Dole Urges End to Impasse on Job Bias : Civil rights: The GOP leader calls on both parties to work out a compromise as the Senate prepares to take up legislation on workplace discrimination.

It is time for both Republicans and Democrats to stop playing politics with civil rights and work out a compromise that will deal with job discrimination, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) said Sunday.

“We ought to settle it,” Dole said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.”

The GOP leader said he expects the Senate to take up a job discrimination bill in the next three or four weeks, adding: “I think there’s a willingness on the part of all parties to try to handle this . . . but I must say that some members of my party and others of the other party like the politics of it. . . .

“Democrats want to attack us as, quote, racist, and we want to go out there and say they’re for quotas. So my idea is we ought to get this behind us.”

Dole praised a proposal by Sen. John C. Danforth (R-Mo.) and eight other Republican moderates as a “constructive effort to find some way out of this impasse, some way to end the politics on each side of civil rights.”

But he noted that all but one of the Republicans who have endorsed the Danforth approach voted last year to override President Bush’s veto of a bill to curb job discrimination. The veto was sustained by a single vote.

Dole’s comments came after a week of bitter exchanges between Bush and his Republican allies in the House and Democratic congressional leaders over whether a House-approved civil rights bill would lead to racial hiring and promotion quotas.

After decisively rejecting a bill last Tuesday that was backed by the Administration, the House a day later approved by a 273-158 vote a plan endorsed by the House Democratic leadership. It includes an explicit ban on quotas but was still attacked by the President as a “quota bill.”

House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) had charged previously that Bush was trying to score political points from racial polarization, an allegation that Bush vehemently denied.

On Sunday, Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) said that he would suspend judgment on Bush’s motives until he sees how the White House reacts to the Danforth plan. “If they stiff that (Danforth) effort, then I would tend to agree with Gephardt,” Nunn said on the NBC program “Meet the Press.”

At issue are a series of 1989 Supreme Court decisions that cut back the scope of laws against job discrimination and put heavier burdens on those making charges of job bias against employers.

While the House bill and Danforth’s plan would reverse the effects of the high court rulings, the Administration bill would have reversed the effects of only one and modified two others. The Bush-supported legislation also would have allowed a judge to award damages up to $150,000 to victims of sexual or racial harassment who tried but failed to get redress from an employer.

The House-approved bill would allow punitive damages up to $150,000, or the actual amount of compensatory damages in cases of deliberate job discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, disability or national origin. Danforth’s plan would permit compensatory damages up to $50,000 for job bias by companies with 50 or fewer employees and a maximum payment of $150,000 to a worker in a larger firm.

In addition, the Danforth plan would allow punitive damages to be imposed on a company for intentional discrimination but any money collected would be paid to the federal government.