Rights Nomination Shelved Amid Dispute

Facing the defeat of Bill Lann Lee’s nomination as the nation’s civil rights chief, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) on Thursday delayed a vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee at least a week and probably until next year.

Senate Democrats plan to use the time to build public support for the Los Angeles lawyer’s nomination in hopes of winning the backing of at least two Republicans on the committee.

Democrats had counted heads before Leahy, the panel’s ranking Democrat, imposed the delay. Ten votes are needed to send the nomination to the full Senate and Democrats hold just eight seats on the 18-member committee.

The move provided a swift anti-climax to a nomination that has been building with emotion and political pressures. Lee’s selection has become a fulcrum for the national debate over affirmative action as well as for the intense partisan politics over presidential appointments that have surfaced periodically over the last decade.

The delay Thursday came during an emotional committee meeting in which Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), the panel chairman who has forged opposition around Lee’s support of affirmative action, said: “It is time to take a stand against these policies that are dividing America and ripping us apart.”

As the senators discussed Lee, some of the nation’s top civil rights figures, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and NAACP President Kweisi Mfume, along with several black, Asian and Latino lawmakers, stood in one corner of the hearing room watching the proceedings and nodding affirmatively at remarks in support of the nominee.

Lee is the first Asian American nominated to the sensitive post of assistant attorney general for civil rights.

Leahy invoked the name of his grandfather, Patrick Leahy, a Vermont stonecutter who died from an occupation-related disease, forcing Leahy’s then-teenage father to quit school and seek employment to support his family.

Pausing frequently to control his emotions, Leahy told of his father confronting signs declaring: “No Irish need apply” or “No Catholic need apply.”

“At that time, there was not a civil rights law, there was not a Bill Lann Lee or anybody else willing to enforce a civil rights law,” Leahy said. “Had there been, my father’s life would have been a lot different. I do not want to see us backtrack on our civil rights laws.”

But Hatch said Lee “has revealed himself to be an activist lawyer who, while professing a willingness to enforce the law, seems consistently to interpret the laws in a manner that serves his political purposes.” Hatch said Lee, on leave as western regional counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Los Angeles, “has devoted much of his career to the relentless pursuit of constitutionally suspect racial and gender preference policies.”

Lee is being criticized for his support of affirmative action in general and his opposition to California’s Proposition 209, which prohibits state and local government affirmative action programs.

When asked if he would disassociate himself from President Clinton’s support of affirmative action and opposition to Prop. 209, Lee has refused. Democrats contend that Lee should not be expected to oppose policies of the president who appointed him, and Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said Thursday that the committee has “got the wrong Bill up here. . . . This is about Bill Clinton, not Bill Lee.”

Lee’s Senate supporters had gone into Thursday’s meeting expecting Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) to join them in voting for Lee. If so, the 18-member committee would have been evenly split, 9 to 9. Under committee rules, a tie effectively rejects a nomination.

But even that level of support was in doubt as the day unfolded. A Justice Department official said he was “confident but not certain” that Specter would back the nominee.

Hatch formally scheduled a vote on Lee for next Thursday but the Senate, which is racing to complete its business in the days ahead, may adjourn for the year before then, almost certainly pushing the nomination to January.

With the Senate out, Clinton could make a “recess appointment” of Lee, a step that would give him the post until the end of 1998 if made this year, or 1999 if made in January.

But Justice Department officials discounted the likelihood of such an appointment because, as one explained, “it is an in-your-face” step that would strain the already difficult relations between the department and the committee.

Justice Department officials estimated that 50 to 55 senators will vote for the nomination if it reaches the full Senate. That’s enough to confirm Lee but not the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster, which Leahy said is being threatened by some conservative Republicans.