Gerald Reynolds is an inspired choice to head the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights.
An African-American conservative, Reynolds replaced the disgraceful Mary Frances Berry, who made the commission a circus.
Reynolds is a vast improvement over Berry, no doubt about that. But George Will raises an important question: Why not abolish this obsolete commission altogether? “Does anyone really think America suffers from an insufficiency of talk about race?” Will asks.
The mission of the commission has been accomplished. “Reynolds rightly says that the core function of the civil rights laws, which required ’a lot of heavy lifting by the federal government,’ was to dismantle a caste system maintained by law,” Will writes. “But that has been accomplished.”
Not only is its mission accomplished, the commission is expensive ($9 million a year). But the real reason is should be abolished is that…
“…someday Democrats will again control the executive branch and may again stock the commission with extremists — 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.”