“A Retreat on Racial Preferences”

That’s the headline on a Tuesday editorial in The Wall Street Journal. The Editors opened with

The Biden Administration has been losing in court on its racially biased policies, and last week something remarkable happened. It gave up. Without explanation, the Justice Department declined to appeal a federal court injunction against a discriminatory loan-forgiveness program for farmers.

The decision not to defend appears to be widespread.

More than a dozen lawsuits have been filed challenging the USDA’s racial preferences, and three so far have resulted in preliminary injunctions by district courts in Florida, Wisconsin and Texas. Justice failed to appeal the Florida injunction before its 60-day deadline last week and hasn’t contested the others.

But maybe not. This collection of decisions only concerns the Ag Department, not other parts of the Biden-Harris (it’s Biden’s demand, after all, that the administration be termed Biden-Harris) Executive Branch.

Without explanation—without public explanation, perhaps. Another explanation might be that, sotto voce, President Joe Biden (D) and his co-President (co-Vice President?), Kamala Harris (D), fear that their Executive Branch’s racism is getting to be too obvious to too many average Americans.

It’s no retreat, actually, nor even a retrograde, but only a misdirection. This administration continues to push racist policies in Defense, with its critical race “theory” spew; in Justice, with its push for “diversity” for diversity’s sake; in Education, with its push to have critical race “theory” and its parallel and misnomered “anti-racism” taught in K-12.

In Which the Supreme Court Gets One Right, So Far

Whole Woman’s Health et al v Austin Reeve Jackson, Judge, et al On Application for Injunctive Relief is a case brought to the Supreme Court by plaintiffs seeking injunction against a newly effective Texas law that bars abortions when a doctor can detect a fetal heartbeat and assigns to the citizens of Texas sole authority to enforce the law, through civil court action.

By a 5-4 vote, the Court declined to enter the matter at this stage of litigation, thereby permitting Texas’ law to remain in effect.

I have some thoughts on the matter.

Here’s the core of Chief Justice Roberts’ dissent from the Court’s decision to not interfere, at this time, with Texas’ heartbeat law:

I would grant preliminary relief to preserve the status quo ante—before the law went into effect—so that the courts may consider whether a state can avoid responsibility for its laws in such a manner.

It’s interesting that Roberts would so misconstrue the situation. Even at the State level, the citizens are sovereign, not the governments they hire/elect from time to time. Far from Texans’ government avoiding responsibility for its laws, it has put that responsibility in the present case, without filter, where responsibility originates: with the sovereign citizenry.

Here’s Justice Breyer, dissenting:

But a woman has a federal constitutional right to obtain an abortion during that first stage.

True enough, as far as it goes, but it, and Breyer, don’t go very far. The baby has a prior, unalienable right to its life.

Then Breyer raised a non sequitur, unusual for a Supreme Court Justice:

The very bringing into effect of Texas’s law may well threaten the applicants with imminent and serious harm. One of the clinic applicants has stated on its website that “[d]ue to Texas’ SB 8 law,” it is “unable to provide abortion procedures at this time.” Planned Parenthood South Texas [URL omitted] And the applicants, with supporting affidavits, claim that clinics will be unable to run the financial and other risks that come from waiting for a private person to sue them under the Texas law; they will simply close….

That’s purely speculative, however plausibly so, and so it’s beyond the scope of any American court’s reach. Aside from that, and more importantly, it may be unfortunate for Planned Parenthood South Texas, but that’s all it is. No business, no entity of any sort, has a Constitutional right to a particular business model. On the contrary, any business’ model must be designed to operate within the bounds of law.

Here’s Justice Sotomayor, dissenting:

The Act [SB8], which took effect statewide at midnight on September 1, makes it unlawful for physicians to perform abortions if they either detect cardiac activity in an embryo or fail to perform a test to detect such activity.

And yet the presence of cardiac activity—Sotomayor’s (cynical, I say) euphemism for a heartbeat—clearly shows that the baby is alive, and not just a cluster of cells (as many pro-abortionists assert babies to be). That brings us back to the part about the baby having a prior, unalienable right to its life.

The Court’s ruling can be read here.

An Example

…of what an honorable government does. This is the Republic of Korea.

From Laura Bicker, @BBCLBicker, via Lyman Stone @lymanstoneky:

@BBCLBicker
380 Afghans who worked for the Korean government in Afghanistan will arrive in South Korea tomorrow according to MOFA [Republic of Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs]. They will not be entering as refugees, but as people of merit to the country says the Foreign Ministry.
9:20 PM · Aug 24, 2021

@BBCLBicker
The 380 are currently at Kabul Airport and will arrive in Incheon tomorrow by military plane. These are Afghans who have worked for years at the Embassy, KOICA, Bagram Korean Hospital, Bagram Korean Vocational Training centre, Chairkar Korean Provincial Reconstruction Team.

@BBCLBicker
The Afghan staff and families will go through the quarantine process as soon as they arrive in Incheon Airport and will then be moved to government owned temporary housing. All notes from MOFA briefing monitored by @HosuLakeLee

Unfortunately—dangerously—we have the Biden/Harris administration instead.

Two Congressmen Went on a Trip

Congressmen Seth Moulton (D, MA) and Peter Meijer (R, MI) went to Kabul, Afghanistan to see for themselves the situation there. They didn’t want to rely solely on President Joe Biden’s (D) word, or those of SecDef Lloyd Austin or JCS Chairman General Mark Milley. Even worse, they didn’t say, “Mother, may I” before heading off.

What’s really bad, though, is that Biden, et al., weren’t interested in what Moulton and Meijer learned on their trip—it was the fact of the trip itself and that the travelers bypassed the Wonders of the Potomac in the going. In fact, the Biden/Harris administration quite angry about the Congressmen’s impudence.

Biden administration officials were furious about the trip, claiming that the arrival of the men caused a distraction for the personnel on the ground attempting to do a job amid chaos. One senior official told the Washington Post, “They’re taking seats away from Americans and at-risk Afghans—while putting our diplomats and service members at greater risk—so they can have a moment in front of the cameras.”

This isn’t just disingenuous, it’s utterly dishonest. No seats were taken away from at-risk Afghans, not when Biden has abandoned them completely in his panic to get our military out of Afghanistan by the end of the month, on Taliban orders.

Even worse is that lack of interest in what the two observed:

leaving on a passenger flight [but only if that ride had three empty seats] and being taken to an area where evacuees are being temporarily relocated will provide them with on-the-ground knowledge of what the rescue process looks like, and aid their ability to deliver oversight.

Biden, et al., already know all the answers; they have no interest in facts.

Somebody’s Racism in Action

Progressive-Democrats; their communications organ, the Press; and the Left generally accuse former President Donald Trump of racism. They hardly pass up a chance to make the accusation, even today.

A just completed Federal Reserve analysis of the just completed Federal census and a Brookings Institute (no right-leaning organization that) say otherwise.

While income inequality exists among racial and ethnic groups, the Brookings Institute points out in several reports that black and Hispanic households have made statistically significant economic progress especially in the years prior to pandemic-related shutdowns in 2020.
An analysis by the Federal Reserve, for instance, found wealth for African Americans and Hispanic Americans grew far faster during the Trump years than for whites.
Between 2016 and 2019, median wealth rose for all race and ethnicity groups, the Fed report states, but growth rates during this period “were faster for Black and Hispanic families.” Wealth increased for Black families by 33% and for Hispanic families by 65% during this period, compared to white families, whose wealth only increased by 3%.

And

[The minority] poverty rate reached record lows in 2019, according to Census data. The Black poverty rate of 18.8% was the lowest it has been since 1959 when poverty estimates were first recorded for this group.
In 2019, the poverty rate for Hispanics, 15.7%, was also the lowest on record since data for this group was first recorded in 1972. The poverty rate for Asians was also the lowest on record of 7.3%. The poverty rate of 7.3% for non-Hispanic Whites in 2019 was the same as the poverty rate of 7.3% in 1973.

It’s not just relative wealth, either. The economic upward mobility that Americans used to enjoy, and then lost in recent years, was greatly improved, also.

…84% of the middle class in 1979 was white, 2% was Black, 2% Hispanic, and 2% “other.”
By 2019, whites had fallen to 59% of the middle class, while 12% was Black, 18% was Hispanic, and 10% was listed as “other.”

The list goes on in the JtN article.

If Trump was being racist, he sucked at it, achieving precisely the opposite for minorities.

No, the racism in action is that of the Progressive-Democrats; their communications organ, the Press; and the Left generally with their routine manufacture of a race beef where they knew, and know today, full well none exists.