Quotas

WHITE HOUSE officials are being blatantly disingenuous when they say they want a civil rights bill that President Bush can sign. Chief of Staff John Sununu and presidential counsel C. Boyden Gray, in fact, seem bent on sandbagging every effort to reach a compromise over quotas, the unresolved issue that Bush said forced him to veto the civil rights bill that Congress passed last year.If he really wants a bill, Bush himself needs to step in now, and call off aides who are working against compromise.

Does George Bush want a civil rights bill, as he says, or does he want an issue? Last Tuesday, Democrats on Capitol Hill announced they would rewrite the controversial "quotas bill," as the White House keeps calling it, to meet objections expressed by the administration. A White House spokesman immediately called the rewrite unacceptable. This was before he or the president had read the new version. Sounds like they want an issue.Some hardliners in the administration think race is just another political issue.

Grandmom Thompson was a thoughtful, methodical person. Growing up, I often watched her make quilts like the prize-winners I see these days at craft shows. Being the impressionable youngster I was, I was always excited over some new bit of information and wanted to find out what she thought.I'd burst in, dying to discuss what I had learned, to be shushed and then quietly debriefed. Watching the latest congressional attempt to pass a civil rights law, I thought back to what she would have said about the political jockeying over it.''Grandmom, Grandmom!

PINEHURST, N.C. -- William J. Bennett, chairman-designate of the Republican Party, appeared yesterday to soften his position on the emotionally charged subject of affirmative action.Addressing a gathering of Republican governors, his first public appearance since President Bush picked him to head the GOP, Mr. Bennett steered clear of the racial issue that many Democrats think is becoming a central element of the GOP's political strategy.Afterward, speaking with reporters, Mr. Bennett tried to clarify his affirmative-action views, which he said had been "overinterpreted" as the first shot of the 1992 campaign.

Three cheers for county prosecutors' plans to appeal a judge's dismissal of charges against a woman accused of driving under the influence of alcohol because, the judge ruled, the police had illegal quotas for issuing DUI citations. It was a misguided decision and should be overturned. On Jan. 5, District Court Judge Sue-Ellen Hantman dismissed a case involving an Ellicott City woman who had been stopped for speeding and then found to have a blood-alcohol content more than twice the legal limit.

The Sun Poll is conducted by Potomac Inc., a nonpartisan, independent firm based in Bethesda. The company has completed 15 statewide surveys for the newspaper since 1998, and it has performed independent surveys for other media outlets since 1986. It is not involved in any of the statewide races for any candidate or political party. Potomac Inc. identifies likely voters by purchasing the most current available data from a commercial vendor, which compiles information from county boards of elections, and creating a call list of those who have voted in previous elections.

WASHINGTON -- Full agreement on language to remove the threat of hiring quotas from the pending civil rights bill reportedly was reached in talks between civil rights and business leaders -- before the corporate negotiators withdrew from the talks under White House pressure.As far as both sides at the negotiating table were concerned, the issue of quotas "is over," according to one source close to the aborted negotiations.The negotiators, who had been meeting privately since December, represented the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a coalition of about 185 organizations, and the Business Roundtable, made up of the chief executive officers of more than 200 major corporations.

BRUSSELS - The European Union has given China until Tuesday to curb the flood of its textile exports to Europe or face a formal trade dispute, with the possible re-imposition of protectionist quotas on some goods as soon as June 15, the European Commission said yesterday. The European Union's trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, and China's chief trade negotiator, Gao Hucheng, failed to defuse the dispute during a meeting in Brussels late Tuesday. Senior aides to the two parties continued talks yesterday, said Claude Viron-Riville, the trade spokeswoman at the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union.

FIRST ON the basketball court and then in the Senate, Bill Bradley of Princeton, the New York Knicks and the state of New Jersey, has built a reputation as a cool performer. With flamboyance all around him in all these settings, he has been known as both athlete and politician as a guy who gets the job done with a minimum of theatrics.That's why the highly emotional assault he has launched and intends to sustain against President Bush on his civil rights record has commanded widespread attention.

THERE IS something particularly demeaning about the way Republicans and Democrats are dealing with the new civil rights bill aimed at countering Supreme Court decisions that have made it harder for workers to bring and win suits charging discrimination in the workplace.This is especially so when you recall that some of Congress' finest moments of this century came in the 1950s and 1960s when civil rights legislation was instrumental in removing or reducing the single most odious social blot on the national image.