Breaking a Deadlock with TNT

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Three sackings inflame the Civil Rights Commission issue

Though they had long known it could happen, the actual event came as a shock to the three Democrats on the six-member U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. On Tuesday morning, in fact, they had expected pleasant news. The Senate Judiciary Committee seemed likely to approve a bill that would extend the commission's life and retain all its present members, including themselves. But hours before the committee was to meet, the White House gave Mary Frances Berry, Blandina Cardenas Ramirez and Rabbi Murray Saltzman a totally different message. As expressed in a letter hand-carried to Berry's office and signed by Personnel Assistant John S. Herrington, it was: "The President has requested that I inform you that your appointment as a member of the Commission on Civil Rights terminates effective today." The next day their names were unceremoniously removed from the lobby directory at the commission's Vermont Avenue offices in downtown Washington.

The sacked commissioners did not go quietly, however. Instead, the dismissals intensified a political storm in which not only the commission's membership but its continued existence is in question. Berry and Ramirez sued in federal court for an injunction forbidding their removal. The Judiciary Committee postponed its meeting, but the 45-member Senate Democratic Caucus formally denounced the firings. More than 30 Senators and 19 Representatives lined up to sponsor a dramatic bipartisan resolution to convert the commission into a body whose members would be appointed by legislative leaders rather than by the President.

If that effort fails, the angry dispute might prevent any other extension of the commission's legal authority to exist--and that authority expires in less than a month. But even if the save-the-commission movement in Congress goes forward, Ronald Reagan seems likely to achieve--though perhaps in a very unintended way--what a White House statement proclaimed to be the purpose of the firings: "to break the present deadlock" over the commission's membership.

That deadlock has been developing almost since the beginning of the Reagan Administration. The Civil Rights Commission, established in 1957, has no enforcement powers; its members and staff can only investigate racial and sex discrimination renewal and assess the progress of federal efforts to end it. But even that watchdog role has had enough bite to nettle Reagan: for the past two years, the commission has issued a series of reports assailing his Administration for allegedly failing to enforce antibias laws vigorously. The castigation continued even after Reagan dismissed the chairman and vice chairman in November 1981 and won Senate confirmation for two replacements. One of his selectees, Mary Louise Smith, a former head of the Republican National Committee, joined the commission majority in a number of 5-to-1 votes criticizing the Administration.

Last May, Reagan made yet another move: to replace Berry, Ramirez and Saltzman with three other Democrats, putatively closer to the President's way of thinking. They are Morris Abram, former president of Brandeis University; John Bunzel, senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution; and Robert Destro, law professor at Catholic University. Critics who had held still for the 1981 firings howled that Reagan was trying to pack the commission with a majority that would uncritically approve his civil rights record, and lately have questioned whether he has legal power to dismiss commissioners (the law is unclear). The Senate took no action to confirm his appointees. The White House stormed that the three had distinguished civil rights records and were being sidetracked only because they are opposed to school busing and racial and sex quotas in hiring.

The dispute is coming to a head now because the commission's legal authority technically has run out; in fact, the body will cease to exist at all on Nov. 29 unless some kind of renewal legislation is passed. On the House side, the Democratic majority passed a bill that would not only keep the commission alive but prevent the President from removing its members for any cause except malfeasance or neglect of duty. In the Senate, the G.O.P. majority began leaning toward a compromise that would expand the commission to eight members, keeping the present six and seating two of Reagan's nominees. Negotiations between even the Senate and the White House broke down, however, and Reagan acted to force the issue with his firings.

The White House insisted that the fundamental question is the "responsibility of the President to exercise [his] constitutional power of appointment." But Senators of both parties were outraged. Texas Democrat Lloyd Bentsen fulminated that "the President's action is a form of tyranny, the tyranny to put down voices of dissent." Maryland Republican Charles Mathias professed himself "shocked" by Reagan's "callous insensitivity to the efforts of congressional leaders" who had been trying to work out a compromise. John Shattuck, an official of the American Civil Liberties Union, voiced a suspicion common among civil rights activists. Said he: "The President's action was really an effort to bludgeon the Civil Rights Commission out of existence" by making compromise on a reauthorization bill impossible.

The White House insisted that Reagan had accepted several proposed compromises that "the other side" rejected. Whatever the case, the angry climate created by the firings does indeed make the task of crafting a bill that could pass Congress and be signed into law by Reagan look impossible. Accordingly, civil rights lobbyists are trying to drum up support for a concurrent resolution of both chambers that would take the commission out of the Executive Branch entirely and establish it in effect as an arm of Congress. It would have eight members, not six: four appointed by the President Pro Tempore of the Senate (currently South Carolina Republican Strom Thurmond, who is also chairman of the Judiciary Committee) and four by House Speaker Tip O'Neill. The resolution would not need the President's signature to go into effect.

There is no certainty that it can pass, however, and so the commission may after all expire on schedule by month's end. If so, it will die mute. Since a quorum of four is needed to transact any business, the three commissioners remaining after last week's firings cannot even convene an official meeting. Nor, among other things, can they even formally issue a report, drafted in October, that complains that the Administration's budget and staff cuts have hamstrung the enforcement of equal rights laws .

--By George J. Church.

Reported by Anne Constable/Washington

With reporting by Anne Constable/Washington This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.