Lani Guinier was right when she argued our electoral system is deeply flawed. Though we don’t have a Tyranny of the Majority so much in America, as a tyranny of two minority parties, who have blocked access to any attempt to wrestle away their hold on political power. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Who is this Lani Guinier person of whom you speak, Steven, and what, if anything does she have to do with the Clintons?
In 1993, Lani Guinier was already a distinguished Harvard Law Professor, and a well regarded civil rights attorney, when President Bill Clinton nominated her to be the first African American woman, and the “first practicing civil rights attorney” to head the US Justice Department’s Civil Rights division. Her nomination was a pretty big deal at the time. She would have been the chief lawyer for the federal government charged with enforcing civil rights laws “on employment, education, housing and voting.”
Guinier was also a close personal friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, whom she met when they all attended Yale Law School together in the early seventies. In fact, both Bill and Hillary attended her small, very private wedding to her husband, Nolan Bowie. After graduation, she served as a law clerk for a prominent African American Court of Appeals Justice, then as the special assistant to the assistant Attorney General in charge of civil rights enforcement during the Carter administration. Later, she worked for the NAACP Defense Fund, losing only two of the many cases she brought and eventually rising to become the head of its Voting Rights project. She was a perfect choice to head up the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.
However, on April 23, 1993, she was unfairly attacked by Clint Bolick, a former Reagan justice, in a deceitful op-ed hit piece in The Wall Street Journal, “Clinton’s Quota Queens,” because of law articles she had written that promoted proportional voting as a better electoral system for a democracy than our current winner take all system. In fact, Guinier was an opponent of racial quotas as a means to ameliorate past discrimination. The other lie spread about her, that she favored creating special districts to ensure African American representation in state legislatures and Congress, was also demonstrably false.
One of the most prominent themes of the attack on Guinier was her supposed support for electoral districts shaped to ensure a black majority – a process known as “race-conscious districting.” An entire op-ed in the New York Times — which appeared on the day her nomination was withdrawn (6/3/93) — was based on the premise that Guinier was in favor of “segregating black voters in black-majority districts.”
In reality, Guinier is the most prominent voice in the civil rights community challenging such districting. In sharp contrast to her media caricature as a racial isolationist, she has criticized race-conscious districting (Boston Review, 9-10/92) because it “isolates blacks from potential white allies” and “suppresses the potential development of issue-based campaigning and cross-racial coalitions.”
Another media tactic against Guinier was to dub her a “quota queen,” a phrase first used in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (4/30/93) by Clint Bolick, a Reagan-era Justice Department official. The racially loaded term combines the “welfare queen” stereotype with the dreaded “quota,” a buzzword that almost killed the 1991 Civil Rights Act.
The problem is that Guinier is an opponent of quotas to ensure representation of minorities. In an article in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review (Spring/89), she stated that “the enforcement of this representational right does not require legislative set-asides, color-coded ballots, electoral quotas or ‘one black, two votes’ remedies.”
Nonetheless, Bill Clinton, rather than defend her, or allow her to defend herself, withdrew her nomination. Indeed, some very familiar liberal Democrats, including Senators Ted Kennedy and and Carol Moseley-Braun demanded Clinton place her head on the chopping block to appease not only Republicans but conservative Democrats.
Thus, that master of triangulation, the “Big Dog” himself, folded like a cheap lawn chair to the drumbeat of media and Republican pressure by withdrawing her nomination. However, instead of allowing her to gracefully bow out, Clinton made a point of blasting her for having anti-democratic views. He never gave her the chance, which she requested, to defend her views at a public hearing before the Senate. He discarded her as one would a worthless piece of trash.
Give me a shot at a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, [Guinier] pleaded. Let me defend myself.
Can’t do it, [Clinton] said. Won’t do it. […]
And when they parted company, and she slid into the back seat of the limo that sped her away from the White House, she did not know her fate for certain. […]
After the 75-minute meeting had ended, Clinton called both Guinier and Attorney General Janet Reno to inform them that he was withdrawing her nomination …
In short in an act of political cowardice, he abandoned a highly qualified attorney in civil rights law, and his personal friend. He essentially allowed her critics on the right to savage her as a radical leftist and racial agitator in order to protect his reputation as a “New Democrat.” Strangely enough, one of Guinier’s most vocal defenders was a Republican lawyer and businessman who served in the Eisenhower administration and later was a cabinet member during the Ford administration.
“The loss of Lani Guinier as Assistant Attorney General for civil rights is a grave one, both for President Clinton and the country. The President’s yanking of the nomination, caving in to shrill, unsubstantiated attacks, was not only unfair, but some would say political cowardice.
“Although Ms. Guinier does not advocate forcing cumulative voting plans upon local jurisdictions, she suggests that some localities may prefer a race-neutral plan to a race-conscious plan. This idea is hardly radical. During the Bush Administration, the Justice Department approved alternative voting systems in at least 35 different jurisdictions.”
• William T. Coleman Jr. (Secretary of Transportation under President Ford), June 4, 1993 NY Times column supporting Lani Guinier’s nomination
So, what terrible “anti-democratic” views had Lani Guinier proposed in her legal writings? We know she opposed majority African American districts to ensure black politicians would be elected. We also know she argued against the use of racial quotas, a classic racist dog whistle still used by Republicans and conservatives today to appeal to the basest instincts of white voters. Well, it was nothing so “horrendous” as that.
In her much demonized and derided legal writings, she argued that our winner take all electoral system is at its heart undemocratic because it limits our voting rights as citizens. In almost every election, voters are presented with only two options, the candidate of Party A (i.e., the Republicans, at present a radical far right wing party) or the candidate of Party B (i.e., the Democrats, who for the most part offer up a paler shade of conservative economic dogma). Guinier argues, instead for a new system of voting to allow a wider range of political views to be represented in government. What she proposes is a system in which “every citizen has the right to equal legislative influence.”
What does that mean? It means she wants elections to offer voters more choices through procedural adjustments both in how we choose elected officials and in how certain decisions by legislatures are made. For example, she once suggested that laws that would unduly effect minority populations (however you wish to define minorities) should require more than a simple majority to pass. In effect, such super-majority requirements would operate much like the filibuster in the United States Senate does, forcing opposing sides into a dialogue by offering those in the minority a veto power over laws they view as aimed at their constituents, whether that be pot smokers, bicycle riders, or more traditional minority groups such as those based on racial, ethnic and gender lines.
The proposal to which she has devoted most of her academic effort, however, has to do with the way in which we vote. Guinier was, and remains, an advocate for what is often referred to as cumulative voting (see, also, Proportional representation). This is not a radical idea by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it is currently employed by any number of large and small for profit companies to ensure that minority shareholders are able to elect directors to a corporation’s board to represent their interests. Here is how the SEC describes cumulative voting procedures:
Cumulative voting is a type of voting system that helps strengthen the ability of minority shareholders to elect a director. This method allows shareholders to cast all of their votes for a single nominee for the board of directors when the company has multiple openings on its board. In contrast, in “regular” or “statutory” voting, shareholders may not give more than one vote per share to any single nominee. For example, if the election is for four directors and you hold 500 shares (with one vote per share), under the regular method you could vote a maximum of 500 shares for each one candidate (giving you 2,000 votes total—500 votes per each of the four candidates). With cumulative voting, you are afforded the 2,000 votes from the start and could choose to vote all 2,000 votes for one candidate, 1,000 each to two candidates, or otherwise divide your votes whichever way you wanted.
The idea behind cumulative voting is to do a better job ensuring that legislative bodies include representatives who owe their allegiance not just to a single party (which may or may not fairly represent the widest range of views held by constituents) but to the people who cast their ballots specifically for them. It would empower and give a voice to people who support positions on issues that are often underrepresented in our current winner take all system.
At present, our two party duopoly limits the options presented to voters, eliminating many candidates who hold views the party establishments, for various reasons (including not wanting to go against the interests of their major financial backers), do not and never will tolerate or accept.
Their are a variety of ways in which cumulative voting procedures could be implemented. In our history, cumulative voting methods have been used in the past to elect members to the Illinois state legislature (1870-1980) and to elect members to many local boards such as city councils, and various elected commissions. In fact, there is a good argument to be made that cumulative voting leads to less partisan divide, a process that is crippling Congress at the moment.
From 1870 through 1980 we elected three state reps per district. In Republican-leaning districts, voters usually elected two GOP reps and one Democratic rep. In Democratic-leaning districts, the reverse was true. But every person in the state was represented by both political parties in Springfield.
In the greater Rockford area, liberal E.J. “Zeke” Giorgi was routinely elected as the Democratic rep. From 1971 through 1980, one of the two GOP reps was W. Timothy Simms, a conservative Republican. Simms believes that multi-member districts were better because the House was less partisan then, and more work got done collaboratively.
I’m not suggesting that cumulative voting is a panacea for all that ails our current political system, one awash in the stink of legalized bribery. However, it is far from being a radical or anti-democratic notion, as Bill Clinton sanctimoniously proclaimed as he threw his now former friend, and one of the most highly qualified lawyers on civil rights law (irrespective of the fact she was an African American female) under the bus merely because of his concern for how supporting her against the ill-founded, demonstrably false, and patently racist attacks made by a few conservative Republicans might make him look to white voters. In short, his decision was all about Bill Clinton and had little to do with the character or quality of Lani Guinier or her views in voting rights:
… Clinton, pounding the White House briefing room lectern with his fist, said he would have stuck with Guinier even if no senator voted for her, had he not disagreed with some of her views.
“The problem is that this battle will be waged based on her academic writings,” he said. “And I cannot fight a battle that I know is divisive, that is an uphill battle, that is distracting to the country if I do not believe in the ground of the battle. This has nothing to do with the political center. This has to do with my center.”
While praising Guinier’s integrity and work as a civil rights lawyer, Clinton admitted that he had not read her articles in depth until Thursday. “I have to tell you that, had I read them before I nominated her, I would not have done so,” he said.
Remember, this was at a time Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate (where they held 57 seats). Bill Clinton didn’t have to back down because of these scurrilous attacks on Professor Guinier. He could have stuck by her, and at the very least given her the opportunity to respond and address the baseless charges made against her in a formal hearing before the Senate.
Instead, he told her of his withdrawal of her nomination over the phone. And afterwards, he and Hillary cut off all contact with their former friend.
Although Guinier says the Clintons were her friends and even attended her small wedding, she has not had even a phone call from them since her nomination was withdrawn:
“I think this is a friendship that has been put in jeopardy by politics.”
Something to remember, when you hear how loyal and devoted the Clintons are to the Black community. That loyalty, at least when it came to one African American lawyer who was their close friend and law school classmate, only went one way. And when it came time for Bill Clinton to show his true colors, he flinched and attacked his own friend at the merest hint of a threat to his political reputation. Why? Because the Wall Street Journal and one former Reagan official out for revenge against “liberals’ for the way serial sexual harasser, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was treated in his Senate confirmation hearings, lied and defamed her.
Amazing, isn’t it, how little it took to cause Bill Clinton’s white privileged Presidential sphincter muscle to tighten up. The mere possibility that standing up for his friend and supporter might make him look like a [ugly racial slur deleted] lover to the white electorate was all it took for him to savage her reputation and career to the exigencies of keeping him in good standing with the good old boys in the Beltway Establishment.
