USA TODAY SEEMS DISAPPOINTED IN THE U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS’ UNWILLINGNESS TO SUPPORT THE PROGRESSIVE LINE:   “60% of People Awaiting Trial Can’t Afford Bail.  A Civil Rights Commission Can’t Agree on Reform.”

The article laments the Commission’s failure to agree on “findings and recommendations” for its bail reform report and extensively quotes my colleague, Michael Yaki:

“We find ourselves in a position where we lack a majority to continue our mission,” wrote Commissioner Yaki, a Democrat. . . .

. . .

Yaki placed the blame at the feet of the newly Trump-appointed commissioners.

“The first action that the conservatives took was to kill a report–much less findings and recommendations–on voting rights that took over a year and a half of investigation and testimony,” Yaki wrote in an email to USA TODAY.

Alas, the killed voting rights report was killed for a reason.  It was a partisan screed.  The bail reform report released yesterday wasn’t exactly brilliant either, but it made more sense to let it go, so long as the Commission was willing to allow the conservative to include their own (dissenting) statements as part of the reports.  Here’s mine.

Prior to Trump’s appointment of Stephen Gilchrist and Christian Adams to the 8-member Commission, my long-time colleague Peter Kirsanow and I could only dissent from reports, since we didn’t have the votes to actually stop a report (or even to affect them much).  Even clear errors in the reports often went through without correction.  We had to content ourselves with writing dissents.

Some of those dissents include this one on immigration detention centers, this one on environmental racism, and this one on jobs for individuals with Down Syndrome. And don’t forget this one on school discipline.  In each case, the Commission’s report had major flaws that in a sane world would have required the draft to be extensively rewritten.

Now that the Commission is split 4-4, you’d think everyone would understand that compromise is necessary to get anything done.  Some members of the progressive caucus, however, don’t seem to have noticed how the situation has changed.  Even small proposals for improving the Commission’s output are often ignored.