Edwin Meese: The Crusading Attorney General

To conservatives, he is a staunch moralist determined to see that the U.S. legal system protects the nation’s traditional values. To progressives, he is an overreaching ideologue intent on using the Justice Department to dismantle two decades of legal advances. After just six months in office, Edwin Meese has proved to be one of the most blunt-spoken and activist Attorneys General since the New Deal. At his ceremonial swearing-in last March, the country’s chief lawyer made his new role clear: “This department will be fiercely independent in . . . upholding the law. But this is not inconsistent with conscientiously and vigorously implementing the President’s philosophy, which is the mainstream of today’s American political thinking.” For better or worse, Ed Meese has fought to make good on his pledge.

While Reagan and his staff have been concerned largely with foreign policy, the federal budget and tax reform, Meese has seized the President’s more peripheral social program as his agenda. His whirlwind of activity has “very little coordination with the White House,” as one presidential staff member dryly put it. But as an adviser to Reagan since his days as California Governor, and White House Counsellor during the first term, Meese knows he is / in step with the President’s intention to challenge existing law on such provocative issues as abortion, criminal rights, affirmative action and school prayer.

In speeches and departmental policy, Meese has led an assault on activist judges. At the American Bar Association convention in July, he complained that “too many courts have become more policy planners than interpreters of the law.” The same month, the Justice Department challenged the Supreme Court by filing a brief that proposed reversing the landmark Roe vs. Wade decision, which struck down most legal restrictions on abortion in 1973. “The textual, doctrinal and historical basis for Roe vs. Wade,” stated the brief, “is so far flawed and . . . is a source of such instability in the law that this court should reconsider that decision.”

On ABC’s This Week with David Brinkley show last week, Meese blasted the Supreme Court’s 1966 Miranda ruling, which requires police to advise criminal suspects of their rights against selfincrimination. He has also attacked the court’s recent rulings on church-state conflicts, telling the Washington Post that the court has confused “freedom of religion and hostility toward religion.” This fall the Justice Department will go before the court to argue that a student religious group in a Williamsport, Pa., high school should be permitted to meet during a school-sanctioned activities period.

In August, Meese reportedly urged the President to rescind rules requiring Government contractors to set numerical goals for the hiring of women and minorities. Last spring the Justice Department filed a motion in an Indianapolis federal court calling for the elimination of minority hiring goals in that city’s police and fire departments. In all, the department has sought to modify affirmative action plans in 53 jurisdictions around the U.S.

Meese further outraged the civil rights establishment with indictments in Alabama against eight political activists for voter fraud in primary elections last fall, charging that the accused used the names of incapacitated and illiterate nursing- home patients on absentee ballots. Although three of the defendants have already been acquitted, the black mayor of Union, Ala., went on trial last week in Birmingham. The anger in Alabama’s black belt is palpable. Randall Williams, a director of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, contends that whites who commit voter fraud go unprosecuted. Says he: “This is clearly a one-sided investigation.”

% The Justice Department was rebuked for its civil rights policies in June when the Senate Judiciary Committee blocked the appointment of William Bradford Reynolds, head of the Civil Rights Division, to Associate Attorney General. Five other top-echelon Justice Department appointments requiring Senate confirmation remain unfilled. Says American Enterprise Institute Analyst Bruce Fein of the vacancies: “If there’s been a blemish on Meese’s stewardship, it is that he has not been able to get his horses in place.”

A former prosecutor in Alameda County, Calif., Meese prides himself on being tough on crime. But two widely publicized cases have led to criticism that he is soft on well-connected criminals. In May the Justice Department accepted a settlement allowing the E.F. Hutton brokerage company to plead guilty to a massive check- kiting scheme, but declined to seek indictments of any of the firm’s officers, although Hutton was fined $2 million. Meese has also had to defend the Justice Department’s protection of Jackie Presser, the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the only major union boss who supported Ronald Reagan’s 1980 and 1984 presidential bids. In July the Justice Department decided not to prosecute Presser on charges of paying $274,000 to nonworking “ghost employees” at a Teamsters local in Cleveland. Presser’s uncle Allen Friedman went to federal prison for allegedly receiving such illegal payments. Federal District Court Judge Sam Bell granted Friedman a new trial last week on the grounds that U.S. prosecutors failed to disclose Presser’s role in the case as an FBI informant. Bell also ordered an investigation of whether FBI and Justice Department officials violated the law by failing to turn over crucial evidence about Presser.

The Attorney General’s most pressing long-term concern is the federal judiciary. President Reagan has 95 new or vacant judgeships to fill, and nominations are expected to flood Capitol Hill this autumn. Meese is bound to have a say in appointing judges who subscribe to the Administration’s social philosophy. If he succeeds in packing the benches with conservative ideologues, Ed Meese may see the Reagan Revolution endure in America’s courts through the end of this century.