About a year ago, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a court of appeals decision that had upheld the University of Texas’s use of racial and ethnic admissions preferences, ruling that the court of appeals had not been strict enough in its scrutiny of the school’s discrimination against the plaintiff, Abigail Fisher.  Last week a divided court of appeals panel on remand has again upheld the university’s discriminatory admissions policy (here are the judges’ opinions).  It’s likely that this case is now headed back to the Supreme Court. The good news is that the court of appeals ruled on the merits — …

I have frequently seen it asserted recently that, even though African Americans don’t use drugs more frequently than whites and others, the war on drugs is locking them up at a wildly disproportionate rate. Now, of course one answer is that, even if use rates are the same, it doesn’t follow that the incarceration rates should be the same. People are typically locked up not for using but for dealing. And some kinds of dealing — for example, in open-air markets — are more likely to result in arrests than others. (And I have to note that most criminals are not drug criminals …

Much was written last week about the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 2, 1964. But recently there was another important historical landmark, namely the 35th anniversary of an unfortunate milestone in that law’s interpretation: United Steelworkers v. Weber, decided on June 27, 1979, by the Supreme Court.  In this week’s email, adopted from a column I published on National Review Online, I’ll explain why this case is noteworthy. In Weber the Court allowed “affirmative action” discrimination against a white employee, notwithstanding the clear language of the 1964 Act, …

The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on Wednesday about legislation to negate the Supreme Court’s decision a year ago in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down the coverage formula for Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965.  One of the witnesses will be Center for Equal Opportunity board member Abigail Thernstrom, a leading expert on the VRA.  CEO chairman Linda Chavez and I have also testified about the Act in the past, and the balance of this email is drawn for a National Review Online column of mine this week. The announced aim of the …

The big political news last week was, of course, the defeat of House majority leader Eric Cantor in his Republican primary.  Not so coincidentally, the day before that I had noted on National Review Online that a number of conservative leaders had requested a meeting with Rep. Cantor regarding proposed changes to the Voting Rights Act being pushed by the Left because it is unhappy with last year’s Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder.  The letter the leaders sent explained why the bill in question is a bad idea, and the leaders wanted Rep. Cantor to come out forthrightly …

This week (Tuesday, at 10:00 a.m.), the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections will hold a hearing entitled, “The Regulatory and Enforcement Actions of EEOC: Examining the Concerns of Stakeholders.” There will be a live webcast. The subcommittee’s press release notes that members have “shared concerns with EEOC ‘guidance’ that limits employers’ use of criminal background checks during the hiring process.” Relatedly, it also notes the subcommittee’s interest regarding the Commission’s increasing reliance on cases alleging “systemic” discrimination, rather than focusing its efforts on individual complaints of discrimination.  I say “relatedly” because the common denominator is the Obama administration’s infatuation with the “disparate impact” …

The federal government wittingly and unwittingly endorses a great deal of racial discrimination in America. A 2011 report by the Congressional Research Service catalogued literally hundreds of government-wide and agency-specific set-aside and preference programs and grants throughout the entire executive branch that amount to some form of racial discrimination. If Congress wants to do something about it, and drastically reduce the amount of discrimination that goes on, it should look carefully at each of four bills that the Center for Equal Opportunity — working with the Heritage Foundation — recently drafted as model legislation. (The bills are described in detail …

Ta-Nehisi Coates has gotten some attention with his essay “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic, but I’m not impressed.  There’s no dispute that America has a long sad history of racial discrimination and that it and its effects are still with us, despite inspiring progress, and there’s also no shortage of talk and scholarship (serious and otherwise) on this topic.  The other part of Mr. Coates’s thesis is, as the title of the essay says, some sort of “reparations,” but he is openly vague about what that would look like, though he does endorse Rep. John Conyers’s proposed bill …