Category Archive

With everyone waiting for the Supreme Court’s decision in the Obamacare case, I coauthored a piece in the Christian Science Monitor last week that explained why a case that will be decided next year also has important health implications – but, in its case, it’s the health of the country’s race relations that is at stake.  You can read the whole piece here, but here are some excerpts: The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide one of the most consequential cases in years – the challenge to the new federal health care law, often known as Obamacare. But right behind …

 Can the federal government adequately predict exactly how many mathematicians, engineers, biochemists, and inventors the United States will need twenty years in the future? I doubt many of us would answer yes. Yet, federal immigration policy does exactly that in allotting work visas for highly skilled employees.        Most of the debate over immigration has centered on low-skilled workers, especially the large population of illegal immigrants who have entered the country over the last two decades. But our legal immigration system is dysfunctional as well. The system primarily focuses on re-uniting foreign-born relatives with family members who are …

Last week, at the invitation of Maryland’s state advisory committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the Center for Equal Opportunity submitted testimony for a hearing on the subject of “Racial Disparities in Incarceration Rates” in Maryland’s state prisons.  It is becoming common to assert that such disparities – that is, the fact that some racial groups are “disproportionately” represented among prison inmates – somehow prove that the criminal justice system must be racist. Related posts: Roger Clegg testifies regarding H.R. 40 Did Juan Williams libel LU’s Hans Bader? Minority Access to Higher Education Americans Overwhelmingly Reject Racial Preferences …

Gov. Scott Walker’s victory in the Wisconsin recall election this week was no surprise to anyone but Big Labor. Unions were furious when Walker and the Republican-controlled legislature cut back their right to bargain on anything beyond wages. Democratic legislators fled the state for several weeks in 2011 in order to try to prevent a final vote from taking place. Demonstrators took over the state capitol, and when that didn’t work, unions and left-leaning groups gathered signatures to force a recall vote. Related posts: TESTIMONY OF ROGER CLEGG, PRESIDENT AND GENERAL COUNSEL, CENTER FOR EQUAL OPPORTUNITY BEFORE THE U.S. COMMISSION …

While much of the world’s attention is focused on the Assad regime’s appalling assaults against Syrian citizens, with more than a hundred dead in this week’s massacre in Houla alone, another human rights atrocity occurring on a much larger scale garners far less attention. Related posts: The Immigration Impasse Destroying Records to Hide Race Discrimination Roger Clegg testifies regarding H.R. 40 TESTIMONY OF ROGER CLEGG, PRESIDENT AND GENERAL COUNSEL, CENTER FOR EQUAL OPPORTUNITY BEFORE THE U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS REGARDING THE PROPOSED EMPLOYMENT NON-DISCRIMINATION ACT

“Minority Babies Are Now Majority in United States,” read the headline in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago. And one thing that an increasingly multiracial and multiethnic United States cannot have is a system in which its institutions treat people differently according to skin color and what country someone’s ancestors came from—where, for example, public universities, government employers, and public contracting officials give preferential treatment to some and discriminate against others on the basis of race and ethnicity. Such division was never a good idea and is now simply untenable. E pluribus unum—now more than ever. Related posts: 50th …

The Wisconsin recall election of Republican Gov. Scott Walker is not going quite like the unions and the Democratic Party expected. Back in 2011, many pundits thought that the governor had overreached when he took on public employee unions, restricting — though not eliminating — collective bargaining rights. But he did so because he inherited a state in dire financial shape with a deficit of $3.6 billion and public employee pensions and benefits that threatened to bankrupt the state. Related posts: TESTIMONY OF ROGER CLEGG, PRESIDENT AND GENERAL COUNSEL, CENTER FOR EQUAL OPPORTUNITY BEFORE THE U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS …

Like many Americans, genealogy has been a keen interest of mine. I’ve had a good sense of where my family came from — Spain on my father’s side and the British Isles on my mother’s. But what I knew was only part of the story. And this Sunday, May 20th, what I subsequently learned will be aired on the PBS series “Finding Your Roots.” Related posts: TESTIMONY OF ROGER CLEGG, PRESIDENT AND GENERAL COUNSEL, CENTER FOR EQUAL OPPORTUNITY BEFORE THE U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS REGARDING THE PROPOSED EMPLOYMENT NON-DISCRIMINATION ACT Suggested Reading on Civil Rights Issues Five Mistakes Some …

Last week, I noted that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has issued new “Enforcement Guidance” designed to make it much riskier for employers to consider arrest and conviction records in hiring decisions, on the grounds that such considerations can have a “disparate impact” on the basis of race.  But later last week, with some help from the Center for Equal Opportunity, the House of Representatives passed by voice vote an appropriations amendment that will forbid the EEOC from using any of its funds “to implement, administer, or enforce” this guidance. Kudos to Representative Ben Quayle (R., Ariz.), who introduced …