The Week

Congress has announced that it will investigate the October Surprise. Good. And after that? . . . How is it that BCCI let its candidate lose to Reagan?

Senator John Danforth (R., Mo.) has been promoting a compromise between George Bush and the Democrats on the civil-rights bill, perhaps doing penance to liberalism for having given the world Clarence Thomas. When negotiations between the senator and the President broke down recently, Danforth accused the Administration of trying “to turn the clock back on civil rights.” Danforth and Bush disagree over an interpretation of a 1971 Supreme Court decision, Griggs v. Duke Power Company, which required employers to show that their job specifications were strictly job related, or non-discriminatory in effect. What Danforth failed to address was whether the burden of proof should rest on employers—i.e., on the accused. Griggs, the Democrats, and evidently Danforth believe it should. Bush and a millennium or so of common law disagree. If employers end up shouldering the burden of proof, then they will resort to quotas to lighten it—which is why Bush has been right all along to characterize the Democrats’ bill as a “quota bill.”

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Congress has announced that it will investigate the October Surprise. Good. And after that? . . . How is it that BCCI let its candidate lose to Reagan?

Senator John Danforth (R., Mo.) has been promoting a compromise between George Bush and the Democrats on the civil-rights bill, perhaps doing penance to liberalism for having given the world Clarence Thomas. When negotiations between the senator and the President broke down recently, Danforth accused the Administration of trying “to turn the clock back on civil rights.” Danforth and Bush disagree over an interpretation of a 1971 Supreme Court decision, Griggs v. Duke Power Company, which required employers to show that their job specifications were strictly job related, or non-discriminatory in effect. What Danforth failed to address was whether the burden of proof should rest on employers—i.e., on the accused. Griggs, the Democrats, and evidently Danforth believe it should. Bush and a millennium or so of common law disagree. If employers end up shouldering the burden of proof, then they will resort to quotas to lighten it—which is why Bush has been right all along to characterize the Democrats’ bill as a “quota bill.”