Punting on Preferences
punting on Preferences We take you first to Texas. On September 26, President Clinton visited Houston for another in an endless series of DNC fundraisers. While he was there, he did a little...
...As is the bravery and intelligence of people like Ward Connerly and the two Michigan plaintiffs, who regularly face down poisonous insults from the institutions they are attempting to reform...
...We move on now to Michigan...
...equally qualified white and Asian-American applicants over there...
...Lee is also, however, directly implicated in an impressive list of race-preference controversies dating back two decades, from school busing in the 1970s right up to the legal counterattack on California's Proposition 209...
...But the president of the United States thinks it would be a grave mistake for Houston, Texas, to heed the Fourteenth Amendment...
...No group preference may be based on arbitrary presumptions...
...Especially given that this philosophy seems openly to defy our highest law, as the Supreme Court has authority to interpret it...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...A measure included on the forthcoming November 4 ballot, the Houston Civil Rights Initiative, would oblige the city to do just that...
...That's what we have Democrats for...
...It won't do for a democratic country to lurch its way to colorblindness courtroom by courtroom, without the clear and resounding public debate an issue of such moment and principle demands...
...In short, to hell with the Constitution...
...ISTEA is the gigantic pot of highway and transit money the federal government sends to the states each year...
...That is a powerful tool...
...The Senate will approve a piece of unconstitutional legislation...
...This won't do...
...The new regulations contain the same old vaporous presumptions...
...The university denied this request, on grounds that its computer system, now undergoing a splashy $3.8 million upgrade, was no longer able to correlate the race, high-school grades, and test results of its applicants...
...One such party is more than enough...
...He calls it "very divisive," notwithstanding the fact that it would merely bring Houston into compliance with the Constitution and is favored by a sizable margin in every public and private poll...
...Houston's leading Republican mayoral candidate, Rob Mosbacher, publicly opposes the initiative...
...The week after the president made this amazing pronouncement, Ward Connerly, leader of California's Proposition 209, which the Houston initiative closely follows, wrote letters to Texas governor George W. Bush and the state's entire Republican congressional delegation...
...They want compensatory and punitive damages at trial...
...But school administrators have been unable to claim computer immunity for other damning information about their group-think admissions procedures...
...Here, too, the Supreme Court has already ruled...
...it is based on nothing more than the racial, ethnic, and gender identity of its intended beneficiaries...
...Still today, three weeks later, not one of them has responded...
...He decided to admit such witnesses, after all...
...But Orrin Hatch of Utah, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, waited until the very last minute—this past Friday—before deciding whether to allow any opposition witnesses at Lee's confirmation hearing...
...The Department of Transportation regulations that govern implementation of this requirement certify a company as "disadvantaged" the same way the city of Houston's contracting program does: crudely...
...Explicitly race-based "dual-track" admissions procedures in American higher education—like those Ann Arbor has so obviously maintained—have been unconstitutional since the Supreme Court's 1978 Bakke decision...
...One wants admission to the college as a transfer student...
...But the Clinton administration proposes to reauthorize ISTEA without change...
...And all the while, Lee has advanced a striking and rigid view: He has never met a race preference he didn't like...
...In other words, Houston's set-aside program is exactly the sort of undifferentiated, unlimited, and unjustified group preference that has been flatly unconstitutional since the Supreme Court's 1989 Cro-son decision...
...And, most basically, it simply won't do for Republicans to pretend they don't understand what the Constitution says...
...They are to treat those students differently— weed them in and out during an initial review— according to what color they are...
...You should vote against it, he told his audience...
...Organizations like Washington's Center for Individual Rights, which is responsible for the University of Michigan case, have begun to sue race-preference malefactors— in this instance, the university's president—as individuals...
...Any group preference instead must be justified with reference to conclusive and particularized findings of disadvantage and discrimination...
...The legal underpinnings of government-enforced and administered race consciousness have been sharply eroded...
...The language of the law requires that "not less than 10 percent" of this money go to "disadvantaged business enterprises...
...He asked them to support the Houston measure...
...This program now sets aside 20 percent of an annual $1 billion municipal procurement budget for companies owned by people presumed to be disadvan-taged...
...In a 1995 case involving the ISTEA set-aside program, Adarand v. Pena, the court applied its earlier Croson principles to all procurement contracting with federal money...
...Only 12 percent of nonmi-nority applicants with equal scores were invited to enroll...
...African-American and Hispanic applicants over here...
...The erosion is bound to accelerate...
...And though the Department of Transportation claims to have adjusted its regulations to comply with Adarand, the claim is a bald-faced lie...
...What is going to eventuate is this: The university is going to lose this case big-time...
...Maybe things are better in the nation's capital...
...According to data published in June by the Detroit News, the college offered a place in its fall 1995 freshman class to any and all minority applicants who had combined SAT scores between 1,200 and 1,290...
...Republican senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky will offer an amendment to strip this atrocity from the ISTEA bill...
...Maybe pigs can fly...
...You see, there's a Republican candidate for a Michigan state senate nomination who is volubly critical of race preferences at Ann Arbor...
...While he was there, he did a little drop-by at San Jacinto College...
...Actually, nothing...
...His subject was affirmative action...
...It seems the Ann Arbor campus has been imposing an elaborate system of boxed grids on its many thousands of applications each year...
...Armed with these appalling documents, two students rejected for admission in 1995 and 1996 filed a federal class-action suit against the university on October 14...
...You might think Bill Lann Lee's philosophy would warrant some extended discussion as the Senate considers his appointment to the nation's most important civil rights post...
...This week, the Senate will debate reauthorization of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, which has technically expired...
...But in the meantime, what is Michigan's Republican governor, John Engler, going to say or do about this matter...
...McConnell's amendment will fail...
...And, most important, both seek an injunction against any future racial discrimination by the college admissions office...
...And the governor, his press spokesman lamely explains, doesn't want to "get involved or do anything to influence the primaries...
...It won't do for Republicans to delay the prize of colorblindness, even for a moment, by silently ignoring the battle while it's waged...
...McConnell's amendment will be opposed by the Republican senator who will manage the debate, Environment and Public Works Committee chairman John Chafee of Rhode Island...
...The News then filed a Freedom of Information Act request for comparable data from the subsequent, fall 1996 freshman class...
...To contracting officers, they offer the following guidance: "You must not require an individual who are members (sic) of a designated group to demonstrate, in connection with his or her firm's application for certification, that he or she is, in fact, socially and economically disad-vantaged...
...that is to say, with the "not less than 10 percent" language still in force...
...The issue is racial and ethnic preferences in student selection by the state's leading public undergraduate institution, the College of Literature, Science, and Arts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor...
...If a firm is owned by a woman or minority, it is mechanically qualified for preference...
...The Senate will also this week hold confirmation hearings on the man President Clinton has nominated to lead the civil rights division of the Justice Department...
...He is Bill Lann Lee, a career attorney with the NAACP On paper, Lee is more than qualified for the job...
...At San Jacinto College, Clinton called the initiative an effort to "turn back the clock on the progress of the last 50 years...
...For its part, the university vehemently denies doing anything wrong, though undergraduate dean Edie Goldenberg says she can't be sure precisely "what is going to eventuate...
...Two of them...
...But through it all, Republicans, too many of them, most of them, are sitting on their backsides, keeping their powder dry, cultivating their nervousness, waiting until next year...
...Inside the boxes, each representing a cross-tabulation of grades and test scores, appear graphic instructions to the college's admissions clerks about how they are to treat the relevant students...
...A depressing pattern emerges from all of this...
...And that presumption is automatic...
...The president heaped praise on outgoing Houston mayor Bob Lanier for having hiked the quotas—sorry, "goals"—employed by the city's Minority, Women, and Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program...
Vol. 3 • October 1997 • No. 7
