Written by by Stewart Baker at legalinsurrection.com
When the Supreme Court struck down Harvard’s use of race in admissions, liberals denounced the decision. President Biden said he “strongly, strongly disagreed” with the decision. Conservatives predicted “massive resistance” to the ruling.
Those who expected an attack on the Supreme Court’s decision were right. Those who supported Harvard are a minority. But they have no doubt about their moral clarity or their right to make the rules. Remarkably, despite the unpopularity of identity-based allocation of scarce resources, they have decided that the best defense is a sweeping offense. Legislation now pending in Congress is poised to extend racial, gender, and religious quotas well beyond education — to housing, employment, healthcare, insurance, and credit decisions – and to make them more or less mandatory.
Proponents are making only one concession to the unpopularity of their cause. They are hiding it. In fact, they’ve hidden it so well that dozens of Republicans in Congress have already voted for it, thinking that it’s a welcome bipartisan resolution of a decades-long battle over federal privacy rights.
The bill, called the American Privacy Rights Act of 2024 (APRA), does have a lot to say about privacy. It’s the result of hard negotiation between companies who make money from personal data and their Congressional critics. But when it comes to quotas, there was no one negotiating for the proposition that Americans should be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.