Ending Affirmative Action

...If we don't, he has a problem, a contradiction even so accomplished a talker as Bill Clinton can't finesse...

...It will improve the odds for a more conservative, Republican Congress, one in which 60 votes are within closer reach...

...But he has decided to pretend that he doesn't, for political reasons involving the support of the civil rights establishment and the Democratic votes it presumably represents...

...And it may help elect a Republican president, who might sweep away a good deal of affirmative action with a single stroke of the pen...

...And he'll get away with that, too, unless Congress preempts the courts and forces a debate on legislative proposals that would kill some preference programs early...

...But he thought even relatively uncontroversial things like "a minority scholarship program" fell into a "gray area...

...the weekly Standard Ending Affirmative Action If you believe, as we do, that affirmative action is inconsistent with common fairness, and has become irrelevant to the problems of race it was created to address, then perhaps you are disheartened these days...

...And he was lying...

...Which is where Senator Dole's legislation, the "Equal Opportunity Act of 1995," comes in...

...Earlier this year, calls for repeal of affirmative action were much the fashion...

...So the Dole language will be stripped or neutered, and both men will be needlessly embarrassed...

...Given Republican courage and persistence, then, one way or the other, sooner or later, federally enforced racial, ethnic, and gender preferences are probably doomed...

...And it would not touch the preference plans of private employers at all, on the perfectly sensible assumption that ethnic and gender classifications imposed by the state are a clear priority for prohibition...

...That iced it...

...He meant the FCC tax deferral that Congress forced him to swallow in March...

...Expect to hear that affirmative action is alive and well...

...And in a matter of days, the Senate will likely act to "preserve" federal ethnic and gender preferences...

...So the best the president can hope for is that lengthy, proliferating litigation delays judicial resolution of federal affirmative action beyond the 1996 election (or until he can appoint another justice to the Court...

...For the most part, in other words, everything's fine...

...No time exists for full-scale hearings and political mobilization...

...Powell's popularity hasn't suffered, either...

...Successful" affirmative action involves the advancement of the less qualified over the more qualified-simply on the basis of biology and inheritance...

...In fact, the report fails to identify a single existing affirmative action program that has either outlived its usefulness or functions in violation of the president's announced "fairness" standards...

...And this Democratic president didn't even complain about it much...

...On June 12, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Adarand Constructors, Inc...

...Pete Wilson endorsed a popular ballot initiative to ban the California state government's practice of race and gender preferences...

...Just a few short months ago there existed a very real prospect of significant reform...

...But further evidence to substantiate that prognosis has lately been in short supply...

...Clinton hopes we will all go back to sleep...

...Clinton's reelection-and thus for a Supreme Court more hospitable to the status quo...

...That would be the "finding" used to justify the Small Business Administration's section 8(a) contracting set-aside, for example...

...Just a few weeks ago in California, for instance, he claimed to have "already abolished one I thought was excessive...

...They will offer statistical disparity studies as evidence of systematic nationwide discrimination...

...I want to know whether there is some other way we can reach any objective without giving a preference by race or gender in some of the programs," Mr...

...In fact, it's probably dying faster than it was at the beginning of the year...

...In the future, no such program may be administered absent a specific finding of discrimination that violates Congressional statute or the Constitution...

...No Democratic president had ever before acquiesced in a restriction of affirmative action...

...And of contracting set-asides for minority-owned businesses-a genuinely controversial and central chunk of federal affirmative action-the president said this: "It's difficult to draw a conclusion that they even do what they were intended to do in the first place...

...And then, after minimal debate, Congress actually voted to abolish one such program: a ludicrous FCC tax deferral granted to broadcasters who sold media properties to "minority controlled" enterprises...

...Generalized disadvantage in the present, historical discrimination in the past, and the interests of "diversity" in the future are no longer sufficient justifications for the federal government to classify and compensate its citizens differently by race...

...He was prepared to defend Head Start, college loans, the earned-income tax credit, and empowerment zones-none of them involving affirmative action, of course...

...And the remedies provided by that program must be narrowly targeted to identified victims...

...Over on the (definitely) Republican side of the aisle, we have the following situation...

...If one of the myriad preference programs that infect the federal bureaucracy should fall outside the frame of this happy picture, why, the president promises to get rid of it pronto...

...But even then, it's hard to see how the High Court could accept as "narrowly targeted" affirmative action remedies that usually apply to more than half the nation's population...

...But understand that what you'll be hearing is wrong...

...And there he will get tripped up...

...Adarand itself involved a program in which race was just one factor...

...President Clinton knows this full well...

...These terms are essentially meaningless, intended to suggest a universe of affirmative action in which the needy are granted a helping hand and nobody ever gets hurt...

...The president will be forced to argue that affirmative action programs, as conducted by the federal government, do not do what we know they do...

...Cheer up...

...But the debate itself will hasten affirmative action's demise...

...David Tell, for the Editors...

...In this very public debate, which we hope Republicans will highlight both in Congress and the presidential campaign, Mr...

...His own report on affirmative action, released six weeks before his trip to California, specifically defends that tax break, and mourns its loss...

...Clinton cannot like his chances...

...No major affirmative action program now employed in the executive branch can survive this test...

...Quite the contrary: He instituted his own review of federal preference programs, and blurted out a vision of acceptable government activity that barely left room for them at all...

...As a legislative matter, prospects for broad-scale reform on the Dole model are probably limited...

...If a serious debate over affirmative action takes place next year, he will have to argue that these programs have succeeded...

...With national polls showing broad opposition to governmentally enforced race preferences, and with a number of relevant judicial challenges moving toward Supreme Court review, President Clinton signed the bill that killed the FCC tax break in March...

...Colin Powell, in brief and general recent comments, has echoed the president's current line: Quotas are bad, but racism persists and affirmative action remains necessary...

...v. Pena that placed federal race preference programs under the "strictest judicial scrutiny," scrutiny that will "seldom provide a relevant basis for disparate treatment...

...The administration's July affirmative action review endorsed elimination of any affirmative action program that creates a "quota," preference for the "unqualified," or "reverse discrimination"-along with any program whose "equal opportunity purposes have been achieved...

...Clinton said at a press conference that month...

...the argument is absurd...

...To protect itself against the defection of this constituency, the administration now argues, against the clear meaning of Adarand, that "inclusion" might still be a significant justification for existing affirmative action programs, and that programs in which race is just one factor in the conferral of benefits might still pass muster...

...Pete Wilson, the first GOP presidential contender to raise a banner against affirmative action, is going nowhere, his campaign a shambles...

...But now the issue seems mostly off the table, and the status quo appears more or less secure...

...Dole's legislation, in pure form at least, will surely require 60 votes to overcome a Democratic filibuster...

...If affirmative action is a success in its particulars, it must mean that certain American citizens have won jobs or contracts that they otherwise would not...

...There are but 54 Republicans in the Senate, and Mr...

...If conservatives manage the debate with careful resolve, and if Congressional Republicans go along, this may prove to be a lull before the storm, and nothing more...

...Which is something most Americans will not abide...

...It will lower the odds for Mr...

...It would not affect voluntary affirmative action programs adopted by colleges and universities that receive federal aid...

...This course reversal has apparently cost Clinton no appreciable (further) decline in popularity...

...Phil Gramm promised that ending federally administered affirmative action would be his first official act as president...

...Appearances deceive...

...President Clinton, after all, unveiled the results of his administration's preferences study in late July with a surprisingly strident defense of the idea, ritual caveats about quotas to the contrary notwithstanding...

...Affirmative action is still dying...

...And-at the same time-that they should not be prevented from doing it...

...Bob Dole ordered up a Congressional Research Service review of existing executive branch preference programs, implying that he would move against at least some of them before 1997...

...Phil Gramm, you see, acting with too little thought for the ultimate success of his ostensible cause, has attached Bob Dole's excellent anti-affirmative action legislation to a vital appropriations bill...

...The bill would leave unchanged programs that merely expand recruitment and financial opportunity...

...Dole's bill, and an identical House measure sponsored by Constitution Subcommittee chairman Charles Canady, would prohibit the federal government-in any decision involving employment or contracting-from granting a preference to any individual or group, in whole or part, on even partial grounds of "race, color, national origin, or sex...

...Newt Gingrich intends to delay House consideration of any affirmative action rollback until his troops develop a comprehensive agenda to empower the disadvantaged...

...Who will win this fight next year...

...But it's an argument that Justice Department lawyers will apparently make in defense of any affirmative action program subjected to challenge in federal court...

...The media announced the impending death of a 25-year-long historical era in which the United States government classified its citizens by skin color, gender, and ethnic origin, and dispensed benefits accordingly...