July/August 1993, Page 64

Jews and Israel

By Sheldon Richman

Jewish Opposition to Lani Guinier

President Bill Clinton's decision to withdraw the nomination of Lani Guinier as assistant attorney general for civil rights was due in part to opposition by American Jewish organizations. In May the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League declined to endorse Guinier, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, because of her views on voting rights, quotas, and majority rule. The three groups refused to vote for a resolution supporting her by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.

As head of the Justice Department's civil rights division, Guinier would have had responsibility for enforcing the Voting Rights Act. The point of contention is Guinier's views, which she has expressed in law review articles, suggesting that voting strength in legislatures should be weighted in some manner to assure that outcomes favorable to minorities occur in their proper proportion. Pointing out that the Voting Rights Act was intended to ensure Black voters "an equal opportunity to influence the outcome of legislative debate," she called for a "remedial mechanism [to] eliminate pure majority rule" and give minorities veto power within legislatures. She has also written that the Senate Judiciary Committee ought to set goals to increase the number of non-white judges on the federal bench.

The Jewish opposition to the Guinier nomination is seen as the latest breach in the Jewish-Black civil rights coalition. For years Jewish organizations with recognized civil rights credentials have opposed moves toward quotas. Jewish groups opposed the redistricting of Brooklyn in the 1970s, which splintered the Jewish community among other districts to increase Black representation.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other Black and women's groups actively promoted Guinier's nomination and harshly criticized Clinton for withdrawing her name. Guinier, whose mother is Jewish and whose father was Black, also had some Jewish support.

Explaining the American Jewish Congress position, director Marc Stern of the group's commission on law and social action said that Guinier "seeks to facilitate a politics clearly based along racial lines, purposefully designing an election system with campaigns based not on issues or common geographical lines but on race." In a statement to the Senate, the AJ Congress called Guinier's views "wrong" and "inconsistent with both statutory and constitutional provisions the assistant attorney general for civil rights is charged with administering."

In a clarification of the AJ Congress's position before the withdrawal, however, Stern wrote in a letter to the liberal Jewish weekly Forward that his organization did not openly oppose Guinier. He said that the Congress's formal statement had "only raised questions about her views that it thought the Senate Committee on the Judiciary ought to be asking Ms. Guinier. The statement carefully avoided opposing Ms. Guinier's candidacy...The AJ Congress was not urging the Senate or its Judiciary Committee to reject her nomination."

Stern said the executive committee of the AJ Congress had not met, as would be required before opposing a presidential nomination. He also said that a meeting with Guinier had been sought "in order to ascertain whether we understand her views correctly. "

Weeks before withdrawing the nomination, President Clinton had publicly defended his nominee but sought to assuage opposition by saying that she would carry out policy as determined by Congress and the attorney general. Her opponents were not persuaded. In a related matter, the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council met in May to discuss reapportionment in New York. The meeting did not produce a consensus, but NJCRAC Executive Vice Chairman Larry Rubin said that "while the Voting Rights Act has extended the right of franchise to virtually every American, many in the Jewish community are concerned that various redistricting plans developed under the act have created inter-group conflict."

The Jewish press also weighed in with editorials critical of Guinier. The weekly Forward wrote that the Supreme Court decision upholding the redistricting of Brooklyn "set the stage for the Balkanization of our entire electorate, a process that will accelerate if Ms. Guinier is confirmed by the Judiciary Committee." It said that "according to [Guinier's] logic, a democratic system is one in which all ghettos are represented, no matter how small the ghettos might be." The editorial concluded, "What a tragic development it would be were the political party in which most Jews made their home in America to begin erecting political ghettos in the new land. "

Washington Jewish Week called Guiner's views indicative of a "totalitarian mindset [that] offends the sense of personal equality, liberty, and, yes, civic obligation which underlie American democracy." It said that the resulting "sectarian democracy . . . would resemble those which have led Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and a number of other societies into civil war." It also pointed out that proportional representation in Congress would "require two-thirds of the Jewish members to get out."

No AJ Committee-AJ Congress Merger

Unbridgeable differences over finances and governance have ruled out a merger of the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress, according to officials of both organizations. The announcement came after the cessation of six-month-old discussions about joining forces.

"Negotiations got down to the point where we saw that there were large, unbridgeable gaps," said AJ Congress President Robert Lifton. Forward said that according to insiders, some leaders of the American Jewish Congress feared that their organization, which has a much smaller budget, would be swallowed by the AJ Committee, which is larger as well as more conservative than the AJ Congress. The American Jewish Committee publishes Commentary magazine, which, unlike the Congress, takes a pro-Likud, hawkish line on Israel.