Nomination For Assistant Attorney General
Guinier is probably most well known as President Bill Clinton's nominee for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in April 1993. A combination of political factors led to her nomination being withdrawn in June 1993. Guinier was attacked by Clint Bolick of the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page as one of "Clinton's Quota Queens". (The title, some said reminiscent of the denigrating term "welfare queen", was chosen not by author Bolick but by editors at the Wall Street Journal.)
In addition, Democratic Senators such as David Pryor of Arkansas and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts informed President Clinton that her interviews with Senators were going poorly and urged him to withdraw the nomination.
According to Clinton's autobiography, Democratic Senator Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois, the only African-American who was serving in the upper chamber at that time, also urged the President to withdraw Guinier's nomination. President Clinton took the advice of these elected officials and withdrew her nomination, claiming he was unfamiliar with her writing and that he didn't realize that she advocated pure racial quotas as opposed to affirmative action, as opponents had charged. The charge was false; Guinier had many times explicitly rejected the use of racial quotas in her law review articles.
Read more about this topic: Lani Guinier
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—Anonymous. “On a Nomination to the Legion of Honour,” from Aubrey Stewart’s English Epigrams and Epitaphs (1897)
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