My life

I asked Secretary Riley and Attorney General Reno to prepare a detailed explanation of the range of religious expression permitted in schools and to provide copies to every school district in America before the start of the next school year. When the booklet was issued, it substantially reduced conflict and lawsuits, and in so doing won support across the religious and political spectrum. I had long been working on the issue, having established a White House liaison to faith communities, and signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Near the end of my second term, Professor Rodney Smith, an expert on the First Amendment, said my administration had done more to protect and advance religious liberty than any since James Madison’s. I don’t know if that’s accurate, but I tried. A week after the religious liberty event, I was faced with the biggest current challenge to building a more united American community: affirmative action. The term refers to preferences given to racial minorities or women by governmental entities in employment, contracts for products and services, access to small-business loans, and admissions to universities. The purpose of affirmative action programs is to reduce the impact of long-term systemic exclusion of people based on race or gender from opportunities open to others in our society. The policy began under Kennedy and Johnson and was expanded under the Nixon administration, with strong bipartisan support, out of recognition that the impact of past discrimination could not be overcome by simply outlawing discrimination from now on, coupled with a desire to avoid requiring strict quotas, which could lead to benefits going to unqualified people and reverse discrimination against white males.

By the early 1990s, opposition to affirmative action had built up: from conservatives who said that any race-based preferences amounted to reverse discrimination and therefore were unconstitutional; from whites who had lost out on contracts or university admissions to blacks or other minorities; and from those who believed that affirmative action programs, while well intentioned, were too often abused or had achieved their purpose and outlived their usefulness. There were also some progressives who were uncomfortable with race-based preferences and who urged that the criteria for preferential treatment be redefined in terms of economic and social disadvantage.

The debate intensified when the Republicans won control of Congress in 1994; many of them had promised to end affirmative action, and after twenty years of stagnant middle-class incomes, their position appealed to working-class whites and small-business people, as well as to white students and their parents who were disappointed when they were rejected by the college or university of their choice. Matters came to a head in June 1995, when the Supreme Court decided the case of Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña, in which a white contractor sued the secretary of transportation to invalidate a contract awarded to a minority bidder under an affirmative action program. The Court ruled that the government could continue to act against “the lingering effects of racial discrimination,” but that, from now on, race-based programs would be subject to the high standard of review called “strict scrutiny,”

which required the government to show that it had a compelling interest in solving a problem and that the problem could not be addressed effectively by a narrower non-race-based remedy. The Supreme Court decision required us to revisit federal affirmative action programs. Civil rights leaders wanted to keep them strong and comprehensive, while many Republicans were urging that they be abandoned altogether.

On July 19, after intense consultations with both proponents and critics of the policy, I offered my response to the Adarand decision, and to those who wanted to abolish affirmative action altogether, in a speech at the National Archives. In preparation, I had ordered a comprehensive review of our affirmative action programs, which concluded that affirmative action for women and minorities had given us the finest, most integrated military in the world, with 260,000 new positions made available to women in the last two and a half years alone; the Small Business Administration had dramatically increased loans to women and minorities without reducing loans to white males or giving loans to unqualified applicants; large private corporations with affirmative action programs reported that increasing the diversity of their workforces had increased their productivity and competitiveness in the global marketplace; government procurement policies had helped to build women-and minority-owned firms, but had on occasion been misused and abused; and there was still a need for affirmative action because of continuing racial and gender disparities in employment, income, and business ownership.