When the city of New Haven tried discriminate against the police officers who passed their promotion test, because they weren’t appropriate ‘diverse’ for the PC crowd, the Supreme Court rightly struck it down. Now, the Justice Department’s Civil Right Division is suing New Jersey for not discriminating on behalf of black and hispanic officers who don’t pass the written exam for promotion in the same numbers as white officers. Though of course that’s not how they frame it.
The exam, a written test that New Jersey police officers must pass in order to advance to the rank of sergeant, quizzes candidates on state and local laws.
“This complaint should send a clear message to all public employers that employment practices with unlawful discriminatory impact on account of race or national origin will not be tolerated,” said Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division. “The Justice Department will take all necessary action to ensure that such discriminatory practices are eliminated and that the victims of such practices are made whole.”
Actually, what this complaint tells us is that it’s more important to bow at the alter of identity politics than to insure that police officers know and understand the laws which they are tasked to enforce. Unless there is evidence that the test itself is inherently racist, i.e. that the questions somehow lend themselves to be answered better by white test takers than others, then there is no discrimination. But there is no such evidence.
The entire argument of discrimination is based on nothing more than a few percentage points of difference between how white and minority candidates perform.
White officers pass the New Jersey test at a rate of 89 percent, as opposed to 77 percent of Hispanic candidates and 73 percent of African-American candidates.
So what? What percentage of right-handed and left-handed people pass the test? What percentage of blondes and brunettes? How is race any more relevant to understanding the law than these entirely superficial characteristics? The fact of the matter is that races are not taking the test – individuals are. Individuals who study and know the material pass, individuals are not prepared fail. Those who fail should not be promoted. Dicing these individuals into artificial categories and comparing passing percentages is entirely meaningless.
“Our suit does not have an issue with a written exam period, but we do believe it has a disparate impact on African-American and Hispanic candidates,” Alejandro Miyar, a spokesman at the Justice Department Civil Rights Division, told The Daily Caller.
Disparate impact is a little-known legal term that describes an employment practice that isn’t intentionally discriminatory, but which results in a discriminatory outcome. It is forbidden under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Disparate impact was first described by the Supreme Court in the 1971 case Griggs v. Duke Power Co. which found that “good intent or absence of discriminatory intent does not redeem employment procedures or testing mechanisms that operate as ‘built-in headwinds’ for minority groups and are unrelated to measuring job capability.”
One would think that understanding the law goes to the heart of measuring the job capacity of police officers.
This is the same Justice Department that dropped the charges of voter intimidation against the Black Panthers after the case had already been won.
No, there’s no radical, racial agenda at Eric Holder’s DoJ.
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Jake Tapper asks the question, but more interesting to me is this answer by Eric Holder:
Attorney General Eric Holder brushed off the question, saying, “I would not have authorized the bringing of these prosecutions unless I thought that the outcome — in the outcome we would ultimately be successful. I will say that I have access to information that has not been publicly released that gives me great confidence that we will be successful in the prosecution of these cases in federal court.”
What is the purpose of a trial if you will only use it when the verdict is assured, but won’t release the accused when it is not? The idea put forth by the left, that civilian trials are necessary for justice, is completely undermined here.
All prosecutors consider the likelihood of a guilty verdict when bringing a trial, but normally the choice is between a trial or letting the defendant go free. KSM is not going to go free regardless of whether this trial is held, nor should he. We already know he is guilty.
The decision, only made when a guilty verdict is assured, to hold a civilian trial in lieu of a military tribunal shows just how pointless such trials are. They are a stage act – pure theater put on for the benefit of the hard left. Eric Holder has essentially admitted that there is no justice-based reason why KSM is being tried in civilian court instead of the adequately equipped, and better suited, military tribunals established for the purpose. He is doing it simply because it provides opportunity to pander to an untenable position hatched in thoughtless opposition under President Bush.
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The latest Friday news dump involved the announcement that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, along with four other terrorists, will receive a trial in civilian courts in New York City. This unwise decision is not about justice.
Mohammed has already confessed to his crimes – over two years ago. This “trial” will provide him an unnecessary platform on which to pontificate, grandstand, and spread his Jihadist filth. Our enemies will handed a magnificent propaganda tool for no good reason.
Leftist commentators, in defending this move, have suddenly found Constitutional religion while pointing to our founding document’s protections as justification. But these protections apply to Americans or residents, not foreigners apprehended overseas for waging war against our country. Affording them Constitutional protections when they have no obligation to uphold the duties it places on the rest of us is what would really make a mockery of it. It is a contract upon which they have never signed, and would just as soon spit on as do so. Why should they receive its benefits?
It is not only the administration’s opponents that are troubled by this decision. Democratic Senator Jim Webb said in a statement, “Those who have committed acts of international terrorism are enemy combatants, just as certainly as the Japanese pilots who killed thousands of Americans at Pearl Harbor. It will be disruptive, costly, and potentially counterproductive to try them as criminals in our civilian courts.”
This is not to say that there should be no due process; merely that it need not take the same form as those provided for Americans. As it turns out, that process already exists through military tribunals that have already been established – over much political wrangling. Why jettison them now? Our tribunals were more than capable of rendering fair verdicts in a situation where sensitive information and methods would not be exposed to our enemies. But that has been tossed aside in favor of a show trial in New York. And we can rest assured, this trial will be quite the circus – one which we’ll all likely leave with pie on our faces.
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In a slight twist to the “never let a crisis go to waste” motto on constant exhibit at the White House, prominent leftists have approached the recent string of high profile shootings with a resolve to not let the tragedies go to waste. The agenda? Hate crimes and gun control.
Hate Crimes
Explicitly citing the recent shootings as evidence, Attorney General Eric Holder called for new hate crimes laws as a way to stop “violence masquerading as political activism.” Although each incident involved the commission of acts which are already considered crimes, Holder says Congress needs to pass new legislation “to protect the rights ensured under our Constitution.” Senate Majority leader Harry Reid has said that he is committed to getting to hate crimes legislation before the August recess.
A particular pernicious aspect of the current hate-crimes push is the willingness of proponents to submit the accused to multiple trials, if necessary. Although the Constitutions prohibition against double-jeopardy has never applied cross-jurisdictions between states and the federal government, it has nevertheless long been seen as desirable to avoid the prospect of federal prosecutions following state acquittals for the same crime. Now, the ability to try acquitted individuals again using federal hate crimes laws is seen by liberal advocacy groups as a virtue.
It’s even being attempted to tie opponents of open immigration into the issue of hate crimes. Meanwhile, ceaseless race-baiter Jesse Jackson takes the well worn low road and blames the attacks on everything from conservative talk radio to “our obsession with guns.”
Gun Control
Perpetually displeased with the reality of living under the Second Amendment and its protections for individual gun rights, the left is forever looking for ways to undermine and destroy our deep historical and cultural beliefs in self-protection and personal freedom. Gun grabbers have a history of hijacking high profile tragedies in hopes of harnessing the emotions of the moment to enact far-reaching bans without any need for consideration of the merits. The most recent spat of shootings are no different.
The Washington Post’s Marie Cocco dramatically writes that we are “enduring a spring of slaughter.” And the cause of our present horror is that “we have decided to let just about anyone have a gun.” Cocco also offers the usual gun control lie, claiming that, “among the guns Poplawski reportedly used in his attack was an AK-47, a so-called “assault weapon” whose manufacture was banned in the 1990s, but is no longer.” Lying about the AWB has always been common place among its proponents. As reality would have it, Ak-47s were not simply banned by the bill, and many variants were legal to purchase, as the bill comically dealt more with what combination of cosmetic features a gun had rather than its functionality.
The various shootings over the last few weeks are deplorable. but so are the left’s efforts to stretch the facts in order to advance a radical agenda. Whether it be lying about the contents of past legislation and its impact, or pretending that a lunatic, jew-hating, 9/11 truther is “right-wing,” the left has demonstrated that they have no intention of getting tripped up over facts while pushing for greater government control.
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Left-wing advocates of granting Washington DC a seat in Congress were heartened by the election of president Obama, a strong supporter of such a move. The problem? It’s blatantly unconstitutional.
Article 1, Section 2 says, “The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several states.” It further states, “No person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the age of twenty five years, and been seven years a citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that state in which he shall be chosen.”
There is no ambiguity here. States are represented in the House. The District of Columbia is not a state. It cannot be represented in the House. Moreover, no individual meets the qualifications above to represent D.C., as one cannot reside in the state in which one is chosen if one is not chosen by a state.
But this isn’t stopping Attorney General Eric Holder. When his lawyers at the Justice Department concluded proposed legislation to grant a House seat to D.C. would be unconstitutional, Holder basically told them to shove of. Rather, he took the time honored, corrupt politician approach of asking the same question of different people until he got the answer he wanted. This is disgraceful.
But the disgrace does not all belong to the democrats. Some RINO’s and misguided republicans are on the wrong side of this issue. The support of Republican Senator Orrin Hatch has been essentially bought with the inclusion of an extra seat for Utah. He and many others from the state felt that Utah should have received an additional seat in the last census, so they are willing to support a blatantly unconstitutional measure in exchange for this redress. But any seat would only last 2 years until the next census and apportionment, where Utah would likely have gained the seat anyway.
Others, such as Susan Collins, support the measure despite her own misgivings over its constitutionality. Her reasoning for supporting it? “I believed then, as I do now, that this question is best resolved by the courts and not by this committee.” This attitude reflects a gross negligence of her duties, as she is as equally bound to uphold the Constitution as the courts. That was the view of James Madison when he addressed the first Congress. He said, “[I]t is incontrovertibly of as much importance to this branch of the Government as to any other, that the Constitution should be preserved entire.”
Whether it be Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Orrin Hatch or Susan Collins, all members of our government have an equal duty to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Passing blatantly unconstitutional laws, with the attitude of “let the courts sort it out,” is a repugnant adbication of that responsibility.
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According to Eric Holder, us cowardly Americans never talk about race. And yet, that’s what the conversation is about regarding an advanced placement education program in Florida.
For decades, high-school students have taken community-college courses to dress up their resumes and prepare for college.
Now, competitive middle-schoolers in Florida are flocking to sign up for high-school classes.
For parents and students, it’s a great chance to get ahead. And school districts have something else to brag about: seventh- and eighth-graders completing courses such as Algebra II Honors and biology that had been reserved primarily for ninth- and 10th-graders.
But the nation’s foremost scholars in middle-school education are worried the fast-growing trend is leaving minority children behind. They also question whether the practice is legal because, nationwide, it has tended to result in students being segregated by race.
In Florida, high-school-level classes at middle schools are filled mostly with white kids. That’s the case even at some schools where most of the kids are black or Hispanic, according to an Orlando Sentinel analysis of public records from the Florida Department of Education and school districts.
So here we have a program that itself has nothing to do with race. It’s a voluntary program in which anyone can participate. The article, after the author is done wringing his hands over several classes with no black students, acknowledges it later:
Orange County officials said they monitor the diversity of their advanced classes and want their racial makeup to mirror the student body as a whole. But many minorities aren’t choosing the high-school classes — a situation that should change as more kids learn about the program, said Dianne Lovett, the school district’s senior director for advanced studies.
Contrary to the claims of Eric Holder and the race baiters in the White House, this nation is obsessed with race already. We’re so obsessed with it that we take a good thing in education, a program that allows students to get ahead of their oppressively incompetent regular school programs, and we turn it into something bad.
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A chimp named Travis was recently shot by police after attacking a woman. A cartoon in the New York Post then satirized the event:
The meaning here is obvious. The artist has taken a recent event and added commentary to it to mock another current event. Specifically, that the stimulus bill was so bad it could have been written by a chimp.
But then here come the race hustlers, led by Al Sharpton, to declare that this cartoon is really a racial insult to Obama. Nevermind that he didn’t write the stimulus bill (Pelosi did), we are to believe that Obama is being compared to a monkey, rather than take the more sensible and self evident understanding I described above. Of course, none of these people cared when Bush was routinely drawn as a chimp.
When one side is this hyper-irrational about race, should we be surprised that others might not want to talk about it?
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That’s what U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder thinks of America when it comes to race. You see, apparently we don’t talk about race enough.
Eric Holder, the nation’s first black attorney general, said Wednesday the United States was “a nation of cowards” on matters of race, with most Americans avoiding candid discussions of racial issues. In a speech to Justice Department employees marking Black History Month, Holder said the workplace is largely integrated but Americans still self-segregate on the weekends and in their private lives.
Is it just me, or is this post-racial America looking, well, awfully racial? But in so far as labeling any and all conservative viewpoints as racist doesn’t constitute actual discussion, maybe he has a point.
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I am a libertarian-conservative blogger living in the DC area. I have a Master's degree in Political Science and work in public policy, but please don't hold that against me.
