Disparate-Impact Liability
The New York Times claims that President Trump’s executive order eliminating disparate-impact liability “could defang the nation’s bedrock civil rights law.”
IN FACT, “disparate-impact liability,” or penalizing people for neutral policies that yield racial imbalances, is antithetical to the nation’s bedrock civil rights law and the U.S. Constitution. Here are the details:
- The Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which was enacted in 1868, forbids government from denying any person “the equal protection of the laws.”
- Despite the 14th Amendment and a series of civil rights laws passed by Republicans, Democrats routinely violated the civil rights of black people and denied them equal protection of the laws for nearly a century.
- In 1964, Republicans and Northern Democrats came together to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the nation’s central civil rights law.
- The Civil Rights Act of 1964 states that “nothing” in it “shall be interpreted to require any employer” to “grant preferential treatment” to anyone “on account of an imbalance” in “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”
- In 1965, Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that “freedom” and “equal opportunity” are “not enough” to remedy past discrimination and demanded that government dictate “equal” results for people of different races.
- Democrats and progressives have since followed Johnson’s lead of supporting policies to obtain equal outcomes at the expense of equal treatment required by the law and the Constitution.
- In contrast, Trump’s executive order states that “disparate-impact liability all but requires individuals and businesses to consider race and engage in racial balancing to avoid potentially crippling legal liability.”
