Can Republicans Save the Rights Bill?
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Senator John Danforth of Missouri and his group of nine moderate Republican sponsors of compromise civil rights legislation are acting in their party’s finest tradition. They seek to break a Congressional logjam, extricate their party and President from a quagmire over quotas and perhaps deliver a law that the nation’s majorities and minorities can live with. Last year, by impressive margins, the House and Senate passed bills to restore and strengthen job discrimination laws battered by a string of Supreme Court decisions. But President Bush, clinging to his “quota bill” slogans and growing increasingly irritated with people who question his commitment to civil rights, threatens to repeat last year’s veto. Enter the Republican centrists. Republicans have bailed out the nation before when Congress’s right wing blocked civil rights bills. They offer an honor roll, names like Dirksen of Illinois, Mathias of Maryland, Scott of Pennsylvania, Case of New Jersey, Javits and Keating of New York, Kuchel of California and Dole of Kansas. In the House, McCulloch of Ohio and Lindsay of New York made monumental contributions. And just last week, Hamilton Fish of New York helped win passage of a strong bill in the House. History may add a Danforth nine. Most of them give little credence to the White House “quota bill” rhetoric but all insist that Mr. Bush wants a good rights bill. The Danforth package of three bills is designed to split differences between the White House and the House bill. The least controversial bill would overturn five high court decisions that have few defenders. The second bill contains a workable formula for resolving the “quota” issue — imposing a reasonable burden of proof on companies whose job policies exclude too many minorities and women to show that those job rules are legitimate. The third bill requires the most careful examination. It would impose further limits on damages that women, religious and ethnic minorities and the disabled may obtain for intentional discrimination and harassment in the workplace. This bill seems downright peculiar. One provision would channel punitive damages, already severely limited, not to the victims of bigotry but to a trust fund that could flow to victims of criminal violence, a deserving but totally different category. Even so, Mr. Danforth has made a timely and tactful move to get the quota issue off his party’s back, where George Bush put it. A just settlement would also spare Democrats an issue that can only burden their party in 1992. Civil rights, Senator Danforth says, needs attention on its merits: “If there is an issue where political consultants should get lost, this is it.” He’s exactly right. More : query.nytimes.com |