White House Conservatives Seek to Kill Anti-Bias Rules

WASHINGTON —  In a surprise move that could reopen the recent bitter fight over civil rights, senior White House officials have prepared a plan to abolish the federal rules that have undergirded two decades of federal anti-discrimination efforts.

The plan, which its supporters want President Bush to announce as early as today, when he is expected to sign the new civil rights bill, would place in doubt virtually all private-sector affirmative action plans and leave federal law on employment discrimination in a state of confusion, legal experts said.

The move represents a last-ditch effort by White House conservatives to reverse policies that have supported affirmative action and--in their view--opened the way for racial quotas in hiring.

“It would be radical surgery,” said Lawrence Z. Lorber, who was assistant secretary of labor in charge of federal anti-discrimination programs in the Gerald R. Ford Administration and who earlier this year represented the Business Roundtable in negotiations over the civil rights bill.

Abolishing the rules, known as the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures, would “really put employers in a bind,” Lorber said. “There will be no clear guidance about what is legal to do.”

Civil rights leaders reacted to the move with fury. “If this is what the President is going to release, then the White House will be declaring war on civil rights,” said Ralph Neas of the Leadership Council on Civil Rights. “The White House would be once again playing the race card, and they ought to be ashamed.”

The new move, quietly developed by White House conservatives after Bush accepted the compromise version of the long-stalled civil rights bill, immediately sparked intense behind-the-scenes debate within the Administration.

The compromise bill, which Bush plans to sign today, would overturn a series of Supreme Court decisions that had restricted the ability of workers to win job discrimination suits. The bill would restore many of the legal protections that had been curtailed by the high court rulings. It would also, for the first time, allow women who have been victims of discrimination to collect monetary damages in addition to back-pay awards.

Conservatives within the Administration had opposed many of the provisions that Bush eventually accepted in the legislation. And, once the congressional compromise was reached in late October, opponents of the bill began an aggressive campaign to control how the new law would be interpreted and implemented. The new policy move is an outgrowth of that effort.

Administration conservatives initially succeeded in having their plan issued as an official directive to federal agencies late Wednesday afternoon. Within hours, however, mounting complaints forced the White House to issue a statement announcing that the plan was “now being reviewed” and leaving in doubt what course Bush would take.

“There’s an internal argument going on, and it won’t be settled until the morning,” said one White House official. White House counsel C. Boyden Gray, the leader of White House conservatives on civil rights issues, “is trying to salvage something out of this,” the official said.

The move and countermove underline both the continuing political volatility of the civil rights issue and the deep divisions within the Administration over how to handle race-related issues as the election year approaches.

Civil rights policy has bedeviled Bush for nearly a year and a half, with conservatives pressing for dramatic action to eliminate what they see as “quota programs” and Administration moderates warning against actions that might further inflame racial tensions.

That debate, already fierce, grew even more intense this fall with the rise to prominence of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who lost his bid to become governor of Louisiana last Saturday. But Duke’s electoral gains, running as a Republican, frightened many GOP strategists, who fear that any new White House effort to debate racial issues will make Bush appear to be following Duke’s path.

Other strategists, however, have drawn just the opposite lesson from Duke’s rise, arguing that the power of his message was demonstrated by the fact that he carried a majority of Louisiana’s white voters.

Bush, always ambivalent on racial issues, has vacillated. In 1989, he accepted arguments by conservative advisers, led by Gray, who said that the controversial Supreme Court decisions limiting job discrimination suits were correct and should be allowed to stand. Then, under pressure from civil rights groups and black officials within the Administration, he changed his mind in the spring of 1990 and ordered his advisers to draft a new civil rights bill.

Since then, the White House conservatives have fought a tenacious rear-guard action, seeking to limit the compromises that Bush would be willing to endorse.

Last year, Gray and his allies succeeded in persuading Bush to veto a civil rights bill, saying that it would lead to quotas. This year, although they failed to block passage of a similar bill, they did force civil rights groups and congressional Democrats to accept several major compromises as the price of avoiding another veto.

Wednesday’s move came in the form of a White House statement designed to set out the Administration’s interpretation of the new bill and to order all federal agencies to adhere to it.

The statement declares that the existing federal employee selection guidelines, first issued under President Richard M. Nixon and then reissued under Presidents Ford and Jimmy Carter, “encourage conduct that is illegal” under federal anti-discrimination law, a reference to the conservative argument that the rules encourage companies to adopt racial quotas in hiring.

The guidelines set out the government’s interpretation of what federal civil rights law requires of private companies and what the law allows employers to do in hiring and promoting workers.

Several of the guidelines, for example, spell out what sorts of tests companies may use in screening prospective employees.

Under the new policy, the federal agencies that administer the rules--chiefly the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Labor--would be directed to abolish those guidelines “as soon as is legally feasible” and then “begin work on new guidelines.”

Developing new guidelines could take months, if not longer. In the interim, companies would be left with no authoritative interpretation of what the law requires or allows. Courts, which have relied on the guidelines in their interpretation of the law, would be similarly without guidelines.