COLUMN RIGHT : Democrats’ Quota Bill: Racial Spoils : Republicans shouldn’t shy from fighting this scam mislabeled ‘civil rights.’

I recently asked a former aide to Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) what he thought of Helms’ TV campaign ad that showed a pair of white hands crumpling a rejection letter. “You needed that job, and you were the best qualified,” a voice said. “But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota.” The ad is thought to have helped Helms win his 1990 Senate race against a black candidate who supports affirmative action.

The former Helms aide replied that if the year had been 1964, and the pair of hands black, liberals would have approved of such an appeal.

In the ‘60s, the argument was that state laws should be “colorblind.” People should be hired, or permitted to sit at lunch counters, without regard to race. Liberals not only won that political battle (the 1964 Civil Rights Act became law) but they also occupied the moral high ground in the debate.

Laws should be colorblind. How things have changed. Liberals now support the racial labeling of people, keeping track of the percentages hired from each group, and filing lawsuits against the guilty if the wrong numbers end up with jobs.

In the 1960s liberals disavowed all such proposals, just as Helms does today. But his opponents have responded by comparing Helms with David Duke, the former Klansman who ran a close race for the U.S. Senate in Louisiana. A month after Helms was reelected, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt, a possible Democratic presidential candidate, delivered a fierce speech attacking Republicans. He accused “ideologues on the right” of “following a new trail of racial resentment and recrimination blazed by David Duke, then trod successfully by Jesse Helms.” Helms has often been accused of “injecting the racial issue” into politics.

Who’s injecting the racial issue? Those who support colorblind laws, or those who support counting by race?

Helms’ opponents, among them Democratic Party Chairman Ron Brown, want to have it both ways. They insist they merely support race-conscious “remedies” to injustice, while firmly opposing “quotas.” Both he and the Democratic Party “vehemently oppose racial quotas,” Brown has said. “This is not a quota bill,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) repeatedly claimed of last year’s so-called civil-rights bill, which was reluctantly vetoed by President Bush.

The denial is not convincing, however. The bill clearly stated that unlawful behavior “is established” when a complaining party “demonstrates that an employment practice results in a disparate impact on the basis of race . . . .” The key phrase is “disparate impact.” Its effect is to permit statistical disparities alone to demonstrate illegal discrimination, without the need to establish discriminatory intent.

If, for example, the relevant work force from which a company hires is one-fourth black, then a company with 25 black employees out of 100 total would (it is presumed) have “lawful” employment practices, because these practices would have had no “disparate impact.” It is vain to deny that such a law mandates quotas. “Disparate impact” establishes a numerical criterion of guilt. An employer who hires anything other than 25 blacks in such a situation is in danger being sued. Therefore, he will self-protectively (and almost certainly without admitting it) use quotas in hiring, knowing that is the only way to stay on the right side of the law.

In fact, such legislation is a thinly veiled way of getting employers to impose quotas on themselves, while permitting the responsible legislators to deny that that is the effect of their handiwork. If such a law does not demand quotas, then it encourages something even worse: a purely arbitrary enforcement of the law.

The issue is still very much alive, because Democrats have vowed to bring back the legislation this year. Nonetheless, as the Helms election almost certainly showed, the issue is a winning one for Republicans. Quotas are genuinely unpopular. But Republicans must be willing to fight on the issue without fear of being called names. Democrats are willing to persist with what might seem an unpopular cause, however, precisely because they sense Bush’s nervousness whenever someone utters the mantra civil rights. (This used to mean a limitation, not an expansion, of government power.)

It will be very bad for America if the hiring of workers degenerates into a racial spoils system. Bush has stubbornly resisted Congress on its right to declare war. Let us hope that he diverts some of that stubbornness into a more appropriate cause--resisting Congress on quotas.