For years, the federal government kept its thumb on the scale.
The weapon of choice was “disparate-impact” theory — the notion that if a fair test or a fair hiring process doesn’t match someone’s preferred demographic chart, the process itself must be racist and torn down. In a stunning reversal, the Department of Justice has declared that theory unconstitutional.
The scheme was sold as a way to root out unintentional discrimination by treating individuals as mere statistics. Instead, it produced intentional discrimination — not as a flaw, but by design.
Left-leaning administrations worked to thwart the Constitution. Right-leaning ones shaped the high court, but entrenched bureaucrats kept weaponizing the law, while too many conservatives gave speeches about equal opportunity instead of taking action.
The Constitution is colorblind and forbids race-conscious decisions. What was missing was leadership. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has acted — putting President Trump’s vision into practice and reaffirming that every American deserves to be judged as an individual, not a demographic.
The Justice Department released a landmark opinion on June 9, authored by Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Joshua Craddock, concluding that the EEOC’s disparate-impact framework is unconstitutional because it pressures employers into race-based decision-making.
For years, politicians in robes, activists, and entrenched bureaucrats on the left hid behind that theory, using statistical disparity as cover to discriminate against Americans who did nothing wrong except succeed on merit. It was never about fairness.
It was always about equal outcomes — engineering a result under the ruse of equity and DEI. It became a bulldozer to plow over the constitutional and civil rights of hardworking Americans.
America is better than that. Achievement is not dictated by race or any immutable characteristic; it is earned through skill, grit, and determination. Our civil rights laws were enacted to prohibit intentional discrimination — not to mandate demographic balancing.
Blanche put it succinctly: “Despite trying to promote equality, EEOC’s disparate impact liability interpretation under Title VII actually fosters the very discrimination its guidelines seek to address. This opinion will now allow businesses to hire based on performance, restoring equal opportunities in the American workplace.”
Mentioned at length in the opinion was our SCOTUS case Ricci v. DeStefano, where New Haven discarded firefighter promotional exams after minority candidates didn’t score high enough to satisfy political expectations. The city threw out professionally developed assessments and teamed with minority organizations to brand us as bigots and racists — to silence any dissent.
It didn’t work. Despite the lawfare, the threats, and even political violence against one of the New Haven 20, we stood together — not just for firefighters, but for what was right.
Consider the logic. Discarding those results is like looking at the graduation rates of minority and nonminority students and deciding that, to be “fair,” no one should graduate. Absurd — but that was the answer the city wanted, public safety be damned. It was about feelings, not the law.
Whenever outcomes disappointed the activists, the answer was never better training or better schools. It was lower standards, rigged selection, and punishment for the people who did everything right.
Expanding educational opportunity and breaking the teacher-union stranglehold — by holding superintendents and school boards accountable for failing our kids — is how you change outcomes, not by punishing the people who earned their success.
The Supreme Court ruled that the city violated Title VII by intentionally discriminating against us but stopped short of our Fourteenth Amendment claim. Justice Antonin Scalia went further, warning that “the war between disparate impact and equal protection will be waged sooner or later, and it behooves us to begin thinking about how—and on what terms—to make peace between them.”
This opinion is only one step. We have witnessed where some Federal courts will attempt to legislate from the bench turning a blind eye to the law. But for the first time in years, Washington is admitting an obvious truth: outcome-based enforcement leads directly to race-based decision-making.
The action needed now is to codify President Trump’s agenda into law by modifying the filibuster along with confirming Todd Blanche. As Mike Davis, President of the Article III Project, stated: “Blanche has spent the last 15 months bringing much-needed reforms and accountability at the Justice Department. But much more must get accomplished to restore public confidence in our justice systems. Blanche is uniquely qualified to finish the job. He’s the right man, at the right time, for the right job.”
President Trump understands that the Constitution must carry the day, and that individuals must rise and fall on their own merit. Equal opportunity has never meant equal outcomes. America’s promise is an equal chance to compete — not a guarantee that every group crosses the finish line together. The moment government engineers the finish, it must discriminate against somebody — and the Constitution does not permit that, no matter how fashionable the cause.
Frank Ricci was the lead plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court case Ricci v Destefano. He retired as a Battalion Chief in New Haven, Conn. He has testified before Congress and is the author of the book Command Presence.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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