Rating the Trump Administration on Civil Rights

Roger CleggUncategorized

Less than a year from now, Americans will be choosing a new president.  From my perspective at the Center for Equal Opportunity, the Democratic candidates are so far uniformly appalling, each trying to outrace the other to the Left — supporting reparations and busing, condemning the criminal justice system as racist, you name it. And Donald Trump and his administration — how’s that record after nearly three years?  Well, it’s a mixed bag.  As a lawyer and CEO’s general counsel, my focus is on the extent to which the legality of race-based decision-making is being supported or opposed.  Racial preferences …

More on Harvard

Roger CleggEducation

Recently the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal was kind enough to ask me to write for them on the decision last month in the Harvard case, in which the school is accused (rightly, in my view) of discriminating in its admissions against Asian Americans.  Here’s what I wrote for them. In a long-awaited decision, federal trial judge Allison Burroughs has ruled that, while Harvard does consider a student’s race in determining who gets in and who doesn’t (“the use of race in and of itself is admitted”), nonetheless Harvard is not breaking the law. That outcome was not …

Harvard Beats Asian Americans

Roger CleggEducation

For now, at least. A federal trial judge has ruled that, while race is considered by Harvard in determining who gets in and who doesn’t (“the use of race in and of itself is admitted”), and while the plaintiff group has standing in this case to challenge the resulting discrimination against Asian Americans (in line with an earlier ruling), nonetheless Harvard is not breaking the law. The outcome was not surprising, and the judge’s 130-page opinion is unlikely to change many minds or alter the expected trajectory of the case to the Supreme Court. The judge found, “Race is only …

More Reparations, More HUD

Roger CleggGovernment Activity

While Americans overwhelming reject it (see, e.g., this Gallup poll), the Left and Democratic politicians — especially among those running for president — continue to endorse the idea of reparations.  I’ve noted before that I testified against this the last time around, and here is an article I had written and included as an appendix to that testimony. The Bizarre Campaign To Eliminate “Profiteers of Slavery”: Practical Questions about Chicago Ordinance Are Overwhelming by Roger Clegg (from Human Events, January 12, 2003) Last fall, according to its Tribune, Chicago “became the first major city in the nation” to pass a …

Identity Politics

Roger CleggUncategorized

Last week President Trump created some controversy — so what else is new? — with his off-the-cuff remarks.  This time it had to do with his criticism of Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) for their criticism of Israel.  “Where has the Democratic Party gone?  Where have they gone, where they’re defending these two people over the state of Israel?  And I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.” Now, the controversy centered on the term “disloyalty,” and whether it implied that …

Trump’s HUD Proposes Good New Regulations

Roger CleggUncategorized

The Trump administration is to be commended for the new regulations that the Department of Housing and Urban Development is proposing for enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, aimed at changing the disparate-impact approach used in the Obama administration. This is the approach whereby a defendant can be held liable for housing discrimination when it has a policy that is nondiscriminatory on its face, is evenhandedly applied, and was adopted with no discriminatory intent — but which leads to politically incorrect statistical imbalances. So, for example, if a landlord would prefer not to rent to individuals with a history of …

Keeping skin color and sex out of government contracting

Roger CleggRacial Preferences

Last month, the Center for Equal Opportunity weighed in with Nassau County in New York regarding the issue of preferences based on race, ethnicity, and sex in its contracting.  Here’s what we said (and this is typical of what we have said to many state and local jurisdictions over the years): June 22, 2019 To:                   Laura Curran Nassau County Executive From:               Roger Clegg General Counsel, Center for Equal Opportunity Re:                   Proposed disparity study For the legal and policy reasons stated in the attached redacted memorandum, which we sent to another jurisdiction, we urge that the County reconsider whether to …

Biden and Busing

Roger CleggUncategorized

It’s hard to know how to weigh in on the Biden-and-busing controversy, since the definition of “busing” is itself uncertain; since it’s hard to tell what Joe Biden means to say now, let alone what he meant to say decades ago; and since the criticism of him by his political opponents is so likely to be deceptive as well. But these thoughts: 1) It is unconstitutional and bad policy to assign students to public schools on the basis of their skin color. 2) This means that Jim Crow segregation was unconstitutional and bad policy; it also means that racial balancing …

Reparations and Other Silliness

Roger CleggGovernment Activity

Last week there were House hearings on reparations, the first since I testified against them in 2007.  In an earlier email, I had included the main text of my testimony, and this week I’m sending an imagined dialogue — which I included with that testimony at the time and which was published in the Federalist Society’s Engage magazine — between a proponent and an opponent of this (silly) idea.  In sum, reparations would be unfair, unworkable, inevitably unending and expanding, divisive (encouraging a victim mentality among blacks and resentment among everyone else), and of course unconstitutional.  But aside from those …

Sex and the Supreme Court

Roger CleggUncategorized

The Supreme Court recently agreed to review cases presenting the questions whether sexual orientation and transgender status are “sex” within the meaning of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act — that is, whether the prohibition in federal employment law against discrimination on the basis of sex includes bans on sexual-orientation and transgender-status discrimination. The answer, of course, is no:  When Congress wrote in 1964 that employers may not discriminate on the basis of sex, they meant — those words meant — that employers could not treat men and women differently, and nobody would have thought that the word …