Given vexing experiences in his first administration, once and future President Donald Trump is well aware of the resistance he will face from the Swamp, the vast horde of left-wing bureaucrats that inhabit the executive branch.
They see it as their political duty to impede, resist, and sabotage every policy priority of a Republican president, especially Trump, and to implement left-wing policies.
With that in mind, the president-to-be has clearly been picking nominees to head executive branch agencies who will shake up that Swamp.
But Trump and his advisers need to understand that there are other, lower-level, non-Cabinet positions over which he has authority to make appointments and where it is also important that he find the same type of nominees.
He needs individuals willing to challenge the bureaucracy and turn around a ship of state that has been heading in the wrong direction for a long time.
Those individuals who shouldn’t care what the editorial pages of The New York Times or The Washington Post say about them and, in fact, should realize that if those left-wing propaganda organs approve of their actions, then they are probably doing the wrong thing.
A prime example of that is the staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, who is appointed by the president with the concurrence of the commissioners under 42 U.S.C. §1975b.
The commission is an independent agency established in 1957 when we were in the midst of real civil rights fights. It has no executive power and can only hold hearings and issue reports and studies on civil rights issues.
But it has a power that should not be underestimated; namely, the power to create storylines and narratives all stamped with the imprimatur of the commission. The commission even has subpoena power.
Just in the past few years, it has falsely opined that Trump’s Federal Emergency Management Agency made racist decisions in handing out hurricane relief and that the right to self-defense is racist.
Despite having some good commissioners appointed by Trump during his first term and Republican in Congress, it has long since outlived its usefulness and has turned into an agency that promotes every bizarre, unsupported claim of the far Left and publishes inaccurate, biased propaganda that masquerades as serious research.
Republicans currently hold four seats and liberals hold four. Like many split bodies in Washington, the staffers take advantage of the even split.
And the staff are almost all uniformly left-wing. Thankfully, one of them—current staff Director Mauro Morales—is on the way out and needs to be replaced posthaste by Trump. In an example of the typical nepotism of Washington between the government and radical advocacy groups, Morales is married to Janet Murguia, the president of UnidosUS, formerly known as the National Council of La Raza.
You can see the mindset in the internal email that Morales sent on Jan. 3 to the eight commissioners who run the agency as well as the commission’s staff, announcing his resignation as of Jan. 17. Morales, who was appointed by President Barack Obama—and unfortunately, not replaced during the first Trump administration—bragged about bringing “national attention” to the “mistreatment of immigrant women and children; the unprecedented rise of hate crimes; the deaths of black Americans because of excessive police use of force; the maternal health of women of color; and the assault on voting rights by powerful forces seeking to suppress and intimidate voters.”
Not exactly the type of nonpartisan, objective, neutral individual you would want running a federal agency, but typical of the civil service ideologues I encountered in my years in the federal government.
The eight commissioners, four appointed by the president and four appointed by Congress, are supposed to run the agency. But you wouldn’t know that from the reign of Morales, who ran the agency with dictatorial assurance, doing everything he could to block the Republican commissioners.
Sources inside the commission tell me that:
- At one hearing, he cut off questions by Commissioner Pete Kirsanow who was asking a witness questions about discrimination against Asian college students, telling Kirsanow he could no longer ask questions.
- When the commissioners—Democrat and Republican alike—asked to have an opportunity to be introduced to the staff and learn about the work they do, Morales refused and the commissioners were prohibited from interacting with the staff.
- Morales was so paranoid about preventing the commissioners from knowing what he was doing that he installed a high-end security lock on his office door that is usually kept locked, even when he is in the office. “This combination lock is the frequent jest of some of the commissioners,” a source told me, “who wonder what top secret documents he must be keeping in his office, since such locks are normally used by offices involved in national security or narcotics investigations.”
- Morales basically refused to report his activities to the commissioners, routinely stating at public meetings that he had nothing to report to the commissioners or the public about his work. When he would offer to answer questions outside of such meetings, even then he would seldom actually respond.
- Without getting the approval of the commissioners, Morales turned the commission into a virtual agency, allowing staff to work at home with little supervision, and with only rare occasional visits to the commission offices in D.C.
- Morales hired a slew of far-left ideologues in key civil rights positions within the commission, essentially engaging in political hiring.
- With the assistance of the Democratic chairwoman of the commission, Rochelle Garza (who lost the race for attorney general of Texas to Ken Paxton), Morales constantly canceled scheduled commission meetings, in an apparent effort to thwart the authority of the Republican commissioners and give the left-wing staff more power to run the agency without their supervision.
- As just one example of Morales’ machinations, he manipulated one study of the commission sponsored by Commissioner J. Christian Adams (a Trump appointee) to study the harmful impact of crime increases in minority communities due to “defund the police” policies and the election of rogue prosecutors. Morales refused to call witnesses requested by the commissioners and engaged in other actions resulting in a study that was such a farce that Adams voted against the final report, even though he sponsored the study. The report went off the rails: Instead of studying the effects of increased crime on minorities, the study purported to conclude that crime wasn’t increasing, which would be quite a surprise to the residents of urban areas such as New York and Chicago. But Morales’ politics are such that he would not allow a truthful study to come out about the harmful effects of anti-law enforcement policies, which he wholeheartedly supports.
The bottom line is this: Every political appointment that Trump and his Cabinet secretaries make inside every executive branch agency, board, and independent commission should be a hard-charging individual who believes in the Constitution, the rule of law, and principles of fairness, and in limiting the power and reach of the federal government so that it does not unduly interfere in our lives.
Mauro Morales leaves behind a federal agency with a large staff and outsized budget. Trump should replace him with someone who will undo the extensive damage that Morales has caused.