Government Activity

At 12:00 noon ET on Wednesday, September 21, 2022, the Federalist Society’s Faculty Division and Practice Groups will host a panel at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC regarding the upcoming Supreme Court term, which will begin on October 3, 2022. The Court’s docket already includes major cases involving affirmative action, election law, intellectual property, and civil rights. The full list of cases granted thus far for the upcoming term can be viewed on SCOTUSblog. The panel will also discuss broader questions about the direction of the Court. Featuring: – Prof. David D. Cole, National Director of the ACLU – …

This week, CEO is hosting a dozen Civil Rights fellows from some of the top law schools in the country for a series of activities and training. The inaugural class is made up of a dozen young men and women, including law students from Harvard, Notre Dame, Marquette, Seton Hall, Brigham Young, Wake Forest, St. Mary’s, George Mason, and the University of Maryland.  The first of its kind program, spearheaded by CEO President and General Counsel Devon Westhill, is taking place here in Washington, D.C. We kicked things off last night with a tour of CEO’s office and a welcome dinner …

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 …

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 …

There was a big front-page story in the Washington Post this week about a bill before the Kentucky state legislature that will, the headlines claim, “threaten” school “desegregation” in Louisville.  Hardly.  My favorite sentence in the story:  “The threat is no longer from protestors in hoods throwing bricks at buses carrying black children into white parts of town, but from state legislators pushing a bill to return to neighborhood schools.”  Nothing but straight news reporting here, folks!  Nothing slanted or tendentious, nosiree! Look:  There is no segregation in Louisville or anywhere else in the country, and there is no threat …

It’s back-to-school time, and Michael Meyers of the New York Civil Rights Coalition and I posted this column on National Review Online last Friday. Segregation is back. These past few weeks have seen controversy over black-student housing ads for roommates directed to “people of color” only, and over colleges and a law school that created separate class sections restricted for black students. What is going on? It appears, alas, that public universities have formally reintroduced and made fashionable racial segregation, in the guise of creating safe spaces for “their” minority students — to endorse, fund, and foster black separatism in …

The front-page headline on the Washington Post last week screamed, “New Data Shows U.S. schools Are Resegregating.”  Not true. Segregation means the government separating students by race and telling them it is illegal for students of one race to attend the same schools as students of another race. So the number of segregated public schools in the United States today is . . . zero. What is being complained about, instead, are racial “imbalances” that come about, not as a result of racist laws, but because of residential living patterns and the general practice of assigning children to schools that are near where they live. Deliberately assigning children …