OCR Text |
Show I l WecMy Special Justice seeks to gut due-process law Washington If some ardent conservatives con-servatives in the Justice Department have their way, , the right of an, individual to sue. state and local governments for violating , due process of law could be in jeopardy. The officials have launched a quiet assault, which they hope will scare Congress into amending a 113-year-old law guaranteeing the right of a citizen to take local authorities to court. The details are spelled out in an internal Justice Department memo, which the agency has refused to release under the Freedom of Information act. But sources familiar with the 10-page document have provided us with the secret strategy. The memo was written by Roger Clegg, director of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy. It recommends that the recent furor over school discipline be used as a tool to dismantle an 1871 law known as the Anti-Ku Klux Klan Act. Congress passed the law more than a century ago to protect individuals from the excesses of state and local governments. Since then, it has become one of the principle vehicles for citizens to claim in federal court that their constitutional rights have been violated by local authorities. For example, it was under the anti-Klan Act that Brown vs. the Board of Education, the landmark case that led to the Supreme Court-ordered, desegregation of the nation's public schools was brought,,.,,,-,., ,,nrr In 1975, the act was again used to guarantee that a student facing arbitrary suspension or expulsion from school was entitled to due process. The decision, written by Justice Byron White a moderate conservative on the court simply said that a student facing disciplinary disciplin-ary action had a right to tell his side of the story. But the law has always been a thorn in the side of hard-core conservatives. And despite a Gallup Poll last year showing that fewer than one in five teachers nationwide thought school discipline was a major problem. President Reagan, in an obvious bow to his conservative base, launched a publicity campaign for more "good old-fashioned discipline in school." It was at about this time that the Justice Department got into the act, though exactly why is unclear. Perhaps it was from an ideological 'conviction that the anti-Klan law was fundamentally wrong; or maybe it was due to simple bureaucratic irritation at a law that had, over the years, forced the Justice Department to battle state and local governments. ments. Whatever the cause, the internal memo includes proposals to make state and local officials immune from lawsuits thati arise,f;fromitheir "discretionary" actions; and to require that citizens filing suit demonstrate that local officials were "knowing and willful" in their violations of constitutional rights. It would also increase the burden of proof on plaintiffs who try to take government officials to court. WHITE HOUSE CUTS: Despite budget director David Stockman's pledge last fall to keep social programs for low-income Americans intact, the White House is looking to these programs for budget savings. According to a White, House document we've obtained, marked "very confidential," the administration administra-tion is eyeing more than $63 billion in cuts in social programs for fiscal years 1986 to 1988. Of these cuts, $31 billion are to come from low-income programs, though Social Security would not be touched. But one particularly cruel proposal propo-sal is to cut Supplemental Security Income payments to match the amounts of regular Social Security increases. This would mean that the poor, in effect, would get no cost-of-living increases like the rest of Social Security recipients. |