In an irony that neither would be likely to appreciate much, Lani Guinier's
account of being nominated and then unnominated for the position of head
of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division is reminiscent of Robert
Bork's Tempting of America (see Orrin's
review). Both quickly came to be perceived more as symbols than
human beings and, as such, ended up being subjected to really unfair personal
attacks and having their philosophies caricatured. But what is really
instructive about the two cases is the differences rather than the similarities.
Robert Bork's nomination split the Congress and the punditry on strictly
party lines and it just so happened that the Democrats controlled the Senate
at that point in time, so he went down to defeat. However, he did
get to have nomination hearings where he was questioned about his views
however ineptly by the members of the Senate Judiciary committee.
[Personally, I learned more of value about constitutional law by watching
the hearings than I did in my law school class.] Despite the fact
that his nomination was clearly doomed, President Reagan stood by him and
insisted on putting the matter to a vote, allowing Bork to lose honorably
and granting him a sense of closure, albeit mixed with disgust, at the
end of the ugly process. Bork later wrote his book in order to explain
and amplify his views on the constitution and the legal system and, to
a lesser degree, to give his perspective on the nomination fight.
The result is a vital and readable contribution to our understanding of
the degree to which our jurisprudence has become politicized and of the
dangers it entails, as well as a resigned, but bemused, look at the Senate
by someone who ran afoul of the institution.
Lani Guinier's nomination, on the other hand, split the nation along
racial lines, with even traditional white allies abandoning black civil
rights organizations to oppose her. Ultimately, even Bill Clinton,
her longtime friend, repudiated his own nominee and withdrew her name before
she got to the hearings stage. This, understandably, left Guinier
frustrated and humiliated, feeling that she had been denied the opportunity
to defend her views and her own good name. In the most affecting
passages in the book, she describes how she was about to appear on Nightline
when Ted Koppel told her that the next day's New York Times and Washington
Post announced that the White House had decided to pull her name, a fact
of which she was unaware at the time. She also describes having old
pal Hillary walk right past her at the White House with a wave and a "Hey
kiddo", obviously unwilling to stop and discuss the fiasco and she details
her meeting with a dewey eyed President Clinton, who moments after telling
her that the meeting was one of the most difficult of his life went before
the White House press corps and denounced her as "antidemocratic".
Guinier has written another book, Tyranny of the Majority, which
I honestly haven't read, but in this book she whines on ad nauseum about
how the failure of her nomination was a catastrophe for the cause of civil
rights in America. In the strangest maneuver of the book, she introduces
herself early on as someone who was forced to write controversial articles
in order to win tenure, then laments how those views were twisted by the
press and hostile politicians, then returns at the end of the book to a
defense of them as her true beliefs. The result is an enormously
self-indulgent vanity piece, with insufficient consideration of, and a
marked lack of honesty about, the controversial theories that ultimately
sank her nomination. The book spreads more noise than light on the
issues.
The most serious flaw of the book, narrowly outweighing her egomaniacal
catalogue of what appears to be every compliment that she was ever paid
in her life, is the disingenuous treatment of the implications of her view
of democracy. The essential fact is that Ms Guinier does not believe
that the United States Constitution, with it's system of representative
democracy, adequately defends the rights of minorities. Therefore,
she proposes adoption of schemes like cumulative voting, geared towards
allowing the losing minority to win actual representation regardless of
their election loss. For instance, if a school board district voted
60% Republican and 40% Democrat, they would send three Republicans and
two Democrats to the board. Now you could discuss the merits
and drawbacks of these types of Rube Goldberg mechanisms until you were
blue in the face, but the primary point here is that they represent a radical
departure from our current constitutional regime and are a fundamental
attack on representative democracy. There is no reason that we should
not consider and debate these types of measures, but intellectual honesty
requires that their advocates describe them accurately. Guinier's
refusal to do so casts a shadow of deception over the book.
In the final analysis, where Judge Bork's book stands out in particular
for the intellectual rigor of his arguments and analysis, Guinier's is
merely interesting as a portrait of the shallowness and duplicity of her
friends the Clintons.
(Reviewed:14-Feb-00)
Grade: (D+)
Websites:
Book-related and General Links:
-Lani
Guinier Professor of Law (Harvard Law School)
-ESSAY
: Making Every Vote Count (Lani Guinier, December 4, 2000, The Nation)
-ESSAY:
An Equal Chance (LANI GUINIER, NY Times)
-ESSAY:
Proportional Representation is Fair for Everyone: 51% of the
Vote Should Not Mean 100% of Power (Lani Guinier, Center for Voting
and Democracy)
-ESSAY:
TESTS OF POLITICAL FAIRNESS: The Case for Cumulative Voting (Lani
Guinier, Center for Voting and Democracy)
-ESSAY:
Applying Guinier's Political Fairness Tests (Robert Richie, Center
for Voting and Democracy)
-Booknotes:
Lani Guinier The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative
Democracy (CSPAN)
-INTERVIEW:
A "Commonplace" Conversation with Lani Guinier (Lise Funderburg, African
American Review)
-INTERVIEW:
Lani Guinier (Secrets of the SAT, PBS Frontline)
-INTERVIEW:
Think Tank Transcripts:Affirmative Action and Reaction (PBS think Tank)
-DISCUSSION:
"Is the Press out of Control?": ROBERT BORK, LANI GUINIER, LARRY SABATO,
SUZANNE GARMENT (PBS Think Tank)
-Lani
Guinier (Wooster.edu)
-ARTICLE:
Power Behind the Thrown Nominee: Activist With Score to Settle
(Michael Isikoff, Washington Post Staff Writer)
-ESSAY:
Lani Guinier: "Quota Queen" or Misquoted Queen? (Rob Richie and Jim
Naureckas, FAIR)
-ESSAY:
Lani Guinier's Constitution (Randall Kennedy, The American Prospect)
-ESSAY:
LANI GUINIER AND PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION: The Justice Department
Loses a Formidable Lawyer (Hendrik Hertzberg, Center for Voting and Democracy)
-ESSAY:
"Even My Own Mother Couldn't Recognize Me": Television News and Public
Understanding (Jane Rhodes)
-ESSAY:
From Legal Scholar to Quota Queen (Laurel Leff, Columbia Journalism
Review)
-ESSAY:
Thinking About Race With a One-Track Mind (STEVEN A. HOLMES, NY Times)
-ARTICLE:
Lani Guinier, Back in New York, Fervor Intact (DAVID FIRESTONE, NY
Times)
-ESSAY:
Racial Gerrymandering: Enfranchisement or Political Apartheid
(Maraleen D. Shields)
-EXCERPT:
chapter one Lift Every Voice (Denver Post)
-REVIEW:
of LIFT EVERY VOICE Turning a Civil Rights Setback Into a New
Vision of Social Justice. By Lani Guinier (Hanna Rosin, NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW:
Anthony Lewis: The Case of Lani Guinier, NY Review of Books
Lift Every Voice: Turning
a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice
by Lani Guinier
-RESPONSE:
Abigail Thernstrom: THE LANI GUINIER CASE (NY Review of Books)
-REVIEW:
Balkanizing America Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights
Setback Into a New Vision of Social Justice by Lani Guinier
(Chester E. Finn, Jr., Commentary)
-BOOK
REVIEW: Tale of a Failed Nomination: Lani Guinier Talks Social Justice
(Paul Rosenberg, Christian Science Monitor)
-REVIEW:
of Lift Every Voice (Neil Gladstone, Philly City Paper)
-REVIEW:
of Lift Every Voice (Michelle Dally Johnston, Denver Post Staff
Writer)
-REVIEW:
of Guinier, Lani. Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback
into a New Vision of Social Justice (Mary Carroll, Booklist)
-REVIEW:
(Epinions)
-REVIEW:
of THE TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY Fundamental Fairness in Representative
Democracy. By Lani Guinier (Alan Wolfe, NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW:
of The Tyranny of the Majority by Lani Guinier (Mark Tushnet, Boston
Review)
-REVIEW:
of The Confirmation Mess Cleaning Up the Federal Appointments Process
By Stephen L. Carter (MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NY Times)
-REVIEW:
of The Confirmation Mess Cleaning Up the Federal Appointments Process
By Stephen L. Carter (Cass R. Sunstein, NY Times Book Review)
-ESSAY:
Down with Majority Rule: How our winner-take-all voting system stifles
democracy (Jack Beatty, The Atlantic)
GENERAL:
-New
Democracy Forum : The Case for Proportional Representation (Robert
Richie & Steven Hill, Boston Review)
-New
Democracy Forum: Rethinking Affirmative Action (Susan Sturm and
Lani Guinier, Boston Review)
-The
Center for Voting and Democracy (researches how voting systems affect
participation, representation and governance. We generally advocate proportional
representation systems for legislative elections, instant runoff voting
for executive and judicial elections and public interest redistricting)
Race
in America (July 13, 1998, Policy.com)
-REVIEW:
Garry Wills: Clinton's Troubles, NY Review of Books
Leading With My Heart by
Virginia Kelley with James Morgan
The Agenda: Inside the Clinton
White House by Bob Woodward
All's Fair by Mary Matalin
and James Carville with Peter Knobler
Highwire: From the Backroads
to the Beltway-The Education of Bill Clinton by John Brummett
-REVIEW:
George M. Fredrickson: America's Caste System: Will It Change?, NY
Review of Books
Liberal Racism by Jim Sleeper
America in Black and White:
One Nation, Indivisible
by Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom
A Country of Strangers:
Blacks and Whites in America by David K. Shipler
The Ordeal of Integration:
Progress and Resentment in America's "Racial" Crisis
by Orlando Patterson
-REVIEW:
Andrew Hacker: Grand Illusion, NY Review of Books
One Nation, After All by
Alan Wolfe
Someone Else's House: America's
Unfinished Struggle for Integration by Tamar Jacoby
Reaching Beyond Race by
Paul M. Sniderman and Edward G. Carmines
Portrait of American Jews:
The Last Half of the 20th Century by Samuel C. Heilman
Roberts vs. Texaco: A True
Story of Race and Corporate America by Bari-Ellen Roberts
-REVIEW:
Lars-Erik Nelson: Clinton & His Enemies, NY Review of Books
Dead Center: Clinton-Gore
Leadership and the Perils of Moderation by James MacGregor Burns
and Georgia J. Sorenson
Vote.com by Dick Morris
Clinton's World: Remaking
American Foreign Policy by William G. Hyland
Comments:
Orrin welcomes reader comments on his reviews.
Add yours here.
