Mending Fences on Social Issues

Some bones for the New Right, but also a shift on voting laws

During Ronald Reagan's first year in office, he urged patience on his New Right supporters, who wanted fast action on politically charged social issues like permitting prayer in public schools. The Administration needed time, said the President and his men, to concentrate on more urgent economic problems. With the economy's downward spiral beginning to erode Reagan's political base, the President moved last week to regain some good will with a constituency that is vital for him. At the same time he moved to diminish the anger of another group, which has never trusted him at all.

The President's call last week for a constitutional amendment to allow voluntary prayer in public schools was both a deft expression of support for a New Right cause that seems to have broad public appeal and an effective maneuver to defuse this potentially explosive issue. Even as the New Right was basking in the warmth of Reagan's Rose Garden homily on the virtues of prayer in schools, the Justice Department advised the Senate that a pending bill to override the 1962 Supreme Court decision banning such prayer was probably unconstitutional. Presidential support for a prayer amendment will persuade the Senate leadership to jettison its pro-prayer bill, but will not necessarily give the New Right what it wants. Reason: there is virtually no chance that Congress will pass a school-prayer amendment this year.

Conservatives were also pleased by the Administration's handling of their call to ban busing as a method of desegregating schools. On the same day he sent his letter on school prayer to the Senate, Attorney General William French Smith notified House Judiciary Chairman Peter Rodino that careful examination of a bill designed to prohibit lower federal courts from ordering busing plans "indicates that [its provisions] are constitutional." This was also a hollow victory for the New Right: although the bill has passed the Senate, it is expected to die in the Democrat-controlled House.

These moves came shortly after the Administration reversed longstanding objections to legislation to extend and strengthen the 1965 Voting Rights Act. With Reagan's support, a compromise version of the bill that had already passed the House was approved last week by the Senate Judiciary Committee, and is virtually certain of passage by the entire Senate.

Judiciary Committee approval hinged on Chairman Strom Thurmond's willingness to give ground on his long-held segregationist views. Although the South Carolina Republican did not vote for the compromise, he decided not to fight it after long talks with fellow Senators and an unusual two-hour private meeting with Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Surmised Hooks: "In his own way, I think he doesn't want to be remembered as a bigot." In essence, the compromise devised by Senators Robert Dole, Edward Kennedy and Charles Mathias decreed that local voting laws could be adjudged discriminatory on the basis of their "effects" rather than their "intent." Civil rights groups say intent is almost impossible to prove in court; the wording of the bill precludes a conservative fear that the effects test could lead to rigid racial quotas.

The President last week also made a well-publicized visit to a Washington-area black family that had been victimized by Klan-style cross burning and other abuses. No Republican strategist seriously expects that such gestures will enable the G.O.P. to capture the black vote in November, but they may help prevent a huge black turnout for the Democrats.

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