Sen. Orrin Hatch declared war Tuesday with President Clinton over confirmation of Bill Lann Lee as the nation's top civil-rights enforcer.
Hatch, R-Utah, said Lee's lifelong work as a lawyer defending affirmative action suggests he would interpret laws in ways to push racial-preference programs - despite some recent court bans."The assistant attorney general must be America's civil-rights law enforcer, not the civil-rights ombudsman for the political left," Hatch said. He added he will oppose Lee when the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which Hatch is chairman, votes on him Thursday.
Hatch announced his opposition a day after the Supreme Court upheld California's Proposition 209, which eliminates preferences based on race in state programs. Lee helped lead the court fight against that as a lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
White House spokesman Mike McCurry said the Supreme Court's upholding of Proposition 209 should make Lee's support of it a moot point, and allow his nomination to move forward.
Hatch disagreed. While he noted that Lee has pledged to enforce existing law, he said hearings and conversations show they disagree about what the law says.
"Mr. Lee's understanding of the nation's civil-rights laws is sufficiently cramped and distorted to compel my opposition," Hatch said.
For example, he said Lee responded to written questions from Republican senators by saying that recent Supreme Court decisions still allow affirmative action in some cases - while Hatch said the court banned them in most cases, and Lee should have stressed that.
"Apparently, then, Mr. Lee is prepared to support racial preference programs until every possible exception under the law is unequivocally foreclosed by the Supreme Court, despite the court's view that such programs are presumptively unconstitutional," Hatch said.
"In matters ranging from racial preferences to Proposition 209 to the Prison Litigation Reform Act, Mr. Lee has demonstrated a decided reluctance to enforce our nation's civil-rights laws as intended, and in some cases his litigation efforts expose an outright hostility to it."
Hatch also fired several broadsides at Clinton on the issue.
"Bill Lann Lee has fallen victim to President Clinton's double-talk on the issue of racial and gender preferences. . . . The President pledged to `mend it, not end it.'
"In practice, however, the president's policy on preferences can more accurately be described as `don't mend it, extend it,"' Hatch said, noting the Congressional Research Service found 160 federal programs with "presumptively unconstitutional racial preferences."
Hatch added, "Recruiting and outreach that ensures broad inclusion is one thing; racial and gender preferences that enforce doubles standards are quite another."
Hatch said that despite all that, "My decision today is an unhappy one. It brings me no pleasure to oppose the nomination of this fine activist lawyer and this very fine human being. But fine human beings - and certainly fine lawyers - can make mistakes."
The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on Lee's nomination Thursday. He would need 10 votes for his nomination to reach the Senate floor, and was thought to have the support of all eight committee Democrats plus one Republican, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa.
Hatch said this is only the third judiciary-related nominee by Clinton that he has opposed in five years. He also opposed two judges - but said he has voted to confirm 230 others. So he said he doesn't declare war over Lee lightly.