Washington.--Last week, while the president was promising to set sail for the political center, his administration continued tacking leftward. His lawyers intervened in two Supreme Court cases that involve what might, and should, be a burning issue in 1996. This issue is: Do we want color-blind government or today's racial spoils system?
Mr. Clinton's lawyers filed a brief in defense of a law giving preference, in the awarding of contracts, to certain government-approved minorities. His lawyers also joined those who want to continue a court-ordered program in Kansas City, ostensibly about "desegregation," that in 10 years has cost Missouri $1.3 billion.
In the first case, the president's lawyers are defending a law that gives contractors bonuses for subcontracting at least 10 percent of any contract to "disadvantaged" businesses. A Colorado contractor, rejecting the lowest subcontracting bid on a highway guardrail, gave the contract to a Hispanic-owned firm and received from the U.S Department of Transportation a $30,000 "bonus." The low bidder says the law licenses racial discrimination against him.
There has been no showing of past discrimination in Colorado's highway-construction trade. However, under the challenged law, certain groups (blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and Native Americans) are presumed to be disadvantaged, regardless of their personal histories or current affluence.
In Kansas City, Mr. Clinton's lawyers want to continue, perhaps forever, government by judiciary. That began in 1984 when a federal judge started ordering what he called remedies for past discrimination in schools.
He has ordered, among much else, a $32 million "dual theme" magnet school for computer and classical Greek education, containing magnificent computers and a field house with an indoor track, a weight room, handball courts and an Olympic-size pool. The judge has also decreed an agricultural school with live animals and a greenhouse. And a technical vocational school featuring lasers, optics and robotics. And field trips around this country and to foreign countries, financed by court-ordered "desegregation" funding.
The U.S. Constitution guarantees to every state "a republican form of government," meaning government by elected representatives. Kansas City may well wonder what happened to that guarantee.
Today Missouri spends almost 50 percent of its education budget on 9 percent of its students, in Kansas City and St. Louis (which also is under court control). Per-pupil spending in Kansas City is $13,500, compared to $7,500 in the most affluent of suburban districts. The judge has assigned children to schools by race and decreed class sizes, and Mr. Clinton's lawyers support his desire to continue because the district's test scores are "at or below national norms."
As this is written, the president is preparing to address the nation about his core convictions, just as soon as he and advisers decide what they are. "What should I be saying?" he recently asked a confidant who (this peculiar "confidant" evidently blabbed to the Los Angeles Times) replied: "Nothing. You've talked enough. Give the people a break. Give us all a break and let us trim the Christmas trees and get through the holidays before you say anything else."
Sound advice. However, a president speaks constantly through the actions of his administration. So, people wonder what Mr. Clinton believes in? The answer is provided by his administration's actions in the Colorado and Kansas City cases, and many other related actions. He believes in a racial and ethnic and sexual spoils system, administered in the name of group rights and "diversity." So much for Mr. Clinton's "centrism."
This spoils system deserves to be the central issue in 1996. California may make it that. As Proposition 187 demonstrated this year regarding immigration, California can shape the nation's political conversation. And in 1996 the following proposed amendment to California's constitution probably will be on the state's ballot:
"Neither the state of California nor any of its political subdivisions or agents shall use race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin as a criterion for either discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group in the operation of the state's system of public employment, public education or public contracting."
Presidential candidates will be drawn into the debate about this. Indeed, there might be, and should be, a similar "color-blindness" amendment to the U.S. Constitution put forward by then.
Speaking about the case of the Colorado contractor, Rep. Kweisi Mfume, D-Md., head of the Congressional Black Caucus, defends a 10 percent set-aside for minorities this way: "What the flip of that is, is that it's establishing, in the process, a 90 percent set-aside for white males." The 1996 election should be a referendum on whether Americans, white or black, want to live in an America run like that.
George F. Will is a syndicated columnist.