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.