THE COLLEGE FIX  REPORTS ON LAST WEEK’S 50-47 CONFIRMATION OF KEN MARCUS AS ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF EDUCATION FOR CIVIL RIGHTS:  In a saner world the Marcus nomination would have been uncontroversial, but … well … we may not be in the best of all possible worlds.

A conservative asked me recently why Trump bothered to nominate someone for this job at all.  Why not just leave it vacant?  I was a bit surprised at the question.  But let me explain:

The Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights heads the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Education.  OCR’s Fiscal Year 2017 budget was $108.5 million; it has 12 regional offices around the country and employs armies of lawyers and investigators.  This is the office that gave us the transgender locker room guidance, the sexual assault on campus guidance that denies due process to accuseds, the disparate impact in school discipline guidance, and much more.  Even many liberals understand that OCR’s actions during the Obama Administration were counterproductive.

Leaving the political positions there unfilled doesn’t mean that nothing will happen at OCR.  It means that the policy preferences of civil service employees will reign supreme.  When a left-of-center President is elected, this may not be a disaster for his supporters, since civil service employees tend to be left-of-center (and civil service employees in civil rights offices are often very left-of-center).  When a right-of-center President is elected, leaving positions unfilled means the election has been effectively nullified in a hugely important area of the law.

OCR has very few political appointees in charge of a huge number of civil service employees.  It’s hard enough to ensure that elections will have the consequences when all those positions are filled.  It is impossible when the Senate sits on nominations for extended periods of time.

BTW:  If you want to know why OCR has such a large budget, despite its tendency toward overreach the answer is this:  During the Obama Administration, Congressional Republicans were alerted many times to OCR’s overreach.  But, despite being in the majority and despite the urgings of many (including mine), they were too timid object to large increases in its budget.