Does the White House Need a Civil Liberties Advisor?

University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey R. Stone would like to see the next president appoint a cabinet-level official to oversee civil liberties concerns:

Presidents have a wide range of official advisers. There is a secretary of defense, a secretary of labor, a national security adviser, to name just a few. The next president should create a new executive branch position: a civil liberties adviser. Within the highest councils of every administration there should be a respected public official whose charge it is to defend our civil liberties against all comers.

I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea, but the practical usefulness of such a position would be limited. The Bush administration inherited a viable Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice, but stacked it with yes-men with no background in civil rights. Now its only significant claim to fame, in seven and a half years, has been the selective prosecution of a black Democratic official in Mississippi for suppressing white voter turnout. Under the Bush administration, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has been similarly co-opted; instead of reducing school segregation and opportunity disparities, it has targeted school desegregation and affirmative action programs.

In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the dystopian Oceania boasts a Ministry of Truth responsible for misinformation, a Ministry of Plenty responsible for strict rationing, and a Ministry of Peace responsible for war. Any official appointed by an anti-libertarian president to head up a Department of Civil Liberties would serve a similarly useless purpose.

Related: Bush on Civil Liberties