Focusing on bias

Currently, the five-member commission has two vacancies, which leaves Bush free to appoint two people and install them as chairman and vice chairman. The EEOC is "a very potent agency," says Clint Bolick, vice president and director of litigation at the libertarian Institute for Justice.

Unlike the Justice Department, which monitors government malfeasance, the commission focuses on private employers, ranging from automakers to retailers. Its mandate is to enforce federal statutes prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, or disability.

The commission can set policy through its interpretations of these job discrimination laws, as well as through litigation. "The EEOC sets the tenor for discrimination law, even to an extent greater than the Justice Department," Bolick says. And most of EEOC's policy initiatives on employment discrimination originate with its chairman, notes Donald R. Livingston, former general counsel of the EEOC and a partner at Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld in Washington.

Will Bush's chairman try to advance policies revered in conservative legal circles -- those that, for example, seek to limit the reach of affirmative action and sex discrimination laws?

"A lot of those cases are going to be handled the same way, no matter who the President is," says Roger Clegg, general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity. "But there are areas where there are differences of opinion of how to interpret the law, and one of those is affirmative action.… [ Another is] how to interpret the Americans With Disabilities Act." He adds that he hopes the Bush Administration's approach to hiring preferences based on race, ethnicity, and sex will be very different from its predecessor's. "The Clinton Administration has been very aggressive and unforgiving to private employers in the way that it has been interpreting [these statutes]," he said.

Return to main story