Civil Rights Watch Dog
The Commission is often referred to as a "Civil Rights Watch Dog" that ensures the federal government is enforcing civil rights laws fairly and evenhandedly. Interestingly, this is a role the Commission has undertaken only in the last few decades. The original Commission was not configured to be an effective watch dog, since all its members were appointed by the President (subject to Senate confirmation)and were subject to dismissal by the President at any time. Moreover, there were no civil rights laws for the federal government to enforce and thus little for the Commission to oversee.
President Ronald Reagan attempted to exercise the power to dismiss by firing Carter appointee Mary Frances Berry. Berry, however, convinced Congress to re-charter the Commission in a way that would protect members from dismissal without cause. It was out of this re-chartering effort that the "watch dog" model for the Commission emerged. Along with Berry, Ford appointee Rabbi Murray Saltzman was fired by President Reagan for referring to Reagan's policy regarding the Commission to that of a "lap dog" rather than a "watch dog."
Under the re-charter, the Commission was given eight members rather than the original six. Only half would be appointed by the President, and a President would ordinarily have to be elected to two terms before he could appoint more than two. First-term Presidents would thus ordinarily have to wait a year or two before they would have any representation at all, and it would take time before all the appointees of previous Presidents would rotate off. The remaining four members would be appointed by Congressional leaders of both houses and both parties. All of this was thought to be crucial to maintaining the Commission's independence from the President, which in turn was thought necessary to the Commission's role as a civil rights watch dog. Since then, the Commission has sometimes been a thorn in the side of sitting Presidents.
Read more about this topic: United States Commission On Civil Rights
Famous quotes containing the words civil rights, civil, rights, watch and/or dog:
“Virtue and vice suppose the freedom to choose between good and evil; but what can be the morals of a woman who is not even in possession of herself, who has nothing of her own, and who all her life has been trained to extricate herself from the arbitrary by ruse, from constraint by using her charms?... As long as she is subject to man’s yoke or to prejudice, as long as she receives no professional education, as long as she is deprived of her civil rights, there can be no moral law for her!”
—Flora Tristan (1803–1844)
“Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“A state that denies its citizens their basic rights becomes a danger to its neighbors as well: internal arbitrary rule will be reflected in arbitrary external relations. The suppression of public opinion, the abolition of public competition for power and its public exercise opens the way for the state power to arm itself in any way it sees fit.... A state that does not hesitate to lie to its own people will not hesitate to lie to other states.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“In any case, raw aggression is thought to be the peculiar province of men, as nurturing is the peculiar province of women.... The psychologist Erik Erikson discovered that, while little girls playing with blocks generally create pleasant interior spaces and attractive entrances, little boys are inclined to pile up the blocks as high as they can and then watch them fall down: “the contemplation of ruins,” Erikson observes, “is a masculine specialty.””
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“My dog lay dead five days without a grave”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)