Category Archive

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 …

An AP story this week laments: “U.S. teachers are nowhere near as diverse as their students,” and says liberal groups “want more to be done to help teachers mirror more accurately the students in their classrooms.”  Those groups say that minority students do better if they have a teacher “who looks just like them” and — rather contradictorily — that white students benefit by “engaging with people who think, talk, and act differently than them” (uh, stereotype much?).  But, the article concludes, it “will take political will” and better “programs and policies” designed “to increase the number of minority teachers.” But …

Last week the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Michigan ballot initiative that banned, among other kinds of affirmative action, racial and ethnic preferences in admissions to public universities.  This is a case that the Center for Equal Opportunity has been involved with for a long time.  We had joined amicus briefs with the court of appeals and the en banc court of appeals, and then also joined two briefs in the Supreme Court: one urging the Court to take the case and, when the Court did so, another urging it to rule the way it did.  What’s more, …

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 and the Heritage Foundation recently drafted as model legislation. (The bills are described in detail here, and this …

Last year I wrote here about the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s ridiculous “disparate impact” lawsuit against Kaplan Higher Learning Corp. The Obama administration sued Kaplan for running credit checks on employee applicants – similar, by the way, to the ones the EEOC itself uses.  Kaplan had learned that some of its employees had misappropriated student payments and, to provide safeguards against this behavior, it began screening its applicants for major red flags in their credit histories. The EEOC sued Kaplan, arguing that it cannot use credit checks, because use of credit checks has a disparate impact on black applicants. Anyway, …

In his remarks at the “Strengthening the Relationship Between Law Enforcement and Communities of Color Forum” last week, Associate Attorney General Tony West gets the ball rolling this way: “Let me also express appreciation to Reverend Al Sharpton, not only for joining us this morning but for his leadership, day in and day out, on issues of reconciliation and community restoration.”  Al Sharpton — a leader for “reconciliation”?  Really? Mr. West also praises New York City mayor Bill de Blasio: “In the short time the Mayor has been in office, the Justice Department has established a productive working partnership with the City of …

Here’s an interesting story from Bloomberg View about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB likes to use the “disparate impact” approach in its regulation of banks, but the American Banker has obtained data showing that the Bureau’s own employment practices might not fare very well under this approach (which puts a premium on racial/ethnic/gender bean-counting).  “Specifically, CFPB managers show a pattern of ranking white employees distinctly better than minorities in performance reviews used to grant raises and issue bonuses. Overall, whites were twice as likely in 2013 to receive the agency’s top grade than were African-American or Hispanic employees, the data …