COLUMN RIGHT : It’s Ebb Tide for Quotas as Lobby Declines : Talks with major corporations fell apart because the American people do not support racial preferences.

With last week’s breakdown of the effort by large corporations and civil-rights groups to agree on a jobs discrimination bill, the prospect for legislation supporting quotas has dimmed considerably. On this issue, the influence of the civil-rights lobby may finally, and thankfully, be declining.

Two decades ago, of course, the lobby had enormous influence. With its support, federal bureaucracies devised and enforced racial-employment policies, and by the late 1970s every Appeals Court to weigh the legality of quotas had sustained them.

This began to change in the 1980s, thanks to the Reagan presidency. While Ronald Reagan only partially succeeded in changing the quota-enforcement policies that he inherited, his Justice Department did manage to persuade the Supreme Court, itself influenced by the President’s appointees, to limit the circumstances under which racial preferences are valid.

It was, in fact, the Reagan Justice Department’s anti-quota arguments in the Supreme Court in 1988-89 that forced the issue out of the hands of the bureaucracies and the courts and into the hurly-burly of legislative politics. Key decisions rendered as a result of those arguments left the lobby no choice but to ask Congress to rehabilitate the court-weakened quota laws. Last fall, a friendly Democratic Congress passed legislation whose key provisions proposed to do just that. But Bush held the trump card by casting a veto that Congress could not override.

The Bush veto surprised the lobby, which, as in the past, pursued an inside-Washington strategy, confident that the President would believe it unwise to veto a so-called civil-rights bill. But, perhaps surprising himself, Bush defined the debate with his anti-quota veto. When voters from North Carolina to California then elected candidates outspokenly against racial preferences, Bush was only inspired to oppose them more strongly.

A lobby that had so long and so unequivocally been committed to policies of racial preference thus was forced to try a different tack. Ralph Neas, head of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, engaged the Business Roundtable--made up of 65 chief executive officers of truly big businesses--in secret talks from which Neas hoped would issue a proposal that Bush could not afford to oppose, given a big-business endorsement.

Neas was smart to try to enlist big business in another of his covert quota operations. In “Equality Transformed,” his new book on affirmative action, Herman Belz of the University of Maryland points out that by the early ‘80s, corporate America had learned to live with racial preferences. Why? The biggest businesses can most easily absorb the regulatory costs of quotas, thus gaining a competitive advantage.

Neas wants a tightening of the law of “disparate impact,” which would strengthen already existing incentives for employers whose work force is racially imbalanced to comply or face costly litigation. Key Business Roundtable figures--most notably Robert Allen of AT&T;, the lead negotiator--were prepared to go along. But not all were willing to swallow still more quota laws. And smaller businesses, which can much less afford the transaction costs of racial preference, publicly objected when they heard about the private talks from which they had been excluded. It is no wonder the talks fell apart.

Neas and his allies are now busy lambasting the White House, which had advised roundtable members that Bush would not sign a quota bill, and AT&T;’s Allen. The White House is accused of sabotage, Allen of a lack of courage. But the talks collapsed for a fundamental reason: Policies of racial preferences lack the support of the American people.

For an employer to prefer someone over another on the basis of race mocks the best principles of the nation. Precisely because of their moral defect, policies of this kind have typically depended on dishonesty and deceit--and secret meetings involving certain elites (in this case, CEOs like Allen and major-domos of civil rights like Neas) who in effect conspire to trade away the rights of those not at the talks.

As much as the nation needs any new jobs-discrimination bill, it also needs civil-rights leaders willing to recover and uphold the original principles of the movement, that civil rights are individual rights that belong equally to all Americans, regardless of race. Strict adherence to this principle remains the best hope for ending discrimination and advancing the economic prospects of all citizens.