Back in November, The Boston Globe's Charlie Savage reported on how the Bush administration had stacked the U.S. Civil Rights Commission with Republicans -- two GOP commissioners had switched their registration to independents after being appointed, clearing the way for the administration to appoint two more Republicans. The scheme was entirely legal, the administration said, and the Justice Department, in a memo from the Office of Legal Counsel, had said so. But now a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has found the OLC memo "problematic" and says that if someone were to challenge the arrangement in court, the administration would probably lose.
You can read the report, which was prepared at the request of counsels on the Senate Judiciary Committee staff, here.
The commission was created by the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and is supposed to serve as a watchdog for discrimination. But there hasn't been much of that during this administration. Savage reported that the coup shifted "the commission's emphasis from investigating claims of civil rights violations to questioning programs designed to offset the historic effects of discrimination."
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