Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 15, 1990 TAG: 9005150561
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/3 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Bush met with more than a dozen black leaders Monday in the first of a series of listening sessions on the legislation, still awaiting final action in both the House and Senate.
While the White House on Monday appeared to back away from a veto threat the Justice Department made last month, it still expressed concern that some provisions are tantamount to hiring quotas.
NAACP Executive Director Benjamin Hooks said the civil rights groups agreed to have their top lawyers sit down with the administration's top attorneys to search for common ground.
But one adviser, Drew Days, said, "There is a tremendous gap that has to be bridged."
Days, a Yale Law School professor who was the Carter administration's chief civil rights attorney, said White House chief of staff John Sununu had voiced concerns about "ghosts walking about in the legislation" - in the form of business leaders' fears of quotas.
Bush spent more than an hour with the black leaders - twice as long as planned.
"The president would like to sign a civil rights bill, and we will be working toward that end," White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said before the meeting. He said "we are not repeating" the veto threat.
The administration concedes that two Supreme Court rulings narrowing minority workers' rights should be reversed, and has offered its own legislation to do that.
But it is unwilling to go along with the civil rights establishment, which wants to reverse a half-dozen rulings and give women the job protections that minorities now enjoy.
Hooks called it "a question of paramount importance to the black community." He praised Bush's past pronouncements on civil rights and appointments such as making Gen. Colin Powell, who is black, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"The president has acted in such a way that for the first time in my memory a Republican president enjoys a tremendous popularity," said Hooks. "The civil rights bill, in my judgment, will become a litmus test."
John Jacob, president of the National Urban League, said Bush "has used the White House as a bully pulpit to preach justice and fairness and equality. And we saw this legislation as an opportunity to put into action [those] words."
Alixe Glen, a deputy White House spokeswoman, said, "There is room for negotiation . . . [but] there are certain principles that won't change."
The White House remains concerned that the legislation would put a burden of proof on employers "so great that the only way of staying out of court is to have a quota," she said.
Bush will hold two more listening sessions Wednesday with leaders of Hispanic groups, Asian-Americans, women, religious organizations and the disabled. Sununu is meeting separately with business and labor groups.
Arthur Fletcher, chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, defended the bill's approach, saying it would mandate not quotas but goals.
"You're talking to the person who wrote the Philadelphia plan, who put goals, targets and timetables in the first plan that was ever issued 20 years ago," said Fletcher, who was an assistant labor secretary in the Nixon administration.
Robert Woodson, a black conservative, attacked both the congressional bill and Bush's alternative.
Woodson, president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, said the remedies would help only well-paid blacks in unions or professions, not poor, unskilled blacks.
by CNB