Civil rights
March 12, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Prominent conservatives have expressed to me their alarm over the prospect that Harmeet Dhillon will be tapped for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. However, I have also received pushback from a few of her supporters. In this post, I will address the arguments they make in defense of selecting Dhillon. But first, I will note that the supporters in question have not denied any of the statements of fact
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March 9, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice was at the center of much of President Obama’s “transformative” agenda. It took a leading role on issues ranging from local police practices, to voting procedures, to transgender matters, to employment quotas, to immigration. In all instances, the Civil Rights Division advanced the left’s position. The amount of mischief the Civil Rights Division can produce is vast. One of the great
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March 5, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Not even Edward Wood could contrive a more unbelievable legal regime than the federal Office of Civil Rights and its Title IX “guidance” for colleges and universities (hence my title above), and there is no one who is more adept at plumbing the depths of this matter than Shep Melnick, the Tip O’Neill professor of politics at Boston College. As it happens, I’m hosting him tomorrow (Monday) at noon at
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February 22, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
When the left sinks a Trump appointee, or the appointee sinks himself, the left doesn’t necessarily win. The left wins only if the replacement is more appealing to it than the original guy. Unfortunately, Alex Acosta, the replacement for Andrew Puzder at the Department of Labor, is vastly more appealing to the left than Puzder was. The Acosta selection represents a win for the left and a defeat for conservatives.
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February 10, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
I’m not enough of an elitist to believe that only Senators with legal training should serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee. However, the ability to engage competently in legal reasoning ought to be a prerequisite. In his work on the Judiciary Committee, Al Franken has failed to display this ability. Indeed, he shows a lack of competence in basic logic that, in a better world, would disqualify him from the
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January 16, 2017 — Scott Johnson
When Martin Luther King, Jr., brought his nonviolent campaign against segregation to Bull Connor’s Birmingham, he laid siege to the bastion of Jim Crow. In Birmingham between 1957 and 1962, black homes and churches had been subjected to a series of horrific bombings intended to terrorize the community. In April 1963 King answered the call to bring his campaign to Birmingham. When King landed in jail on Good Friday for
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December 12, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
The left has relentlessly attacked Sen. Jeff Sessions as a racist. Sessions’ Senate colleagues on both sides of the aisle know the charge to be false, and African-Americans from his home state who know the Senator have refuted it. Because the racism slander won’t fly, we’re now being told that Sessions is anti-LGBT. In support of this charge, critics cite what CNN calls “a public campaign as Alabama attorney general
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January 18, 2016 — Scott Johnson
When Martin Luther King, Jr., brought his nonviolent campaign against segregation to Bull Connor’s Birmingham, he laid siege to the bastion of Jim Crow. In Birmingham between 1957 and 1962, black homes and churches had been subjected to a series of horrific bombings intended to terrorize the community. In April 1963 King answered the call to bring his campaign to Birmingham. When King landed in jail on Good Friday for
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June 29, 2015 — Steven Hayward
Morningafterwise, we didn’t have to wait long for conjectures like this from Time: Now’s the Time to End Tax Exemptions for Religious Institutions . . . Rather than try to rescue tax-exempt status for organizations that dissent from settled public policy on matters of race or sexuality, we need to take a more radical step. It’s time to abolish, or greatly diminish, their tax-exempt statuses. Or the New York Times
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June 28, 2015 — Steven Hayward
Remember the Hobby Lobby decision last year, where the Supreme Court sided with employers whose religious faith led them to object to the Obamacare mandate that all health insurance policies must offer contraceptive coverage? The authoritarian and conformist left howled with indignation. Get ready for a lot of sequels in the aftermath of Obergefell. On Friday the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations in America issued a very gracious statement about
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April 11, 2015 — Steven Hayward
With the exception of what it calls “B-Hed” features about quirky news, the Wall Street Journal typically employs a fairly straight up headline style (unlike The Economist), but sometimes they could use just a little more imagination. Consider today’s front page howler: In Campus Rape Cases, Some Men See Injustice Well, duh. Ya think? And especially given some of the understated but devastating reporting in the body of the story:
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March 8, 2015 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday President Obama spoke at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in observation of the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday and the Selma to Montgomery marches. The White House has posted the text of Obama’s speech here and the video below. I encourage interested readers to check out the text or the video for themselves. President Obama began by paying tribute to Rep. John Lewis, whom he identified as “one of [his]
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January 19, 2015 — Scott Johnson
When Martin Luther King, Jr., brought his nonviolent campaign against segregation to Bull Connor’s Birmingham, he laid siege to the bastion of Jim Crow. In Birmingham between 1957 and 1962, black homes and churches had been subjected to a series of horrific bombings intended to terrorize the community. In April 1963 King answered the call to bring his campaign to Birmingham. When King landed in jail on Good Friday for
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December 19, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
Christian Adams reports that Eric Holder has issued a decree stating that cross dressing and transsexualism are now protected under federal civil rights laws designed to protect women from sex discrimination. According to Holder, the “most straightforward reading” of Title VII’s bar on discrimination ‘because of … sex’ — indeed, the “plain meaning” of its text — is that it bars discrimination “based on gender identity, including transgender status.” Therefore,
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October 19, 2014 — Scott Johnson
I may be mistaken, but it has seemed to me for quite a while that the campaign for gay marriage is about something other than “freedom” or “acceptance” or “equal rights.” The point of the campaign seems to me that we are compelled to get our minds right, to borrow the resonant phrase of the jailers in Cool Hand Luke. The proponents of “marriage equality” demand our inner assent. We
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August 28, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard oral argument yesterday in the case of Davis v. Guam. The hearing occurred in Guam, the first time the Ninth Circuit has sat there since 2002. Mr. Davis, a resident of Guam, attempted to register to vote in a plebiscite on Guam’s relationship to the United States. He was denied permission to register because he could not trace his
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July 16, 2014 — Scott Johnson
This past February Paul wrote about the case of Teresa Wagner v. Carolyn Jones, Dean of the University of Iowa College of Law in this post. Like Paul, I had read Peter Berkowitz’s Wall Street Journal column over the previous weekend and noted that the oral argument in Ms. Wagner’s appeal was scheduled before the Eighth Circuit in St. Paul the following Thursday morning. TaxProf Paul Caron picked up on
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