Commission itself – argued that it no longer served any useful purpose and conducted partisan investigations meant to embarrass Republicans. After 2004, when Bush appointed two conservative Commissioners who had recently canceled their Republican Party registrations to the two "independent" seats, obtaining a six-member conservative majority bloc, the Commission dramatically scaled back its activities and canceled several ongoing investigations. On September 5, 2007, Commissioner Gail Heriot testified about the agency's value on the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Heriot told the Senate Committee on the Judiciary:If the value of a federal agency could be calculated on a per dollar basis, it would not surprise me to find the Commission on Civil Rights to be among the best investments Congress ever made. My back-of-the-envelope calculation is that the Commission now accounts for less than 1/2000th of 1 percent of the federal budget; back in the late 1950s its size would have been roughly similar. And yet its impact has been dramatic.In 2008, President George W. Bush announced that he would oppose the proposed Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act shortly after the commission issued a report recommending rejection of the bill. In 2018 the Commission reversed its position in a report evaluating the federal government's efforts to meet its trust obligations to Native Americans and Native Hawaiians. During the Barack Obama administration, this conservative bloc reversed its position and began using the commission as a vigorous advocate for conservative interpretations of civil rights issues, such as opposition to the Voting Rights Act and the expansion of federal hate crimes laws. In 2010, Commissioner Abigail Thernstrom, a Republican appointee generally considered part of the commission's conservative bloc, criticized her colleagues' investigation into the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case, describing it as motivated by a partisan "fantasy ... [that] they could bring Eric Holder down and really damage [President Obama]" and arguing that only "a moron" could believe the commission's theory that Obama appointees had ordered DoJ attorneys not to protect the voting rights of white people. In October 2010, Michael Yaki, one of the two Democratic commissioners, walked out of a meeting in protest. In doing so, Yaki deprived the panel of a quorum and delayed a vote on a draft report, which Yaki claimed, is unfairly biased against the Obama administration. Yaki described the panel as a "kangaroo court". President Obama eventually appointed