AsianWeek

Back to the Firing Line
By Phil Tajitsu Nash

As loud drums and crashing cymbals on H Street welcomed the wildly gyrating dragon dancers and their serpentine beast, and a marching band accompanied the young and old marchers who joined with Mayor Anthony Williams and other dignitaries to welcome in the Year of the Rabbit, conservatives marshaled their forces to oust one of the highest ranking Chinese Americans in federal government.

They say Bill Lann Lee, the Yale-educated, Los Angeles-based civil rights lawyer who for 14 months has been acting assistant director for civil rights, is still eminently unqualified to be our nation's top civil rights enforcer. To them, his experience with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund are minuses.

They object to the fact that he was never confirmed, but his interim appointment came only after conservatives used Lee's 1997 nomination debate as a springboard to castigate affirmative action. While his appointment by Attorney General Janet Reno, with the approval of President Bill Clinton, allowed Lee to stay in office through last year's session, it now means he faces confirmation before the 1999 Congress.

Lee will be able to stay only if he gets the Senate's approval-no sure thing. A conservative group last week issued a report at a press conference that blasted Lee for his performance so far, accusing him of continuing to overstep his boundaries to advocate for affirmative action.

That brought strong rebuttals from civil rights advocates of all colors. "Today's attack on Bill Lann Lee was little more than warmed-over criticism," said Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. Said the Organization of Chinese Americans' Daphne Kwok: "Opposition to Lee was ridiculous before, but the current attack is outrageous."

There are many reasons why it important to have an Asian American-especially Bill Lann Lee-as head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.

First, the division oversees enforcement of federal laws on hate crimes, fair housing, the rights of the disabled, and many other areas. An agreement on Japanese Latin American redress last fall, while not all that advocates had hoped for, might not have happened at all if someone like Lee, with his understanding of history and due process, had not been at the helm.

Second, though we as a community have benefited from the civil rights struggles of African Americans, Latino Americans, feminists, and gays and lesbians, we have not always been out front showing our support for the rights of all people, not just ourselves. Lee has done so, devoting his life's work to ensuring equal access to justice, better education and housing, and other goals that preserve our democracy through law.

Third, Lee, on behalf of the Justice Department, objected this month to a New York State law that purportedly seeks to simplify a voting scheme, but actually makes it three times harder for a candidate to win. What he is opposing is a return to the types of elections where, because of high minimum vote requirements or winner-take-all strategies, minority voices are seldom heard.

Being raised in New York, Lee well understood that New York state has never had any Asian Americans in statewide office, and the state legislature has yet to have any representation of Asian descent. But in New York City, 11 of 15 Asian American candidates were recently elected under the long-used "choice voting" method, in which people can rank candidates; there were none before. Although we do not make up less than 20 percent of the voting-age population in any school district in the city, Asian Americans have at least one seat in seven districts.

And finally, on a personal level, Lee has provided decades of support. When I was a law student at Rutgers University, he defended a program I was involved in against a "reverse discrimination" suit. Later, he became my supervisor while I was an intern at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

For years, Lee has known that giving Asian American and other minority voters a chance to be represented is not the same as racial preferences, as alleged by his critics. We shouldn't let them win.

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