to expressing concern about the “Paperwork Reduction Act.”
The Commission has recently searched for racist policies as evidenced by “disproportionate” outcomes in a wide variety of arenas, from the “Civil Rights Implications of Disaster Relief” to “Racial Disparities in Maternal Health.” It has viewed it as its mission to invoke civil-rights protections for criminal offenders, like “The Civil Rights Implications of Cash Bail.”
But Heriot said she was told that “over my dead body will we even look into the increase in crime” as it relates to whether minorities are disproportionately crime victims.Shortly after reneging on their word to hold a vote on approving the crime victims report, the four Democrats rotated off the commission, their six-year terms having come to an end. They were replaced with four new Democrats, but under the law, the nominees for chair and vice chair can only assume those titles if a majority of the commission consents.
With no chair in place, a staff member who is supposed to simply work for the commissioners improperly “usurped” control to advance a Democrat agenda in the otherwise evenly-divided body, Republicans said. Mauro Morales, a former Obama administration official, is staff director of the commission and is tasked with carrying out the will of the commissioners.
Morales declined to place a vote on the crime victims study on the agenda for Friday’s meeting, while insisting that the commission vote to confirm the chair and vice chair.
Though he began the meeting by saying “I am not substantively participating in this meeting, but because of the current absence of a chair and vice chair, I will be administering it pursuant to our administrative functions,” he was soon barking orders at Republican commissioners.
“I’m Staff Director Morales. You may not like me, but please respect the office,” he ordered Adams.
“Turn off your mic,” he told Heriot. “You can answer when I’m finished.”
Morales said he had the authority to set the agenda because “Under our statute, the chair and the staff director create the agenda for the commission.”
But the statute actually says that “The Chairperson, after consulting with the Staff Director, shall establish the agenda.”
“The staff director is not authorized to establish the agenda, and nobody is authorized to say look we’re going to shove this down your throat,” Heriot said of the confirmation vote.
Republicans said that under the commission’s practices, in the absence of a confirmed chair, the most senior member serves as acting chair — which in this case would be Pete Kirsanow, a Republican.