Confirmation Bear Traps

(5 of 6)

Chavez started out as a Democrat, working for the party's national committee while her husband worked for the AFL-CIO. She moved on to the American Federation of Teachers, another natural step in the liberal food chain. But as it happened, she found herself growing more conservative. Chavez likes to say that she didn't leave the Democratic Party but that it left her on domestic social issues and foreign policy.

She is no straight-line conservative. Like Bush, she has broken with some in her party by supporting legal immigration. But labor groups are convinced that she poses a threat. "We've never before had a nominee for the Department of Labor who has expressed opposition to some of the key things that are her responsibility to enforce," says Marcia Greenberger, executive director of the National Women's Law Center. Critics fear Chavez will ignore all but the most egregious examples of workplace discrimination, fight against raising the minimum wage and side with Big Business against family-friendly measures like family medical leave and child-care support.

Conservatives are hoping she will throw open the windows at Labor, with her articulate style and political skills. "I don't think we'll see her try to overturn the Executive Order that created affirmative action. That battle's been fought and lost in the '80s," says Bolick, who calls Chavez a "creative conservative" and "kindred spirit." "The law says preferences should be given to the socially and economically disadvantaged. I see her reinterpreting that statute through regulation, trying to go away from race toward class."

The third most tempting target for interest groups is Gale Norton, the former Colorado attorney general who is Bush's pick for Interior. She is being assailed by environmentalists, who now rival civil rights groups for clout on Capitol Hill. Norton, says Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope, "would be a natural disaster as Interior Secretary. Norton is the oil, mining and timber industry's choice." Pope's group is worried that she will move quickly to open more federal land to mining and oil exploration. During a stint as Reagan's associate solicitor for conservation and wildlife, where she was a protege of James Watt, the Interior Secretary enviros loved to hate, she worked to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, and is expected to do so again. After all, Bush campaigned on the idea. And those who hope the Bush Administration will take global warming seriously may be disappointed to learn that in 1997 Norton co-authored an op-ed piece declaring there's no such thing.