White House Won’t Push Reynolds Confirmation

Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole said Wednesday that the Reagan Administration is dropping efforts to have William Bradford Reynolds, the Justice Department’s civil rights chief, confirmed as associate attorney general.

Dole (R-Kan.) made the announcement on the Senate floor after consulting with White House Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan and Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III.

The senator said those officials told him “it would not be their intent to ask us (Senate Republicans) to pursue this matter further.”

Reynolds’ nomination for the Justice Department’s third-ranking post has been stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which declined in three separate votes to advance his name to the full Senate.

Dole and other Reynolds supporters had said that they might pursue a rarely successful petition to discharge the nomination from committee. But Dole told colleagues on the floor Wednesday: “It will not be the intention of the majority leader to discharge the Judiciary Committee from further consideration” of the nomination.

The nation’s civil rights organizations, several Republican senators and many Senate Democrats contend that Reynolds has refused to enforce civil rights laws and misled the Judiciary Committee in sworn testimony.

Reynolds denied that he testified falsely and lauded his enforcement record as better than that of his predecessors.