According to this Washington Post article, black Maryland state legislators are “planning to propose emergency legislation to address the dearth of minority-owned businesses approved to grow medical marijuana in the state.”  There’s a federal constitutional problem here, though: A predicate for racial preferences in government contracting is a demonstration that there has historically been discrimination in the industry involved. Medical marijuana was legalized in Maryland only a couple of years ago, so one wonders how much discrimination there has been, historically, in an industry that does not yet actually exist.  But never mind all that.  “This is a good modern-day civil rights …

If there’s one thing that this country needs more of, it’s racial division.  That, at least, seems to be the view of the Obama administration. As Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation writes in this Issue Brief posted recently: On the first day of Congress’s recess, the Obama Administration recommended the most sweeping changes to the nation’s official racial and ethnic categories in decades.  The two most significant proposals were creating a new ethno/racial group for people who originate from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and taking from those who identify as Hispanic the option to identify their …

Do non-citizens vote? Yes, they do, according to this study — and they vote quite a bit.  Here’s the abstract: In spite of substantial public controversy, very little reliable data exists concerning the frequency with which non-citizen immigrants participate in United States elections. Although such participation is a violation of election laws in most parts of the United States, enforcement depends principally on disclosure of citizenship status at the time of voter registration. This study examines participation rates by non-citizens using a nationally representative sample that includes non-citizen immigrants. We find that some non-citizens participate in U.S. elections, and that …

The Left’s view is that “systemic racism” and “institutional racism” and “implicit bias” are all bad except that it is all right to discriminate systematically and institutionally and explicitly against whites and Asian Americans, and in favor of African Americans and Latinos, where the latter two are “underrepresented” in, say, Ivy League admissions or in Silicon Valley, but it is not all right to discriminate against Asian Americans, let alone anyone else, and in favor of whites, period, and so it is also all right to have, say, contracting discrimination programs that discriminate against whites and in favor of African …

“Keith Lamont Scott Is Sixth Person to Die in Police Shooting in Charlotte This Year,” says an NBC News headline.  Well, yeah, but if you actually read the story, near the end you learn some interesting facts.  All those shot were men.  Each was 43 or younger.  Four were black, one was Asian, and one was white.  And all except for one was armed. What’s more, here are the details on the one who was not armed:  “Daniel Kevin Harris, a white, unarmed, 29-year-old, was shot on Aug. 18, after a state trooper tried to pull him over for speeding …

The Supreme Court will be back in a week or two, so I thought this would be a good time to share with you an essay I did over the summer and at the request of the website SCOTUSblog: I’ve been asked to discuss what will happen in the area of racial preferences – a.k.a. “affirmative action” – if Justice Antonin Scalia’s successor is a conservative. Well, since Justice Scalia was a conservative, then what will happen is basically what has been happening. The new Justice will line up with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence …

I am proud to announce my first publication in the Guam Daily Post, which ran earlier this month: On Sept. 1 at the federal courthouse, Dave Davis will argue that the much-discussed status plebiscite should at last be put out of its misery. It is commonly understood everywhere else that, under the United States Constitution, the right to vote is violated when you parcel out voting rights based on your ethnic group. But in Guam, it will take judges to enforce the law. The same thing happened, by the way, in Hawaii, and the Supreme Court ruled in Rice v. …