It seems like it was just earlier this morning [It was just earlier this morning, Steve —Editor] that I wrote about President Trump’s executive order eliminating federal DEI efforts. But there’s more to it. Trump’s order also nuked President Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order EO 11246, which established affirmative action, with the stroke of his pen.Â
Advertisement
You may safely assume that it was a beautiful pen. The most gorgeous pen ever used to wipe out six decades of discriminatory hiring and admissions policy, established without a single Congressional vote.
The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo explained that Trump’s rescind order is wide-ranging, “banning all federal contractors and publicly-funded universities from practicing race-based discrimination, including DEI.” If Rufo’s name sounds familiar, he’s been a powerful force in taking back America’s institutions from the radical left. Rufo was appointed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis two years ago to reform the state’s New College into a place where students can get a classical education, based loosely on Michigan’s Hillsdale College.
Time magazine shrieked about Rufo’s “alarming and deceptive” crusade against DEI and gender studies, and the New Republic called him “a disturbing figure.” That’s endorsement enough for me.
But I digress.
The universities will scream bloody murder over losing their racial/sexual/whatever preferences. But it will be much more illuminating than one of their “Various Victimhood Studies About Studies” degrees to learn whether they’d rather give up their cherished admissions spoils systems or their precious public funding.
Advertisement
As for the federal government, for now, they won’t have many avenues for resistance. Along with abolishing DEI and now affirmative action, Trump has instituted a wide-ranging federal hiring freeze. It’s difficult to keep on keeping on with biased hiring practices when there are no hires to be made.
“This is clearly going to generate intense litigation,” legal scholar Jonathan Turley noted with his usual dry understatement. “The key will be not the policy contained in the EO but the actual guidelines and determinations made by these agencies,” Turley wrote, and you can expect plenty of foot-dragging. “There will also be challenges if some changes do not comply with the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) and notice and comment requirements. Those procedures take time, but a failure to comply can lead to even greater delays from litigation and resulting injunctions.”
It’s going to take more than an EO to undo 60 years of damage and congressional action to make the changes longer-lasting.
Nevertheless, chalk up Trump’s action as yet another campaign promise, delivered with blazing speed.
A commenter on my earlier column today had a nifty little theory about that. “Trump knows at least some of his EOs will be challenged in court,” Sanchez wrote. “That is the plan! Flood the left with work to do! Cloward Piven the left’s legal teams!”
Advertisement
Whatever broader strategy Trump may or may not be employing in his first days back in office, Rufo reminded readers on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birth that “the ideological capture” of the 1965 Civil Rights Act by the radical left “is neither fixed nor inevitable.”
“Rather than argue for its abolition, Americans concerned about the excesses of the DEI bureaucracy should appeal to higher principles and demand that our civil rights law conform to the standard of colorblind equality. The answer to left-wing racialism is not right-wing racialism — it is the equal treatment of individuals under law.”
It’s been too long, but we are moving in that direction again at last.
Recommended:Â Senate Passes Laken Riley Act With *12* Dem Votes in Big Trump Win
