Bill to Restore Anti-Bias Laws May Face Veto

Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh said Wednesday that he would oppose this year’s major piece of civil rights legislation, even as President Bush praised Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and pledged “to live up to the highest ideals of the civil rights movement.”

Thornburgh said he will recommend vetoing a bill that would overturn five Supreme Court decisions limiting protections against job discrimination. The Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee handily approved the bill as Thornburgh’s letter was released.

Passage of the bill, which would make it far easier for civil rights plaintiffs to win job discrimination lawsuits, has been the civil rights movement’s highest legislative priority for a year.

In a letter to Senate Labor Committee Chairman Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), Thornburgh said: “The Administration opposes as inconsistent with equal opportunity any legislation that would encourage quota systems or otherwise divide our society along racial lines.” Supporters of the bill deny that it would encourage quotas.

Bush sidestepped the issue in his speech to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. He pledged to “fight against poverty and for opportunity” and to “use this office--this bully pulpit--to condemn, in the strongest terms, racism, bigotry and hate.”

In raising the veto possibility, Thornburgh noted that the Administration has proposed legislation to overturn two of the five rulings. He said it “is determined to help root out racial bias and bigotry and to guarantee equal opportunities for all Americans.”

It is the other three rulings on which the Administration and the Senate bill are at odds. The three, which were decided on 5-4 votes at the end of the 1988-89 Supreme Court term, held that:

--In cases of alleged employment discrimination, employers no longer have to demonstrate that apparently discriminatory hiring and promotion practices are essential to corporate success. Last year’s court decision in Ward’s Cove Packing Co. vs. Antonio shifted the burden of proof to employees who charge that they were victims of discrimination. The Kennedy bill would shift the burden of proof back to employers.

Thornburgh said that, without establishing a link between specific employment practices and a resulting discriminatory impact, “employers could be found liable for the numerous innocent factors that can cause statistical imbalance in the composition of a work force.”

--Managers may include race or sex as a reason for denying an employee a promotion if they also give other, legitimate reasons for their decision, according to the court’s ruling in Price-Waterhouse vs. Hopkins. The Kennedy bill says that the employer is guilty of illegal discrimination if race or sex was one reason for denying a promotion.

Thornburgh said that this would penalize employers in cases in which race or sex was “a motivating factor” in employment decisions, regardless of whether the same decisions would have been made anyway.

“Allowing recovery based on an employer’s state of mind is contrary not only to the spirit of Title VII (of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) but to the spirit of our legal system as well,” he said in his letter to Kennedy.

--White employees, according to the ruling in Martin vs. Wilks, may now challenge court-approved affirmative action plans years after they are adopted. This decision threatened to unravel hundreds of city and county plans to hire and promote more minority members. The Kennedy bill would bar new lawsuits if the white employees knew about affirmative action plans but waited years to contest them.

Thornburgh said that the court’s ruling “may lead to fairer, more carefully considered and unassailable remedies for discrimination.”

The bill’s supporters deny that it would compel employers to use quotas for women and minorities.

The President, in his remarks Wednesday, noted that “prejudice and racial tensions still exist in America.” Bush predicted that “the day will come--and it is not far off--when the legacy of Lincoln will finally be fulfilled at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue--when a black man or woman will sit in the Oval Office.”

“When that day comes, the most remarkable thing about it will be how naturally it occurs. He or she will be another President, another traveler in the continuum of freedom, representing all the people of America.”

Bush’s words did not mollify civil rights leaders, who expressed outrage at Thornburgh’s veto threat.

Ralph G. Neas, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, an umbrella group of more than 180 organizations, accused the Administration of deciding “to bow to the right wing of the Republican Party.”

After noting that the threatened bill has 40 co-sponsors in the Senate and 164 in the House, Neas predicted that it would be passed with at least 70% support--more than enough to override a veto.

The Senate committee approved the measure on an 11-5 vote.

Staff writer William J. Eaton contributed to this story.