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| Lani Guinier and President-Elect Bill Clinton |
Before EYE type another word please accept my apologies for the sparse postings. EYE must admit the "election" of Donald Trump through me for a loop. EYE was so sure there were more of us than there were of them. Time will tell if my faith in the American people is justified. EYE still refuse to believe the majority of the American people hate President Obama more than they love their country. But EYE have my groove back and EYE am fired up and ready to go.
So, Donald Trump plans to nominate Alabama's own Jefferson Beauregard Sessions as the chief law enforcement officer of the land as payback for his loyalty while giving African Americans, women, veterans, and immigrants the middle finger.
Guinier is probably best known as President Bill Clinton's nominee for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in April 1993.[7][8][9]Here is what the New York Times had to say about the Lani Guinier Mess:
President Clinton withdrew his nomination in June 1993, following a wave of negative press that was brought on by her controversial writings, some of which even Clinton himself called "anti-democratic" and "very difficult to defend".[10]
Conservative journalists, as well as Republican Senators, mounted a campaign against Guinier's nomination. Guinier was infamously dubbed a "quota queen," a phrase first used in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Clint Bolick, a Reagan-era Justice Department official.[11] The term was perceived by some to be racially loaded, combining the "welfare queen" stereotype with "quota," a buzzword used to challenge affirmative action.[12] In fact, Guinier was an opponent of racial quotas.[13]
Some journalists also alleged that Guinier's writings indicated that she supported the shaping of electoral districts to ensure a black majority, a process known as "race-conscious districting." One New York Times opinion piece claimed that Guinier was in favor of "segregating black voters in black-majority districts." Guinier was portrayed as a racial polarizer who believed—in the words of George Will—that "only blacks can represent blacks."
In the face of the negative media attention, many Democratic Senators, including David Pryor of Arkansas, Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, and Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois (the only African-American serving in the Senate at that time)[14] informed President Clinton that her interviews with senators were going poorly and urged him to withdraw Guinier's nomination.[15]
President Clinton took the senators' advice and withdrew Guinier's nomination on June 4, 1993. He stated that Guinier's writings "clearly lend themselves to interpretations that do not represent the views I expressed on civil rights during the [presidential] campaign."[16] Guinier, for her part, acknowledged that her writings were often "unclear and subject to vastly different interpretations," but believed that the political attacks had distorted and caricatured her academic philosophies.[16] William T. Coleman Jr., who had served as Secretary of Transportation under President Gerald Ford, wrote that the withdrawal was "a grave [loss], 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."[17]
Although he handled the nomination miserably, the President had good reason to drop it. Ms. Guinier's writings suggest that, despite her obvious talents as a civil rights attorney, she was not the right person to be Washington's civil rights enforcement chief. Mr. Clinton, already wobbling from other setbacks, had no stomach for a fight he couldn't win on behalf of a candidate whose views he now says he does not entirely endorse.
Without question the nominee herself created the basic problem. Her law review articles about voting rights -- poorly written, provocative and easy to caricature -- gave right-wing snipers a broad target for charges of radicalism. But they also alarmed moderate readers, including longtime supporters of the Voting Rights Act, who feared her extreme-sounding enforcement notions would discredit and imperil that valued law.
Here is what they have to say about Jeff Sessions
Donald Trump ran a presidential campaign that stoked white racial resentment. His choice for attorney general — which, like his other early choices, has been praised by white supremacists — embodies that worldview. We expect today’s senators, like their predecessors in 1986, to examine Mr. Sessions’s views and record with bipartisan rigor. If they do, it is hard to imagine that they will endorse a man once rejected for a low-level judgeship to safeguard justice for all Americans as attorney general.If Lani Guinier was characterized as a racial polarizer and therefore deemed unfit, certainly the same applies to Jeff Sessions. Let's see if republicans and the white male dominated media apply the same standards to Sessions. My guess is they won't because there is more than a whiff of hypocrisy.
