The Beltway Circus Rolls on at U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

If you miss the flurry of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus now that the animals are gone, you might catch the next meeting of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. The kind of circus one sees all too often in the nation’s capital is alive and kicking at this federal body.

The United States Commission on Civil Rights was established in 1957 and given the task under federal law of investigating and reporting on important civil rights issues. With four members appointed by the President, two from the House of Representatives, and two from the Senate, it is currently split four to four between left and right. 

As I explained in a recent article, while the commission has no executive authority, its influence should not be underestimated. It has “the power to create storylines and narratives all stamped with the imprimatur of the commission.”  The left has continually used it when it has been in control to spread false stories about the state of civil rights in this country today, disseminating myths, lies, and propaganda like the claim that the right to self-defense is racist.

It is one of the many boards and commissions that President Donald Trump has been trying to reform, and it is one of the federal agencies most in need of such reform.

On January 20, 2025, hours after being sworn in, Trump picked Commissioner Peter Kirsanow to be the new chairman of the commission. Yet just last Friday, the commission held hearings on the use of foreign languages in government services, and holdover Chair Rochelle Garza, a hardcore leftist, refused to yield her chairmanship to the vice-chair or Kirsanow.

For anyone questioning President Trump’s full-court press against the Beltway Swamp, Garza’s intransigence shows how bureaucrats will fight to the bitter end to resist the results of the 2024 election.

Across the federal government in almost every department, agency, and commission, Trump is up against unelected bureaucrats seeking to preserve their own power. Garza is just the latest example.

Garza was the failed Democratic candidate for attorney general in Texas in 2022. Ken Paxton crushed her by ten percent in the only statewide race the Democrats had any hope to win. Her electoral thrashing apparently qualified her to be selected by President Joe Biden in 2023 to chair the Civil Rights Commission.

Despite Peter Kirsanow, a longtime member of the commission, being picked by President Trump on January 20 as the new chair of the commission, Garza won’t relinquish the gavel. 

Last week, the White House sent the commission yet another notice of Kirsanow’s designation and Garza’s de-designation as chair. Despite that, at last Friday’s commission meeting, Garza refused to relinquish the chair (full video here).

Commissioner J. Christian Adams made a parliamentary inquiry whether it was even “possible or prudent” for Garza to sit as chair considering President Trump’s action.

But Garza dug in, insisting she was the chair because the President’s de-designation of her had no legal merit. When Adams asked for a ruling from the Commission’s general counsel, David Ganz, he refused to provide one. Instead, he said he would have to “consult” with the White House Counsel for an answer to Adams’ inquiry. Ganz has the White House notice; what does he need to “consult” about?

In the meantime, Garza is still arrogantly running the Civil Rights Commission. Since the President has removed her from serving as Chair, at the very least, she should turn the gavel over to the Vice Chair, yet she is refusing to do so. Moreover, Garza is blocking Kirsanow’s assent to chair by fomenting opposition among her caucus. Under federal law (42 U.S.C. § 1975), a majority of the commission must concur in the president’s choice of chairman. Garza is clinging to the chairmanship despite the fact that she is no longer the chair, and under the plain terms of the statute, until a vote confirms Pres. Trump’s choice, the vice chair “shall act in place of the Chairperson.”

This stubborn effort to cling to power is stranger still considering the fiscal mismanagement of the Civil Rights Commission on her watch. I have obtained accounting documents from a source showing the commission has run up an $800,000 deficit while Garza has been chair. That’s mere peanuts at most federal agencies, but at a federal commission with only a $13 million budget, it raises serious questions about where the money went.

Financial deficits aren’t the only legacy of Garza’s tenure. She has hidden from other commissioners bipartisan inquiries from Congress asking the commission to investigate antisemitism on college campuses. She failed to make nominations to state civil rights commission advisory committees as required by federal law. 

Garza has cancelled multiple scheduled meetings of the commission, although no one knows if that is because she doesn’t want to travel from Brownsville, Texas, or prefers to run the commission without other commissioners interfering in what she does. She even allowed the civil rights commission’s designees to the important Election Assistance Commission advisory board—a critical board for clean elections on which I also serve—to sit unfilled and vacant for over a year. Garza has neglected her duties in multiple ways.

A strong case can be made that her misbehavior falls within the provisions of part (e) of the statute that allows a president to remove a member of the commission “for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”

Garza is a DEI activist, a true believer that seems not to have understood the tectonic political shifts that occurred in last November’s elections. She runs the Texas Civil Rights Project, an open-borders advocacy organization that, in their own words, “envisions a border state that respects the right to migrate.” Her “Beyond Borders Project” fights “for migrants to move across our border with dignity… our team aims to eliminate policies that perpetuate the harmful effects of militarization, cultural erasure, imprisonment, and exclusion along the Texas-Mexico border.”

The Civil Rights Commission has an outsized voice to members of Congress. That’s another reason Garza is dug in, to maintain control over the commission’s propaganda promoting a race-centric vision of civil rights, where color of skin matters more than content of character. While Garza holds fast to the chair, she controls the commissions’ social media feed to attack Donald Trump, and anyone opposed to the racial policies that President Trump is trying to clear out of every nook of the federal government. Those discriminatory racial policies have not been cleared out at the commission.

I wrote previously that the commissioner’s staff director had to go. Ex-staff director Mauro Morales had the good sense to resign after my piece. He understood his days were numbered, even though he enjoyed an annual salary of $170,000 as a federal employee and presided, with Garza, over inaction, mismanagement, and leftist activism. 

The President should quickly appoint his replacement as the commission’s staff director, a power Trump has under federal law (42 U.S.C. § 1975b), also with the concurrence of the commissioners. 

But as long as Rochelle Garza keeps pretending she is the chair of the civil rights commission, the circus continues. When it comes to the commission, President Trump is in the right and Garza is in the wrong. But swamp creatures like her don’t give up power willingly.

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