Daily Archives: 2 July 2021

Compelling Interest and Racism

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors correctly decry President Joe Biden’s (D) race-based “equity” programs and diktats as taking our nation back to an ugly past.

By equity, Mr Biden means preferences for some racial groups over others to achieve equal outcomes.

And

Mr Biden sells his agenda as taking America into the future. But allocating government funds or privileges by race is a step back to an uglier past. … If applied on the scale Mr Biden hopes, America would become a nation of groups competing for racial spoils and defined outcomes rather than seeking equal opportunity for everyone.

The editors added this near the end of their piece, and here I demur from them.

Strict scrutiny requires that the government have a compelling interest for discriminating by race, and that it must use the least restrictive means to achieve that interest. If less restrictive ways can achieve the same purpose, the policy fails.

There shouldn’t be any strict scrutiny on such matters; the policies should fail on their face. There’s nothing in the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protections clause that permits Government-determined “compelling interest” to override our Constitution [emphasis added].

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

All of that plainly applies to our Federal government every bit as much as it does to each of the governments of the several States.

The Strict Scrutiny standard, as applied here, has been unconstitutional from the start and was an earlier Supreme Court attempt to duck its responsibility in applying our Constitution rather than seeking out excuses and methodologies for getting outside of it.

Government’s compelling interest is to defend and uphold our Constitution.

Full stop.

Repealing SALT

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John Tamny, FreedomWorks’ Center for Economic Freedom Director, wants the SALT deduction cap repealed, and he thinks all Republicans should agree with him.

Among the several Tamny rationalizations for why Republicans should leap at the chance to repeal SALT is this gem.

Repealing the SALT cap might not restore that vision [convolutedly, of limited government], but it would direct money away from Washington and toward states and localities.

No. A better way, the only truly effective way and the only legitimate way, to direct money away from Washington and toward states and localities is to end altogether the interstate transfer of taxpayer monies.

The money us citizens allocate to our various government jurisdictional levels are best left within those jurisdictions entirely. Taxes allocated to our central government should be exclusively for the Constitutional purposes of paying the national debt, funding a defense establishment adequate to defeating external threats, and seeing to our nation’s general Welfare as enumerated in Art I, Sect 8. Those taxes allocated to our respective States and lower jurisdictions are best left within those jurisdictions, subject to the requirements and specifications the citizens of each State set for their State.

The only legitimate interstate transfer of tax dollars is in response to a declaration of a regional or national emergency.