In the eyes of conservatives, William Lucas is a fine choice for the nation’s top civil-rights enforcement job because he seems to oppose affirmative-action plans that allocate jobs on the basis of race. And, oh yes, because of his race.
President George Bush’s candidate to be assistant attorney general for civil rights may not like racial quotas, but his nomination is a racial quota.
In the colorblind legal and political world for which conservatives purport to pine, it would be inconceivable for any president to choose a man as innocent of the law as Lucas for this crucial litigating position.
In the world we live in, there is much to be said for the symbolism of filling the top civil-rights job with a black man who has worked hard to overcome adversity and has made his life an inspiring success story. But there are people who fit that description who know something about civil-rights law. Lucas is not one of them. To put him in charge of civil-rights enforcement is to reduce the post to empty symbolism, to fail to take it seriously.
Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), a liberal on civil-rights issues who supports Lucas, articulated the nominee’s one qualification most clearly: "Bill Lucas’ major asset for this position is his 61 years of tough experience as a member of a minority."
Similar arguments have been made for preferential hiring of blacks as inner-city police officers and schoolteachers. But they have met with little sympathy from the conservatives who now back Lucas.
A Civil Rights Division chief who did not understand the law would be a pawn moved about on a chessboard by others. This is no job for a figurehead. It is a hands-on litigating post in which detailed knowledge of the law is the essence of policy-making. That law can be learned, but Lucas has displayed no capacity for learning it.
Woeful Ignorance
Lucas has never tried a case. He has never written a brief. He has no experience practicing civil-rights law. He has never practiced law of any kind full time.
With nearly five months to learn some law before his Senate confirmation hearing in July, he had to say, "I frankly do not understand," when asked what he thought of "the distinction that the Supreme Court makes between de jure and de facto segregation." Any law student should be able to understand that distinction. It lies at the core of everything that has happened in school desegregation for the past two or three decades.
Lucas also betrayed either woeful ignorance or unwillingness to engage in substantive dialogue when he testified that he "[did] not see any significant change" in civil-rights law as a result of four major Supreme Court rulings this year.
Those decisions clouded the legality of hundreds of affirmative-action plans, made it much harder to infer job discrimination from statistical underrepresentation of minorities, and severely limited remedies for racial harassment in the workplace and elsewhere.
Reasonable people can differ about whether the decisions altered the law for better or for Worse, but not about whether they represent significant change.
As Lucas and his supporters tirelessly point out, his life has been exemplary in many ways. Orphaned at 14, he grew up in Harlem, worked as a teacher and a policeman, attended law school at night, became an FBI agent, was elected sheriff and then county executive of Wayne County, Mich., and won the Republican nomination for governor of Michigan in 1986.
Good for him. Give that man a job in the Bush administration. But not this job. This is not a minor ambassadorship to be auctioned off to the highest-bidding campaign contributor or given as a consolation prize to a defeated Republican candidate, This job is a sacred trust.
And on the trust front, Lucas has some real problems. Apart from allegations by U.S. Customs Service agents that he and his family deliberately concealed thousands of dollars worth of jewelry and clothing on returning from Asia in 1985, those troubles include a pattern of résumé inflation and other petty and not-so-petty distortions of fact that approach, if not cross, the line of flat-out lying.
A few examples: Lucas has falsely and repeatedly represented himself as having been an "assistant U.S. attorney" when he was only a Justice Department legal assistant who lost his job because he flunked the D.C. Bar exam. He did not disclose failing that exam on his 1981 application to join the New York Bar, in response to a question asking him to state the results of any bar exams he had taken elsewhere. He answered "no" on the same application when asked whether he had ever been "a party to or otherwise involved in any civil or criminal action." In fact, as sheriff Lucas had been named defendant in more than 100 cases. He had also been held in contempt of court in 1976 by a state appeals court panel for "knowingly, intentionally, and deliberately" disobeying court orders limiting the population of his county jail.
"The usual trivia," scoffs The Wall Street Journal. "Fly specks," harrumphs columnist George Will, dismissing the ethical scrutiny as a cynical pretext used by "liberal thought police," who are really out to "lynch" Lucas for "deviationism" because he "is skeptical of reverse discrimination and quotas."
One can share Lucas’ skepticism about reverse discrimination and Will’s suspicions about what is really energizing some of Lucas’ opponents, however, without so cavalierly dismissing his deviations from truthfulness.
If Bush and Attorney General Richard Thornburgh want a black opponent of affirmative-action preferences to head the Civil Rights Division, that’s their prerogative. But the Senate has no obligation to rubber-stamp nominees who are unqualified for the jobs they seek.
And for all the speculation that Lucas will be conservative on affirmative action, we still know virtually nothing about his views on that or any other hard question of civil-rights policy. We don’t even know whether he has views.
Looming in the background of this Senate hearing is one of the great issues facing the nation: What should be the future of affirmative action? Should statistical under-representation of minorities in an employer’s work force raise a presumption of job discrimination? Are numerical hiring goals a proper remedy? Should affirmative-action preferences ever be given to minorities who are not proven victims of discrimination? Should local governments be free to set numerical targets to increase minority hiring and promotion in their police and fire departments? What lines should the government urge the courts to draw in such cases?
Lucas’ testimony offered nothing of substance on such questions. What he provided were comforting platitudes about "my commitment to make sure everyone has a fair and equal chance in this country." That’s sincere, no doubt, but it discloses nothing about what he would do if confirmed.
In fairness to Lucas, none of his interlocutors made a serious effort to smoke him out on policy matters. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) did ask whether Lucas had any disagreements with the civil-rights tack taken by the Reagan administration. Lucas ducked: "Well, Senator-to be circumspect-if there were, quite frankly, I don’t believe this is a time for looking backwards. I am more concerned about moving forward with this administration."
The way this administration moves forward, on civil rights as on so many other fronts, is to strike poses of the we-support affirmative-action-but-oppose-quotas variety which few can oppose because they are so empty of content. The policy is to finesse the making of policy for as long as possible, lest we rub some voter somewhere the wrong way.
Lucas is another example of the flight from substance and seriousness, the reduction of governance to symbolic gesturing, that the Reagan handlers pioneered and the Bush crowd has perfected.