Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 2, 1993 TAG: 9306020148
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Her nomination has attracted intense criticism for articles she has written about the Voting Rights Act, which her critics say make her a proponent of extreme race-based proposals.
A senior Democratic senator said Tuesday night that about two dozen Senate Democrats have told the White House that it must withdraw the Guinier nomination, noting that she is likely win approval from only a small minority of the 18 members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
"I don't see how she can survive," a senior White House official said after Clinton named David Gergen as counselor to the president over the weekend as part of an effort to signal that the White House was firmly fixed in the political mainstream.
Guinier (pronounced gwa-NEAR), a 43-year-old law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was nominated by Clinton on April 29 to be assistant attorney general in charge of the civil rights division of the Justice Department.
Sen. Joseph Biden, the Delaware Democrat who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, gave only the barest suggestion that Guinier could be confirmed.
"If she can come up here and explain herself, convince people that what she wrote was just a lot of academic musing, who knows?" Biden said in a telephone interview from Delaware. "I suppose it's conceivable that she could be confirmed. If she comes up here and says she believes in the theories that she sets out in her articles and is going to pursue them, not a shot."
At the White House, an official said that there was a sharp division of opinion within the administration about whether Guinier could still win confirmation.
"Unfortunately, she's been demonized to a degree that it makes our problem very complicated," the official said.
In law review articles and elsewhere, Guinier has said that although the Voting Rights Act had given blacks a chance to elect blacks at all levels of government, that had often proved insufficient.
Even if blacks elect blacks, Guinier has argued, they will remain in the minority and may be consistently outvoted and ignored by the white majority. For such cases, she has proposed a variety of voting schemes to give minorities a greater influence over legislative outcomes.
To her critics, her theorizing is grounded in a troubling and hardened "we-they" view of racial politics and an insupportable interpretation of the scope of the Voting Rights Act, which she would be in charge of enforcing if confirmed.
Her supporters say her views have been caricatured, largely by right-wing interest groups who are looking to use her as a vehicle to wound the president.
by CNB