Senate Approves Civil Rights Bill : Congress: The measure to reverse Supreme Court decisions passes after attempts at compromise fail. Bush has threatened a veto. Question of quotas at issue.

The Senate, setting Congress on a collision course with the White House after one of the most divisive and politically bruising debates this year, passed a major new civil rights bill Wednesday night that President Bush has said he will veto.

Despite Bush’s personal intervention in a last-minute attempt to negotiate a compromise, the Senate set aside objections by conservative Republicans and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1990 by a vote of 65 to 34.

White House officials already have said that Bush will veto the legislation in its current form because of his belief that the bill would force companies to resort to minority quotas in their hiring practices.

White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater, traveling with President Bush in Anaheim, said Wednesday night that the Administration was disappointed by the vote.

“We’ll work to change it in the House. We still want a bill we can sign,” Fitzwater said.

In a written statement later, Fitzwater also said: “The President wants a bill that ends discrimination, not one that starts a quota system.”

Civil rights advocates, for whom passage of the job discrimination bill is a major victory, denied that it would impose a quota system on employers and predicted that Bush will be persuaded to drop his veto threat and support the bill by the time it reaches his desk later this year.

“Tonight’s vote means we are going to get a strong civil rights bill this year, one that we still hope the President can be persuaded to support,” said Ralph Neas, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the main lobbying arm of the civil rights movement. “My guess is the discussions will continue as the bill moves through the House and we think there is a good chance that the President can be brought on board.”

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), seeks to reverse several recent Supreme Court rulings that civil rights advocates said severely blunt the impact of existing federal laws against job discrimination.

Its provisions include bans on discrimination in the workplace and legal reforms that make it easier for employees to prove allegations of discrimination and seek punitive damages for them. It would also, for the first time, allow women to sue their employers and collect damages for sexual harassment.

Rejecting arguments by conservative Republicans that his changes amounted to a sweeping and ill-conceived revision of the nation’s civil rights laws, Kennedy and other Democratic supporters of the bill said the intent was simply to restore the force of laws that, prior to their modification by the Supreme Court, worked well for nearly two decades.

“It’s time to end the unequal treatment of minorities and women in the workplace,” Kennedy said. “. . . The party of Lincoln should be the party for civil rights.”

While not disputing the Democrats’ contention that the Supreme Court rulings necessitated a revision of job discrimination laws, the Bush Administration took sharp issue with two provisions in the bill that it argued would go beyond current law and impose unreasonable costs on employers.

One deals with the ability of employees to challenge and seek damages for business practices that effectively exclude minorities from job opportunities even if they are not intended to be discriminatory. Under a law in effect since 1971, such practices were justified only if a company could prove they were necessary to the performance of its business. The court, however, weakened that ruling in 1989 by relaxing the definition of what constituted a “business necessity” and by shifting the burden of proving that the practice was not necessary to the plaintiff.

The Kennedy bill sought to reverse that decision, taken in the case of Wards Cove vs. Antonio, and restore the effect of the original ruling in the 1971 case of Griggs vs. Duke Power Co.

However, Republicans said that the standards of proof companies would have to meet to defend themselves under the Kennedy bill were much too strict and would have the effect of forcing employers to hire minorities by quotas to turn back what could become a tidal wave of discrimination suits.

“This is clearly a quota bill . . . and quotas are inescapably unfair,” said Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.), explaining his decision to oppose the bill. “You do not cure old wrongs by imposing new ones. You do not cure old discrimination by imposing new discrimination.” California’s other senator, Democrat Alan Cranston, voted for the bill.

The other provision that the Bush Administration opposed dealt with the monetary awards that plaintiffs could receive if the court finds that they have been victims of intentional discrimination. Those awards, opponents said, could increase the incentive to file law suits and lead to a “legal bonanza” for lawyers.

Clearly not wishing to pay the political price of vetoing a civil rights bill in an election year, the Bush Administration sought to negotiate a compromise with Senate Democrats. However, in large measure because of what civil rights advocates and even some Administration insiders said was a deep split within the White House, the negotiations eventually collapsed.

“There was obviously a split in the White House,” said one supporter of the bill who was close to the negotiations. “There were a number of occasions where we added language to meet their objections and where we thought we had an agreement, only to find out the next day that we didn’t.”

“Since these negotiations began eight weeks ago, a battle has been under way in the White House for the heart and soul of the President on the issue of civil rights and it is a battle that, so far, the right-wing of the White House has been winning,” Neas said.

On the other side, Republicans were left deeply embittered by what they charged was an unwillingness by Kennedy to compromise and negotiate in good faith in the belief that he had enough votes to “cram this legislation down our throats,” in the words of Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.).

“We went as far as we could go, we went a long way, but nothing seemed to please the other side,” complained Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). “They were not interested in civil rights. They were interested in playing politics with civil rights,” he charged.

Kennedy angrily rejected those charges, saying that it was the White House that refused to negotiate in good faith.

“I regret that we have been unable to reach an agreement in these negotiations. But I make no apology . . . for refusing to accept so-called compromises that would undermine basic principles of civil rights,” the senator said.

Saying that the law specifically bars quotas, Kennedy accused the White House of manufacturing the quota controversy to disguise its opposition to civil rights legislation.

“Quotas, schmotas. Quotas are not the issue. Job discrimination is the issue,” he said.

Although the battle over the bill left a bitter taste on both sides of the Senate’s political aisle, Democrats and Republicans alike sought to keep the door open to further negotiations as the legislation moves through the House, where the bill is expected to be taken up shortly.

Several senators noted that, in an election year especially, both sides have an incentive to continue those talks--Republicans because they don’t want to bear the onus of appearing to be against civil rights and Democrats because they may not have enough support to muster the 67 votes they will need to override a veto should Bush cast one.

“We’re confident that we have the votes to sustain the veto,” Hatch said, adding that “we would then go back and draft a new bill that meets the President’s objections by protecting civil rights rather than playing politics with them.”