Quota Bill

WHAT'S THE price of playing politics with people's civil rights? For America's workers, it comes to two years of lost protection. It was two years ago that the Supreme Court issued a series of rulings stripping minorities and women of legal safeguards against job discrimination -- safeguards they'd taken for granted since 1971. It was two years ago that a majority of the lawmakers on Capitol Hill agreed that those safeguards should be restored.But it wasn't until last Thursday that the Republican president and the Democratic leaders of the Senate came up with compromise legislation they all could live with.

Washington NOW THAT Pat Buchanan and David Duke have come out swinging as conservative rebels who'll challenge George Bush in the Republican primary, confused voters wonder, "Which is which? What's the difference between them?"Glad you asked, Confused Voters.Pat Buchanan is the burly, pugnacious Irishman. Looks like a bartender in a city taproom. Gets mad quickly. Sometimes flashes a wicked grin. Talks like a right-wing editorial writer, which he once was.David Duke is the skinny, blond guy with the cosmetically redesigned nose.

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration signaled yesterday that the president will veto a new civil rights bill if it remains, as it is now, similar to the one he vetoed last year.That indication launched what is likely to be a bitter and protracted political debate over whether the bill would pave the way for employers to use racial hiring quotas.John R. Dunne, assistant attorney general for civil rights, told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil Rights that the proposed 1991 bill would result in the use of quotas and, therefore, that it "is not legislation the administration can support."

WEST POINT, N.Y. -- President Bush declared yesterday that he wanted to "destroy the racial mistrust that threatens our national well-being as much as violence or drugs or poverty" and called for support for his civil rights bill, saying it would avert employment quotas."

WASHINGTON -- The leader of nine Senate Republicans trying to reach a compromise with the Bush administration on civil rights legislation said yesterday that he would not negotiate any further and that White House Chief of Staff John Sununu offers no movement.Sen. John C. Danforth, R-Mo., who has been leading the compromise effort, announced that he was introducing new civil rights legislation embodying those agreements the Republican senators had been able to reach in word-by-word negotiations with Mr. Sununu and Attorney General Richard L. Thornburgh.

DON'T BOTHER me, says President Bush, with the facts. House Democrats, alarmed at the slogan-slinging that defiles their proposed Civil Rights Act of 1991 as a "quota" bill, are revising it to forbid hiring quotas for minorities and women. The president hasn't seen the revised language yet, but hey -- he doesn't have to.Bush may not like the proposed legislation for substantive reasons. But for him to persist so unreasonably in the quota canard invites the belief that he is driven, instead, by ugly political reasons.

There's a lot of history behind President Bush's veto this week of the Civil Rights Act of 1990, but it is not a pretty chapter. It goes back more than 25 years, to the time when Alabama's segregationist governor, George Wallace, first ran for president exclusively on opposition to the Civil Rights bill of 1964; the Republican Party's presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, blew Wallace out of the race by announcing that he opposed the civil rights bill...

William J. Bennett, erstwhile secretary of education and drug czar, emerged this week as the new Republican designated hitter. In an article in the Wall Street Journal, he speciously attacked the Civil Rights Act of 1991 as a "quota bill."Neither the message nor the forum was new; you can set your clock by how quickly the Wall Street Journal comes out against any meaningful civil rights legislation. In his article Bennett dutifully peddled the Journal's canard that Martin Luther King would be horrified at "quota bills," because all he ever wanted was "a color-blind society" in which people are judged "on the content of their character" and "not on the color of their skin."

Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV says President Bush is lying. That is a harsh word. But it is a euphemism for what the West Virginia Democrat is really accusing the president of doing. He is really accusing him of resorting to racist demagogy for political gain."Republicans want to drive people apart to win elections," Senator Rockefeller told an AFL-CIO conference recently. "They want to turn our attention from what George Bush and Ronald Reagan have been doing for the last 10 years. That's why George Bush is making all that noise about the civil rights bill.

WASHINGTON -- House Democratic leaders are planning to make key concessions on the civil rights bill, including a cap of $150,000 on punitive damages for victims of sex discrimination and sexual harassment.Details of the compromise were being worked out in intensive backstage negotiations in hopes of achieving a veto-proof majority when the House takes up the controversial bill later this month.Democratic strategists said yesterday that their main goal is to shore up support for the bill among Southern conservatives in their party and moderate Republicans, even though the proposed cap is strongly opposed by women's organizations and some House liberals.