Bush Stacks Civil Rights Commision with Anti Civil Rights Repuplicans

The Republicans continue their same tricks of racial discrimination, last month with John Tanner, the top ranking voting rights official at the Justice Department, was caught saying photo ID requirements do not disproportionately disenfranchise minority voters because: “Our society is such that minorities don’t become elderly the way white people do; they die first.”

In November comes a story about how Bush stacked the Civil Rights Commission, which is basically a government run watchdog group. As reported in The Carpetbagger Report, the commission should have no political majority. And technically they didn’t, because two Republicans suddenly changed their party to independent. Thus they have four Republicans and two Republican leaning independents.

Of course I don’t have a problem with the GOP being on the board, except that GOP continually legislates against minorities. And just like many other agencies in the government now perform the opposite roles (USDA relaxes food rules, Homeland Security violates peoples security…) the Civil Rights Commission has released statements and reports that oppose their very name. As reported by the Boston Globe:

[T]he commission has put out a series of reports concluding that there is little educational benefit to integrating elementary and secondary schools, calling for closer scrutiny of programs that help minorities gain admission to top law schools, and urging the government to look for ways to replace policies that help minority-owned businesses win contracts with race-neutral alternatives.

The conservative bloc has also pushed through retroactive term limits for several of its state advisory committees. As a result, some longtime traditional civil rights activists have had to leave the advisory panels, and the commission replaced several of them with conservative activists.

How can the GOP expect to win if they continue alienating the black and Latino vote? Newt Gingrich has even admitted the Republicans are alienating the already small conservative-minority voting bloc. In a country with rapidly changing demographics it looks like the Republican party is headed down a path of self destruction. Which explains why the right is so fearful of abortion.