'A Threat to Our Domestic Institutions' - High times for a racial ambulance chaser.

These are glory days for Mary Frances Berry. After years of neglect, the head of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is back in the news. The voting mess in Florida last November is one of the best things ever to happen to her. Thanks to her commission's subpoena powers, she's been able to pull off a feat that other left-wing activists could only dream of doing: dragging Gov. Jeb Bush and Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris in front of her panel and treating them with the full dose of disrespect they deserve for denying Al Gore the presidency. When Bush showed up for his grilling in the ballroom of a Holiday Inn on January 11, the governor had barely leaned into his microphone-"I didn't get to have an opening remark, but I'm pleased that you're here and . . ."-before Berry cut him off. "If you have any opening remarks, you will submit them for the record, and we're sorry we don't have time," she snapped. It was difficult to hear Bush complete his sentence: ". . . we welcome you to Tallahassee." Berry spent the entire time treating him with contempt, and then denounced Harris's testimony as "laughable." There was another hearing a month later, in Miami, and Berry has promised more still. She says she'll subpoena Bush again for a new round of browbeating. She's loving every minute of it.

Mary Frances Berry is one of the ambulance chasers of the civil-rights movement. Every hiccup in American race relations finds her sprinting to the scene, ready to exploit and agitate. When New York City police officers shot an unarmed Amadou Diallo, she was there-and her pliant commission banged out a hasty and half-baked report on brutality just as the would-be Senate race between Hillary Clinton and Mayor Rudy Giuliani was intensifying. When Jesse Jackson screamed about the suspensions of black high-school students who rioted in Decatur, Ill., she threw the credibility of her commission behind the bogus charges. When the country was treated to a black-church-burning scare-a hoax-she went into hysterics. She hollered about racism, and simply couldn't stomach the thought that certain conservatives were willing to help. When the Christian Coalition offered to pay for rebuilding efforts, she said, "You have the very people who created the context for the fires rushing over and saying, 'Let us help you put them out.'"

Now she has targeted the Sunshine State, and people are paying attention. At the commission's meeting on March 9, she boasted that her panel is the only branch of the government at any level conducting an investigation of voting-rights abuses in Florida. She promises a full report by the first week of June, but there's no question what it will find. "Voter disenfranchisement appears to be at the heart of the issue," she said, reading from a statement the commission then adopted, even though it failed to cite a single example of intentional discrimination on the part of any Florida official. Commissioners Russell Redenbaugh and Abigail Thernstrom objected, but Berry gaveled them into silence.

Berry has gone on the warpath against the Bush brothers before. Last spring, she attacked Jeb Bush's plan to phase out race-based admissions at Florida colleges and universities. (Bush's proposal is "no substitute for strong, race-conscious affirmative action," she said.) She was so desperate to attack Bush, she violated commission rules by failing to announce in the Federal Register that her statement would be discussed at the next monthly meeting and instead pushed it through on less than a week's notice-so that its release would coincide with a legal action taken by the NAACP and NOW. She rejected an offer to meet with Bush before putting out the statement, and later penned an article for the now-defunct black-activist magazine Emerge on Bush's "One Florida" plan. It was entitled "Jeb Crow."

Berry insists that she's on a "fact-finding" mission in Florida, but her crusade is plainly partisan. Last fall, she protested the presidential-election result when it was still uncertain. "We are either in a position in the next few weeks-those of us who believe in the cause of human rights near and far-of having to mobilize, nudge, and use our elbows to make sure that Al Gore stays on the right path," she said at a community college in New York on November 17. "Or we're in a position of having to mobilize for an all-out campaign to make the Bush ...