Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 3, 1990 TAG: 9006030063
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Baltimore Sun
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Nevertheless, whether the bill opens or closes the door on quota hiring is the key issue in the debate over it.
It is the issue President Bush apparently will use as his yardstick in deciding whether to sign the bill. He told civil rights advocates May 17 that he wanted to sign a civil rights bill, but would not sign a "quota bill."
The legislation at issue, also known as the Kennedy-Hawkins bill, aims to reverse the effects of five Supreme Court decisions last year that many regarded as having undermined federal law against racial discrimination in employment.
The only thing that appears to be in doubt about its passage is whether Congress could override a presidential veto. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh has warned publicly that he will advise Bush to veto the bill if the quota issue is not resolved to the White House's satisfaction.
Some civil rights leaders classify the quota issue as a "bugaboo," to use the description of Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. They say the specter of quotas has been raised by conservatives who oppose the bill because of its aims and regardless of its contents.
They also doubt Bush is getting a clear picture of the bill's potential effect from his conservative-oriented civil rights policy triumvirate: Thornburgh; C. Boyden Gray, the president's counsel; and White House chief of staff John Sununu.
Opponents of the legislation insist quotas are a real issue. They say the bill would induce employers to adopt quota systems of hiring to avoid job-discrimination lawsuits or to answer charges of employment bias if they are hauled into court.
Ralph Neas, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the 180-organization coalition that is spearheading the effort for passage of the Kennedy-Hawkins bill, defines a quota as "a fixed number" of minority or female employees who are hired "regardless of their qualifications." He says such quotas have "never been required by civil rights law."
Arthur Fletcher, the new chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and Bush's middleman in arranging meetings with civil rights leaders, agrees that a quota is "a fixed number" of minority or female employees. But Fletcher specifies the number becomes a quota only when it is "mandated by a court" as a "remedy" after an employer has failed to show the court a "good-faith effort" to eliminate discrimination from its business practices.
The Kennedy-Hawkins bill would return to an approach to employment discrimination cases set in a unanimous decision in 1971. In a case known as Griggs vs. Duke Power Co., the court held unanimously that once a plaintiff identified an employer's practice as discriminatory, it was up to the employer to show that the practice served a "business necessity."
The Leadership Conference - from which a small cadre of specialists was drawn to help drafting the Kennedy-Hawkins bill - says "it is an extraordinary distortion for the administration to suggest that restoring the rule of Griggs is somehow rooted in racial quotas."
The debate over the quota issue illustrates the pressure brought to bear on Bush in civil rights policy.
Civil rights advocates and the nation's black community, which have hailed Bush's rhetoric and his accessibility to civil rights leaders as turnabouts from the Reagan years, are warning that he must now back up his image with concrete action: signing the Kennedy-Hawkins bill.
The civil rights community publicly hopes Bush will "participate in the bipartisan consensus," as Neas puts it, by signing the bill. They are not yet saying publicly what they believe privately: that they will have the votes in Congress to override a Bush veto if his conservative constituency pushes him to that.
by CNB