I would not be surprised if this was the ulterior goal, to strip the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it has always been a thorn in their side… we have a god given right to discriminate!
Fortune
By Alphonso David
July 24, 2023
Thirteen Republican attorneys general have sent a letter warning Fortune 100 CEOs against taking race into consideration as part of their employment and contracting practices. They claim this is in response to the recent Supreme Court case banning affirmative action in higher education. But the intent behind their threats has nothing to do with affirmative action–and everything to do with gutting all provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The recent letter may have been co-signed by the top lawyer in each of their respective states, but it doesn’t stand up to the slightest bit of legal scrutiny. Their primary argument is that the ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. President & Fellows of Harvard College has rendered “explicit racial quotas” illegal. This wholly ignores that racial quotas have long been prohibited under the Civil Rights Act, as decided by the Supreme Court in Regents of University of California v. Bakke all the way back in 1978. That’s a full 45 years of settled law that is being ignored in favor of inflammatory threats against America’s largest companies.
So, if the attorneys general letter isn’t about new legal implications coming out of the recent affirmative action decision, what is it about?
In the short term, Republicans are hoping to create a further chilling effect on corporate diversity initiatives that are already on the ropes. Recent controversies surrounding Disney, Anheuser-Busch, and others are fresh in countless CEOs’ minds, who may be worried about attracting the attention of right-wing ideologues. The attorneys general clearly intend to contribute to this environment of fear in hopes that employers will choose to dismantle corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs rather than risk a lawsuit.
All these supposedly business friendly politicians are willing to attack businesses who do not follow their ideology! It is the Republican philosophy that you should be to hire or not hire a person not on the qualifications but rather who they are, what they believe in, who they are married to, and how nature made them.
In the long term, their intentions could be even more nefarious. The letter represents the opening salvo in Republicans’ efforts to attack Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and redefine what constitutes racial discrimination.
It was always a thorn in the Republicans side.
The Republican attorneys general suggest that our current environment differs so substantially from where the country was in 1964 that our definition of what constitutes discrimination must change. They blithely and offensively suggest that America has solved racism–that the same law that protects Black employees from being called racial slurs in the workplace should now be race-neutral, so it can be wielded by white employees who feel they have been unfairly passed over for a job.
[…]
Make no mistake: The attorneys general who issued this letter are showing their hand. They intend to bring or influence lawsuits against employers that have inclusive employment, contracting, and hiring practices in the months ahead–all in service of pursuing another radical Supreme Court decision that upends precedent and guts Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
This is a cynical political game. It’s not based on sound legal theory that honors legal precedent or legislative history. But that doesn’t mean it can be ignored. If we don’t hold these disingenuous efforts up to the light, we will lose ground under the cover of darkness. If we don’t speak up, our silence becomes complicity.
Tell me, what do you think the justices talk about on those long vacation trips that the billionaires pay for?
Propublica
By Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski
April 6, 2023
IN LATE JUNE 2019, right after the U.S. Supreme Court released its final opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas boarded a large private jet headed to Indonesia. He and his wife were going on vacation: nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht staffed by a coterie of attendants and a private chef.
If Thomas had chartered the plane and the 162-foot yacht himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded $500,000. Fortunately for him, that wasn’t necessary: He was on vacation with real estate magnate and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, who owned the jet — and the yacht, too.
NPR reported that Propublica…
A ProPublica investigation out Thursday reveals that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has failed to disclose luxury vacations and free travel provided by conservative billionaire Harlan Crow.
So tell what did they talk about during those nine days?
Propublica
By Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, Alex Mierjeski
June 20, 2023
In early July 2008, Samuel Alito stood on a riverbank in a remote corner of Alaska. The Supreme Court justice was on vacation at a luxury fishing lodge that charged more than $1,000 a day, and after catching a king salmon nearly the size of his leg, Alito posed for a picture. To his left, a man stood beaming: Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire who has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to rule in his favor in high-stakes business disputes.
Singer was more than a fellow angler. He flew Alito to Alaska on a private jet. If the justice chartered the plane himself, the cost could have exceeded $100,000 one way.
In the years that followed, Singer’s hedge fund came before the court at least 10 times in cases where his role was often covered by the legal press and mainstream media. In 2014, the court agreed to resolve a key issue in a decade-long battle between Singer’s hedge fund and the nation of Argentina. Alito did not recuse himself from the case and voted with the 7-1 majority in Singer’s favor. The hedge fund was ultimately paid $2.4 billion.
Alito did not report the 2008 fishing trip on his annual financial disclosures. By failing to disclose the private jet flight Singer provided, Alito appears to have violated a federal law that requires justices to disclose most gifts, according to ethics law experts.
I can just picture them sitting around a roaring fire sipping their 25 year whiskey talking about how to present their case and how the judge could rule?
“If you were good friends, what were you doing ruling on his case?” said Charles Geyh, an Indiana University law professor and leading expert on recusals. “And if you weren’t good friends, what were you doing accepting this?” referring to the flight on the private jet.
This was when Justice Samuel Alito spoke at the
Heritage Foundation and how they promoted the talk,
In a wide-ranging discussion, Associate Justice Samuel Alito discusses his more than three decades on the Supreme Court of the United States and the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Over the course of his judicial career, Justice Alito has demonstrated a keen intellect and an allegiance to the Constitution. He has also exhibited courage by never hesitating to state what the law is, not what he would like it to be, even when doing so places him in the center of the storm. He also has exhibited a quality that is exceedingly rare in Washington: humility.
Justice Alito at the end of the talk said when asked;
When you quoted a great jurist, Learned Hand, who once wrote, “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no Constitution, no law, no court can save it.”
I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on that and your thoughts on the precious values in our Constitution and its fragility.
Justice Alito: The enforcement of rights almost always has costs, and there will be those in government who from time to time want to restrict rights. What happens when they try to do that? Who is going to be there to try to stop this from happening? We hope the courts will do that. Most of the time, the courts do that. But in the end, the judiciary is the weakest of the three branches. If it came down to a bare-knuckles fight between the judiciary and either the executive or Congress, there’s no doubt who would lose.
What do you think that the lawyer get out of these “Question & Answer” session, maybe an understanding on how to present a court case?
The
Washington Post reported back when Amy Coney Barrett was President Trump’s nominee to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court…
Barrett was a paid speaker five times, starting in 2011, at the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, a summer program established to inspire a “distinctly Christian worldview in every area of law,” tax filings show. It was founded to show students “how God can use them as judges, law professors and practicing attorneys to help keep the door open for the spread of the Gospel in America.”
The Blackstone program is run by Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal advocacy group whose founding leader has questioned the “so-called separation of church and state” as it is often understood. In the years Barrett spoke there, the fellowship’s suggested reading list included a book co-written by the same leader that lamented how Christians for too long had been “AWOL from the courthouse.”
The justices are in a web of intrigued with conservative legal organizations, are they talking about strategy for different cases? How to present their cases? What the judges are looking for in a case. Do you think that this will give them an unfair advances when they go to court?
The case that the Supreme Court ruled on the last day of the session the case of 303 Creative v. Elenis was all “what if” it wasn’t even true, all was all premised on “What if I posted this on my website?” there was no injured party. Do you think that the strategy was discussed on one of those billionaire junkets with the justices? Or did they just talk about how great the fishing was?
