A Civil Rights Struggle Ahead
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The Senate is headed for a confirmation fight over Lani Guinier, President Clinton’s nominee to be Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Conservative Republicans see a chance to shoot down a Democratic nominee using her own academic writing for gunpowder. The battle will be demagogic, witness the early use of canards like “racism in reverse” by politicians who never gave civil rights high priority. Nothing less than the health of the Voting Rights Act, a crowning achievement of American justice, is at stake. The core question is whether Ms. Guinier, a veteran litigator, has the philosophy and political sense to be the custodian of that act. These matters are in doubt and must be tested in hearings still weeks away. Partisan attacks from senators hostile to the act should not decide her fate. It should hinge on her ideas and her ability to command a job of historic importance. Based on what the Senate’s hearings disclose, the Clinton Administration may find that this nomination cannot win confirmation. Ms. Guinier’s writings in professional journals suggest that she would interpret the Voting Rights Act in novel, even aberrant ways. If these writings are viewed as a scholarly search for new ways to root out isolated, deeply resistant discrimination, then they seem like creative theorizing. But if they represent an agenda for reorganizing democratic institutions, they seem disqualifying. Her articles depict legislatures and local councils that, for all the political gains under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, remain racially polarized with blacks unable to influence laws or governance. Downplaying the changes in Southern governance since 1965, she dismisses “majoritarian” voting as inherently discriminatory. As for the notable and formerly impossible elections of black politicians like Gov. Douglas Wilder of Virginia, she questions whether he is an “authentic” figure for blacks — because he owes his job to white voters as well. Such visions give rise to exotic legal remedies, some of which have been tried only rarely. A state or locality found in violation of the Voting Rights Act, in her view, might fairly be required to abandon legislative districts and hold elections that recognize self-identified interest groups using cumulative voting techniques. Even more disturbing are Ms. Guinier’s ideas about legislatures. She posits court orders requiring minority vetoes or internal rules requiring legislatures to conduct less voting and more jury-like negotiations demanding unanimity. This is a recipe for governmental gridlock and is blind to history, as well. Minority constituencies suffer more from legislative deal making than from open votes. Indeed, the voting law is valuable precisely because it has changed the racial makeup of governing bodies and forced them toward the kinds of consensus of which Ms. Guinier, on the basis of her writing, seems unaware. The Voting Rights Act has made politics accessible to the formerly disenfranchised, electing thousands of minorities first in the South and then nationwide. It halted decades of voting rights denials, both blatant and subtle. It imposed Federal review over certain states and localities, most with histories of shifting their election rules as fast as civil rights lawyers could strike down old dodges. More : query.nytimes.com |