Notes on the Right: Connerly's Super Tuesday

By Lee Cokorinos
for the Equal Justice Society
Summer 2007

November 2006, when Ward Connerly scored his first state ballot initiative victory against affirmative action in eight years with a lopsided 58-42 percent win in Michigan, speculation has been rife over where he and his wealthy backers would next turn their attention.

In a speech to the Heritage Foundation in March, Connerly declared his intention to expand on the Michigan win by organizing a multi-state “Super Tuesday for Equal Treatment,” calling it “the most high stakes effort that we will ever engage in.”

At the Heritage briefing, Connerly said he would be choosing five states to target from a list of nine, but subsequently cut the number to four. He may have run into difficulty finding the resources and well-connected in-state supporters needed to sustain a coordinated campaign across such a wide field.

In late April, at a high profile event in Denver, Connerly finally declared his intention to target Colorado, Missouri, Oklahoma and Arizona with simultaneous initiatives on November 4, 2008. Campaign announcements in the other three states followed. If passed by the voters, these referenda, using identical ballot language, would outlaw state-level affirmative action policies on race and gender in public education, contracting and employment.

The Supreme Court: A “Speed Bump”Connerly has sought to present his initiative as a grassroots effort, a mischaracterization repeated by the Christian Science Monitor. But this is no grassroots movement. The main supporters of his “Super Tuesday” campaign come from the same cozy circle of well-funded conservative political operatives who have been backing the national assault on diversity policies since the early 1990s. In his Heritage talk, Connerly referred to them as “our own vast right wing conspiracy.”

Connerly told his audience that he has formed a twelve member “working group” to “fashion a national campaign” to overturn the “diversity rationale” that the Supreme Court applied in upholding affirmative action at the University of Michigan. Chastising his colleagues for taking too timid an approach to overturning Grutter, Connerly has declared that “a negative court decision should be regarded as merely a speed bump.”

The working group for “Super Tuesday,” which is being run under the umbrella of Connerly’s American Civil Rights Coalition, includes, among others, Linda Chavez and Roger Clegg of the Bradley foundation-funded Center for Equal Opportunity. Clegg has been working for several years on a project to uproot state legislation and regulations that attempt to secure diversity in education, contracting and employment. Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and National Labor Relations Board, was also named by Connerly as being part of the group; as was Manuel Klausner, co-author of California’s Prop 209 and immediate past chair of the Federalist Society’s Free Speech and Election Law Practice Group.

Other members include Terry Pell of the Center for Individual Rights, also funded by Bradley, which litigated the University of Michigan cases for lead plaintiff Jennifer Gratz (now director of state and local initiatives for Connerly); and John Carlson, the Seattle talk radio host who spearheaded I-200, the 1998 initiative banning affirmative action in Washington State.

Abigail Thernstrom, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, is also in the working group. Thernstrom has been waging academic warfare against diversity policies and serves on the boards of both the Center for Equal Opportunity and Clint Bolick’s Institute for Justice.

Battleground StatesIn three of the four states targeted by Connerly, leading members of the anti-civil rights infrastructure established over the past two decades by the Right’s major foundations form the core of his support. [To read the entire story, go to: http://www.equaljusticesociety.org/newsletter_10/story2.html]