Equal Protection Wasn't Supposed to Be Negotiable |
I spent over 30 years managing other people's money, and one rule never changes: if you owe a fiduciary duty to a group of people, you treat them the same. You don't run one set of rules for the client you like and another for the client you don't. Do that, and you'll lose your license, and you'll deserve to. So, when I watch federal judges split down the middle on whether the government can stop sorting Americans by race, I keep landing on the same question. Why is this even a fight?
On Feb. 6, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted a nationwide injunction that had blocked core provisions of two of President Trump's early executive orders, the ones ending DEI preferencing across federal agencies and requiring contractors to certify they aren't running discriminatory diversity programs. The panel found the challengers, led by the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, hadn't shown the orders were unconstitutional on their face. The certification requirement stands. The termination provision stands. The court left the door open for narrower, as-applied challenges down the road, but the broad win went to the administration.
Less than five months later, a different court went the other way. On June 29, a federal judge in the Western District of Washington blocked enforcement of similar DEI and "gender ideology" grant conditions against Seattle, Portland, Cleveland, and a string of other cities and counties. Two federal courts, two executive orders cut from the same........