The Political Interest Another Blown Opportunity

By Michael Kramer

In the midst of last year's Los Angeles riots, a hesitant, almost sobbing Rodney King asked the question at the core of America's existence as a humane society: "Can we all get along?" Perhaps not, but certainly not if we can't talk, and that is the tragedy of the Lani Guinier affair. It is the President's prerogative to nominate whomever he choses -- and to withdraw a ; nomination if he loses faith in his choice -- but in precluding a Senate hearing that would expose Guinier's views to a serious discussion about minority rights, a course he says he chose partly to avoid a "bloody and divisive conflict," Bill Clinton has denied the nation an opportunity to confront its racial prejudices.

In an age when the collective attention span is measured in nanoseconds, a chance to engage the entire country in a complex debate is rare. One need not have agreed with Anita Hill's challenge to Clarence Thomas to have one's consciousness raised about sexual harassment. Lani Guinier was similarly poised to illuminate an emotional issue. In showing her the door, Clinton in a way affirmed Senator Bill Bradley's observation: "When politicians don't talk about the reality of what everyone knows exists -- that as slavery was our original sin, so race remains our unresolved dilemma -- they cannot lead us out of crisis."

Guinier's beliefs, most of which advance an informed discussion of how to balance majority rule and minority rights, do not lend themselves to sound- bite analysis. But one idea in particular is a notion the Senate especially could have profited from considering. Like the Reagan and Bush administrations, Guinier is a champion of "two-thirds supermajorities," the idea that discrimination is sometimes so invidious that majority rule must be tempered. In fact, it was the Reagan Administration that supported a plan that required Mobile, Alabama's seven-member city commission to muster a supermajority of five votes instead of four to pass legislation, thereby ensuring that the support of at least one of the city's three black commissioners would be needed. That action, which Guinier applauds, may be radical, but it has deep bipartisan roots. It wasn't Guinier who said that "democracy is trivialized when reduced to simple majoritarianism"; it was the conservative commentator George Will.

The Senate should appreciate such arguments because it regularly employs similar devices. Only 40% of Senators are needed to filibuster legislation; a two-thirds supermajority is required to approve treaties or override a presidential veto. Above all, the fact that every state has two Senators, regardless of its population, flies in the face of "one man, one vote," a constitutional suppression of majority rule expressly designed to protect the minority rights of rural states.

In two sentences last Friday, Guinier summed up the state of race relations in the U.S.: "We have made real progress toward Martin Luther King's vision of a society in which we are judged by the content of our character, not by the color of our skins. But we are not there yet." The truth is we will never be there until every American can answer "Often enough" to Bill Bradley's question, "When was the last time you had a serious discussion about race with a person of a different color?" Advancing racial equality (the single principle on which Clinton has said he will never compromise) can be accomplished in many ways and in different forums. A Senate debate over Guinier's nomination was only one, but it was there for the taking. It may have been divisive, but it could also have been cathartic. That it won't happen is a shame.