Free Republic

When scholars enthuse over laws and regulations, they are often the last to notice the unintended consequences of the statutes and rules. “Why is every attempt that involves aggressive enforcement of civil rights laws against your views?” Columbia law professor Theodore M. Shaw asked at a Federalist Society meeting at the Mayflower hotel here in Washington last week. Shaw refused to entertain the possibility that the enforcement he desires may harm the very people the policies are designed to protect. For example, in April 2012, the U. S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission urged employers not to use criminal background checks...

Washington (CNN) -- Members of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission shouted at each other Friday over the Justice Department's decision to drop most of the charges in a 2008 incident in which black militants confronted voters at a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, polling place, leading to charges of voter intimidation. Conservative commission members accused the Justice Department of "stonewalling" the commission's investigation into the dismissal, and called a Justice Department's response to requests for information "breathtaking and insulting." A liberal commission member, in turn, dismissed those complaints as the "last gasps of a conservative majority of this commission." At the end of...

On the first Tuesday in November, two uniformed men arrived at a voting place and took up positions by the entry doors. In the hours that followed, they harassed voters and election officials, hurled racial epithets and physically blocked persons of other races who sought to cast their votes for president of the United States. One of the men brandished a nightstick. Bartle Bull, a civil rights movement veteran, was there. He says it was "the most blatant form of voter intimidation I have encountered in my life in political campaigns in many states, even going back to the work...

<p>The U.S. Supreme Court has finally put an end to the year-long misuse of public funds by the notorious Mary Frances Berry, head of the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights.</p> <p>Without comment, the court yesterday declined to review a unanimous ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals that forbade Berry from blocking President Bush's appointment of Peter Kirsanow to sit on the commission.</p>