Bush backslides/ Will administration perpetuate preferential

0 Comments | Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), Aug 18, 2001

The Bush administration has reneged on another campaign pledge, though this one won't be trumpeted by the major media anytime soon.

Perpetuating a Clinton-era Supreme Court battle, President Bush's Justice Department is arguing that it's OK for the government to subsidize companies that award contracts to businesses owned by "disadvantaged" persons.

Bush and company have explained their backpedaling in (Colorado Springs-based) Adarand Constructors, Inc. vs. Mineta in two ways: It's an unwritten rule that a new president doesn't reverse positions on court cases undertaken by the last administration, and the case itself is so narrowly focused it won't have a broad impact. Both are flimsy arguments.

Consider how former President Clinton's Justice Department all but reversed George H. W. Bush's position on a discrimination suit filed by a white teacher who was fired while a black teacher who was hired at the same time was not. And while Adarand seems narrow, its implications could be broad.

The Affirmative Action and Diversity Project, which adamantly supports racial preferences, declared: "... (I)ts outcome is widely regarded as crucial to affirmative-action programs in general."

To say that this case is insignificant doesn't wash.

Race-based programs of any stripe are inherently wrong; they are legalized discrimination that almost always end up doing more harm than good. Bush ought to stick to his guns and make sure Adarand doesn't set a dangerous precedent.

Adarand, whose owner Randy Pech is white, sued in 1990 after a state contractor awarded a subcontract to a Hispanic-owned company, despite the fact that Adarand had the lowest bid. Under a Department of Transportation initiative called the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program, or DBE, the federal government provided grants to contractors who give work to minority firms.

The Supreme Court ruled the program violated Adarand's equal- protection rights in 1995 but allowed the DBE to be revamped rather than scrapped. The Clinton administration's revisions satisfied lower courts in Colorado, leading to the current court battle.

The Justice Department filed a brief last week defending the program, saying that discrimination remains a persistent problem in the marketplace.

But Robert Levy, a constitutional law expert at the Washington, D.C.-based Cato Institute, says the revisions to the DBE program still don't meet the "strict scrutiny" standard the 1995 ruling mandated.

As the court also pointed out in a similar case, Richmond vs. Croson, a remedial action must justify a compelling government interest and be narrowly tailored to specifically address the wrongdoing.

As Levy points out, this means that pleading "overall societal discrimination" is not enough.

One must prove a specific slight by a person or entity caused actual economic harm before remedial action, i.e., racial preferences, can be considered.

That's not the case in Adarand, and we suspect not so in most other discrimination suits.

By arguing that the DBE program now meets the strict-scrutiny standard, the Bush administration is in treacherous waters.

President Bush said during the campaign, "If I am president of the United States, I will eliminate racial preferences." If he is to make good on his pledge to dismantle such misguided public policies, he must commit to attack it on every front.

Postal privatizing

It's the Rx for what ails the system

Have you noticed that mail delivery has been tardier than usual lately? "New delivery standards implemented by the U.S. Postal Service earlier this year are adding an extra day for first-class mail delivery to most cities in the West," reported the Associated Press.

The reason: The Postal Service has switched some services from planes to ground transportation because of flight delays, Chuck Gannon, national manager for service standards, told the AP. It's true the nation's air-traffic system needs an overhaul; privatization of air-traffic control and airports would help. But the Postal Service has little incentive to hurry in the first place because of its monopoly on first-class mail.

The last time privatization or breaking the monopoly was seriously on the table was 1988, in the waning days of the Reagan administration. Jim Miller, then the director of the Office of Management and Budget, made a valiant but ultimately unsuccessful push for postal reform. Now a counselor for Citizens for a Sound Economy, he says one way to improve deliveries would be to privatize the Postal Service. But even better, he said, would be to end the monopoly.

"There is some concern for postal issues in the Bush administration. But every administration has to be driven by the very short run," he said. The catalyst could be an impending Postal Service operating deficit, causing much greater price increases that would slam consumers even as they switch more and more to e-mail. Germany, Holland and Great Britain have privatized mail delivery. It's past time for the United States to do the same.