Posted on 07/11/2018 8:07:48 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Last month, the Senate voted to confirm Kenneth L. Marcus as assistant secretary for civil rights in the Department of Education. The vote was 50-46, with not one Democrat supporting him—a point I will return to presently. In that position, he will head up the Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR).
This is the second time Marcus has held the post since he was “delegated the authority” to run OCR during the administration of George W. Bush.
During his career, Marcus, a University of California-trained lawyer, has also served as staff director of the United States Commission on Civil Rights and in 2011 founded the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. He has written about the problem of anti-Semitism, most recently a book entitled The Definition of Anti-Semitism.
Since Marcus clearly is well-qualified for the job, why the party line vote? Why were no Democrats willing to vote in favor of him?
The short answer is that Marcus does not hold with either the procedural or the substantive idea that the Democratic Party has embraced for the transformation of American education. Let’s look first at procedure.
During the Obama administration, the OCR came under the control of appointed officials who, like the president, were eager to shape education policy in line with their views. Their problem was the fact that executive departments are not given a free hand to write or rewrite the law. Under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), whenever a federal agency wants to revise or update existing law, it must follow a deliberately time-consuming path of first giving public notice of intended rule-making, then allowing public comment on proposed rules, and finally formally adopting whatever new rule emerged after notice and comment.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
Instead of making that office run better - a GOP establishment agenda - do the progerssives work but do it better - the office should be eliminated.
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