Clinton to Revive Failed Appointment

The White House said Tuesday that attorney Bill Lann Lee of Los Angeles again will be nominated as the nation’s top civil rights enforcer, a move sure to reignite opposition from critics of affirmative action who blocked his nomination 14 months ago.

Lee is acting assistant attorney general for civil rights, a post that often has been a lightning rod for controversy.

The White House said late Tuesday that President Clinton will try again to make Lee’s position permanent. “We expect the president will be nominating him soon,” a White House official said.

White House spokesman Joe Lockhart praised the job Lee has done in his acting role and said that those who have criticized him “speak with a demonstrable lack of knowledge” about his abilities and achievements.

Lee could not be reached for comment. As acting head of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department, he oversees enforcement of federal laws on hate crimes, fair housing policies, the rights of the disabled and a range of other areas. He was formerly Western regional counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Lee’s first nomination in 1997 triggered a wave of criticism from conservatives, who attacked his support for affirmative action. It soon became clear that Lee’s nomination would not clear the Senate and Clinton--in a move derided by his critics as an end-run--installed him on an interim basis in December 1997, while Congress was in recess.

Conservatives who oppose Lee began attacking his renomination Tuesday, even before the White House had acknowledged that the move was imminent.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) urged the White House to nominate a “confirmable candidate,” charging that Lee’s role as an acting division chief violates a 14-month cap on federal vacancies. Clinton administration officials disputed that interpretation.

The Institute for Justice, a conservative public-interest legal group in Washington, also has fought Lee’s nomination. The group issued a report on Lee on Tuesday, charging that “the Civil Rights Division under Lee persists in using its legal arsenal to impose, support and defend racial preferences, without regard to the rule of law and to the detriment of all Americans.”

UC Regent Ward Connerly, a leading opponent of what he describes as race-based preferences, said that “if I were in the Senate, I’d throw him out on his ear, simply because of the president’s flaunting of the process. . . . [Lee’s acting status] makes a travesty of the confirmation process.”

Connerly, chairman of the American Civil Rights Coalition, a nonprofit public interest group in Sacramento, said that “our worst fears were that he would be a proponent of preferences based on race and I think that he has lived up to those fears” during his time as acting assistant attorney general.