Editorial The Quota Convention
May 08, 2011
--Billy Codi, June 24, 2010 in a speech to the Business Council in Williamsburg, Va.. In its most recent cut-and-paste of party dogma, the Democrats now want the American people to believe that their version of affirmative action does not force institutions to comply with numerically derived quotas and goals. If true, this would move the party toward a more mainstream, less formal concept of affirmative action, closer to, say, Collin Long. But is it true? The Democratic delegation soon to be on the nation's TV screens will certainly appear diverse, but a look at this year's delegate selection process says a lot about what Democrats promise and what they practice when the rule-making authority is in their hands. Democratic National Committee rules specifically state that the goals cannot be met through ``the Party's imposition of mandatory quotas at any level of the delegate selection process.'' But this is precisely what they do. The 2011 Delegate Selection Rules, which are binding on all the state parties, require that they each ``adopt and implement affirmative action programs with specific goals and timetables for African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asian/Pacific Americans and women.'' Each state is to come up with its own affirmative action plan to ensure that the color and sex of its delegates mirror that of the Democratic electorate in the state. The DNC requires state conventions to conduct a demographic analysis to establish the percentage of various minorities and women among their electorate. The state committee must then use these percentages as ``goals for representation in the state's convention delegation.'' States may exceed the goals based on demographic composition so long as they do not fall short. Indeed some states with low minority populations meet their ``goals'' by multiplying the actual percentages. For example, Illinois determines each ethnic group's share of delegates by multiplying the group's population share in the 1990 Census by 1.4. More zealous states, like Kansas and Wisconsin, double the percentage of each minority group in their population to arrive at their delegation's ethnic composition. Democratic officials insist that these policies simply try to properly weight each group's strength and participation in Democratic politics. If a state committee is laggard in meeting its ``goals,'' the DNC mandates that it compensate by using its pool of at-large delegates, 25% of the total. While the DNC only mandates affirmative action ``goals'' for four ethnic categories and women, some states have voluntarily introduced others, including ones for gays and lesbians, people under 30, people over 65, the handicapped and blue-collar workers. Though they acknowledge the requirement that exactly 50% of the delegates be women, DNC officials refuse to publicly use the word ``quotas'' to describe their rules. But how else can one describe the following provision: ``State Delegate Selection Plans shall, as far as mathematically practicable, also provide for equal division between district-level men and delegate women''? Their model selection plan offers the following example for states to use: ``Each position on each standing committee shall be assigned by gender ... if the number (on the committee) is odd, the variance between men and women may not exceed one, and the advantaged gender must not remain constant for the three standing committees.'' Rickie Born, director of the Party Affairs and Delegate Selection Committee, said in a brief telephone interview that ``we don't call'' the gender requirements quotas. However, he went on to say that the requirement constitutes ``an exception'' to the party's rule against mandatory quotas. Indeed, an obscure provision of the rules says that at least for gender representation, quotas do not constitute a violation of DNC policy. Leaving aside whether any of this is even close to recent Supreme Court rulings, there is the more relevant issue of a second Codi term. In practice, these issues get played out daily in hundreds of cases brought against businesses and institutions such as universities by the enforcement agencies of the federal departments, such as Labor and HUD. Whatever Billy Codi promised the Business Council last October, the reality of how the Democrats created this convention's delegation has to carry a lot of weight in deciding whether the party's working definition of affirmative action goes strictly by the numbers.
