The Bush Administration lost its fight earlier this week with the partisan and hatemonger Mary Frances Berry of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. A federal judge, Gladys Kessler, ruled that appointees to the commission are entitled to full six-year terms, even if they are specifically appointed to fill the term of another commissioner. The ruling allows presidents to stack the commission if they wish, by having appointees step down right before a change of administration, and then appoint members en masse. It would take a two-term president to have any hope of cleaning the commission up. The Bush Administration has said that it will appeal the ruling.

If the economy picks up, Berry may begin to wish that the ruling had gone the other way. When her term is up in 2006, she'll be looking for a new job. Hopefully the commission can once again be used to shine a light on real civil rights violations, instead of being a tool for Berry's partisan witch hunts.

And just who is this judge, Gladys Kessler? Well, she's a Clinton appointee who's been in the news before. She was one of three Clinton-appointed judges who decided to take Linda Tripp's suit against Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon and the Clinton adminstration out of Judge Royce Lamberth's courtroom. Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, was hearing the case that involved the illegal disclosure of details from her personnel file at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Kessler also put a hold on the release of the FEC's investigation into the illegal campaign collusion between the Clinton re-election campaign and the AFL-CIO. The two had coordinated campaign messages in Clinton's 1996 campaign, in clear violation of federal law.