Fighting Stealth Dictators

When William Hayden received a dismal score on his Nassau County police entrance exam, no one told him why. After some investigation he learned that Nassau County had, with the help of the U.S. Justice Department, thrown out more than half of the test in order to boost minority scores.

After the county and the Justice Department discarded the sections of the test evaluating reasoning and inference-drawing skills, what qualifications did they test for? Not many. The remaining sections were said to measure such amorphous qualities as personality and temperament. One question asked, for example, "Which of the two statements is most like you: I'm always in a hurry at work to get things done, or At work, I think of myself as part of a smooth-running machine." Such were the criteria by which Nassau County's potential police officers were judged.

Unfortunately, this quiet social engineering is routine business for the Justice Department. The department has become so adept at using its power to pursue pet social projects--most notably racial preferences and bilingual education--that the feds routinely bully counties and districts into agreements to establish quotas and inflexible education programs that are unnecessary and unwanted. Meanwhile, the taxpayer picks up the tab.

In Denver, where the Justice Department has been called in by the Office of Civil Rights (a particularly powerful one-two punch), federal education officials are making absurd demands. They insist that students of Hispanic heritage are sometimes better off taking classes in Spanish--even if they are English speakers who do not know a word of the Spanish language.

Federal educrats argue that parents do not have the right to remove their children from a Spanish speaking class and that only tests--not parents or teachers--may determine when a student is ready to enter an English-speaking class. So much for a free and color-blind society, parental wisdom, and local control.

What makes this racial gerrymandering and social masterminding so Orwellian is that it happens so quietly, without public consent or even knowledge. Faced with the Justice Department's bottomless pockets and the risk of losing large amounts of federal funding (Denver alone could lose as much as $30 million), local officials acquiesce, keeping these federally forced programs out of the court and the headlines.

When local officials have stood up to the Justice Department, courts have made some effort to rein in this federal leviathan. The Justice Department, for example, lost a groundless employment discrimination suit against Torrance, California. U.S. District Judge Mariana Pfaelzer deemed the suit frivolous, unreasonable, and without foundation, and ordered the department to pay the city's legal fees in the case.

The Justice Department had accused Torrance of discriminating against minorities in its police and fire department entrance exams. The department probably expected Torrance--which first showed its independent streak when it incorporated in 1921 to avoid being swallowed up by Los Angeles--to acquiesce and sign a consent decree. That is what three other Los Angeles counties (Alhambra, El Monte, and Pomona) did when they were hit with discrimination suits around the same time. However, even faced with the threat of an expensive lawsuit, Torrance decided to fight back.

Torrance hired a prominent Los Angeles law firm to guide the city through the needlessly onerous and expensive discovery process the Justice Department demanded. (After one particularly asinine set of Justice Department depositions, the court warned Justice's attorneys that "at some point, the folly must end.") Even after millions of dollars were spent on discovery, the department was unable to provide any evidence that Torrance discriminated in its hiring process. Judge Pfaelzer summed the situation up well when she commented to a Justice Department attorney:

It puzzles me that the United States government, with all the power and financial ability they have, brought the action against the City of Torrance and yet I still can't figure out what it is you have that will carry the burden of proof here.

Standing up to the Justice Department is the first step in curbing the department's pattern of unchecked coercion. Of course, it is an outrage that individuals and cities should have to expend any energy or money at all battling the tyranny of federal bureaucrats . . . particularly when it is the taxpayers who are being compelled to fund this battle against themselves.

Marni Soupcoff clerks at the Washington, DC-based Institute for Justice and studies at Stanford Law School.

For more information ...

Back to Equality. "It is high time," Ward Connerly writes, "that those who are obsessed with color develop a little colorblindness." (Hillsdale College, February 1998, 4 pp.).

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