Dear Steve:
I’ve run dry on impeachment (for the moment), but power in Washington is very much on my mind as I read in the Boston Globe that Deval Patrick is going to Texaco as general counsel. Patrick, of course, used to be the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the U.S. Department of Justice. And, as you know, he happens to be black. Texaco has just bought itself–undoubtedly at a stiff price–sure protection against further charges of discrimination.
To be sure, it’s not big news. And when Patrick was at DOJ, he seldom made the headlines. I’m struck with how many important public policy decisions are made below the media’s radar screen. Patrick held enormous power in his day, as his successor, Bill Lann Lee, does today. All eyes are on the president and Congress. In fact, they’re often bit players. Congress passes a law; the president signs it; and that law is putty in the hands of administrators tucked away in the executive branch. As it’s shaped and reshaped, whatever Congress originally intended disappears.
It’s a simple, obvious, elementary point that the Washington Post, when Lee was nominated to be Patrick’s successor, tried to deny. “The range of discretion” in the job is really not great, the Post editorialized. After all, it went on, the assistant attorney general takes an oath to uphold the law. Did the editors pen those lines tongue-in-cheek? Did they quietly giggle as they came up with such reassuring spin? Who believed them in Washington, of all places?
As it has turned out–and as Roger Clegg makes clear in his splendid “Rule of Law” column in Monday’s Wall Street Journal–Bill Lann Lee has become all that his early critics feared. That is, he’s an advocate of racial preferences, busing, and other race-based policies through and through.
For example, Lee has filed a brief in the Second Circuit arguing that a county has not violated federal law when its police application test was designed specifically to keep the number of successful whites down. (Such police tests include all sorts of personal history and personality questions that can be framed with race very much in mind.) And he regularly files briefs that read Supreme Court decisions involving race in, shall we say, very creative ways.
I think Lee’s reading of Supreme Court decisions just plain distorts them. But lawyers bend the law all the time; it’s what they get paid to do. Appoint an assistant attorney general who is determined to uphold preferences, and he (or she) will play with the statutes and decisions and get the desired result.
So, whether Bill Clinton falls or stands, Bill Lann Lee will still be there protecting civil rights–in his fashion. The government the Americans elected in 1996 and the policies now in place are not in jeopardy.
Abby
