Right Back at You

Cheryl Mills is definitely one tough sister. Though she had little courtroom experience, last week she stood in the well of the Senate, showing tremendous poise as she defended the President and took the House impeachment managers by storm. A little-known White House deputy counsel, Mills hurled their hypocrisy back in their faces. The managers, she intoned, had argued that "the entire house of civil rights might well fall" if Clinton escaped conviction. You could almost hear her muttering, "Spare me." "We've had imperfect leaders in the past," said Mills, referring to Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., "and we'll have imperfect leaders in the future, but their imperfections did not roll back nor did they stop the march for civil rights," she said. "I'm not worried about civil rights because this President's record on civil rights, on women's rights, on all of our rights is unimpeachable."

Her rhetoric wasn't fancy, but it was on target. The G.O.P. is a party, after all, that owes its post-Barry Goldwater resurgence to opposition to civil rights. And while its leaders from time to time proclaim their belief in racial justice, their pledges have been mostly lip service. They're too genteel for a sheet-wearing bigot like David Duke but all too willing to embrace bigotry if it's dressed in a suit and tie.

Mills, 33, is just the sort of hard-nosed advocate to drag such hypocrisy to the surface. She has rubbed some colleagues the wrong way--and endeared herself to the First Couple--with her scorched-earth responses to legal challenges during her six years at the White House. When a congressional committee was probing the Clinton Administration's use of a White House database, in 1997, Mills was accused of failing to turn subpoenaed documents over to the committee. Indiana Republican David McIntosh asked the Justice Department to investigate her for possible perjury and obstruction of justice. (Justice says the referral from the Hill is still being evaluated.) Last week, White House sources say, Mills toned down the civil rights aspects of her speech at the urging of more politically minded members of the President's defense team. But she still managed to tap the fury many blacks feel as they watch the spectacle of these proceedings.

It is a spectacle filled with galling reminders of the G.O.P.'s alliances with anti-black forces. The presiding officer is Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a Republican appointee who had a well-documented early life as a segregationist before his rise to the high court. In the 1960s he was the leader of Operation Eagle Eye, described by the Arizona Republic as "a flying squad of G.O.P. lawyers that swept through south Phoenix to question the right of minority voters to cast their ballots." The man who swore Rehnquist in as presiding officer of the trial, South Carolina Republican Strom Thurmond, ran for President in 1948 on the segregationist Dixiecrat ticket. These days Thurmond would prefer that you forget that youthful indiscretion, since he was only 45 at the time.

Not all the bad news is old news. In December newspapers reported that Georgia Congressman Bob Barr, Clinton's attacker-in-chief, had delivered a keynote speech to a white-supremacist group called the Council of Conservative Citizens. Not long after that, it came out that Senate majority leader Trent Lott had also been cozy with the C.C.C. When confronted, both Barr and Lott denied that they were aware of the group's racist agenda, though the organization's officers have never made any secret of their views--and Lott's uncle Arnie Watson is a member of its executive board. You don't have to be a Clinton fan to wonder why lying about a sexual affair makes you unfit for office while lying about being intimate with bigots does not. After Cheryl Mills' powerful presentation, it's a question that deserves to be answered.