Hate has no room at the Inn. I received the following message which puts our lives in perspective at this moment in time.
On this most holy Easter Sunday, I wanted to reach out and wish you and your loved ones a blessed day.
My faith is a guiding light in my life, and I would not be where I am today without it. May we all honor His goodness and spread His word throughout our great country.
I am truly so thankful for the support you have shown me, and I sincerely hope you have a wonderful Easter with family and friends.
From my family to yours: Happy Easter!
“GIVE TO THE WORLD THE BEST YOU HAVE, AND THE BEST WILL COME BACK TO YOU.”
The ruling, by a judge in Texas, was the latest in a string of court decisions that have eroded or struck down federal affirmative-action mandates in a variety of arenas.
A Commerce Department agency has been told it cannot serve only minority-owned businesses.Credit…Graeme Sloan/SIPA USA, via Associated Press
The Minority Business Development Agency, a Commerce Department program created during the Nixon administration to help minority-owned businesses, discriminates against white people and must offer its services to people of all races and ethnic groups, a federal judge in Texas ruled on Wednesday.
The judge, Mark T. Pittman of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, sided with two of the three white business owners who sued the agency after they were told its assistance was limited to members of “disadvantaged” minority groups. The third was found to not have standing.
The presumption that the business owners were not disadvantaged violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, wrote Judge Pittman, who was named to the federal bench by President Donald J. Trump. Judge Pittman permanently barred the agency from serving only members of minority groups.
“If courts mean what they say when they ascribe supreme importance to constitutional rights, the federal government may not violate such rights with impunity,” he wrote. “Time’s up.”
The ruling was the latest in a string of court decisions that have eroded or struck down federal affirmative-action mandates in a variety of arenas. The most prominent example was a Supreme Court ruling last June that upended race-conscious college admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
The three plaintiffs who sued the Commerce agency based their legal argument on that ruling, and Judge Pittman referred to it 32 times in his opinion.
The Department of Justice, which represented the agency in the suit, declined to comment on the ruling.
Marc H. Morial, the president and chief executive officer of the National Urban League, called for an immediate appeal.
“The decision is wrong and stands for a narrow retrogressive view of the Constitution,” he said. He added that the agency’s work “to concentrate on the growth of businesses that still remain substantially locked out of the mainstream of the American economy is necessary and needed.”
But the principal lawyer representing the plaintiffs, Dan Lennington of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative public-interest law firm, said the ruling should also be applied to other race-conscious practices, like the awarding of grants, workplace promotions and race-based scholarships in higher education.
“We hope this is a precedent to eliminate all of that,” Mr. Lennington said. Automatically labeling a group of people as disadvantaged is “ridiculous,” he said, citing Judge Pittman’s reasoning that Oprah Winfrey would qualify as disadvantaged under the Commerce agency’s rules.
With a $550 million annual budget, the Minority Business Development Agency funds privately operated business centers in 33 states and Puerto Rico that help companies secure financial aid and strategic advice. The case involved three small businesses — a Texas chain of sexual wellness centers, a Florida contractor and a Wisconsin architect — whose owners, all of them white, separately sought help from the agency’s business centers.
The Texas and Florida business owners were told that they could not apply for help because the centers’ services were available only to disadvantaged individuals. (The Wisconsin business owner abandoned plans to seek help after discovering on the agency’s website that he, too, was ineligible because of his race.)
The law governing the agency’s operations defines disadvantaged people as members of specific minority groups, including African Americans, Hispanic persons and Native Americans, as well as anyone else whose business operations are hampered by prejudice against a group. Disadvantaged people must own more than half of a business to qualify.
The white business owners argued in their lawsuit that basing eligibility for the agency’s help on an applicant’s race or ethnicity was unconstitutional. In his opinion, Judge Pittman allowed that discrimination remains a troubling reality, citing evidence from the case that minority business owners “have less access to loans, get less money when they apply, and have to pay more for it.” And he noted that decades of legal precedent had in fact stated that it was sometimes necessary to take race into account “in order to remedy the effects of prior discrimination.”
But he said that was at odds with Congress’ intent when it drafted the 14th Amendment, citing historical records that said its drafters demanded “the abolition of all distinctions founded on color and race.”
“There is no escaping this tension,” he wrote. “Given its drafters’ desire to eschew race-based discrimination, even benign discrimination cannot be squared with the Equal Protection Clause.” And he said the government had failed to offer specific instances of intentional discrimination that might have justified some exception to that tenet.
Judge Pittman, who was confirmed to the federal bench in 2019, had previously been appointed to a state appeals court post by Gov. Greg Abbott, Republican of Texas. His most notable federal decisions, in 2022, outlawed President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program and overturned a Texas law that had barred people age 18 to 20 from carrying concealed handguns.
Although the ruling could dilute the agency’s ability to assist minority-owned businesses, the hurdles they face aren’t going away, said Sarah Hinger, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Racial Justice Program.
“The circumstances facing minority business owners don’t change regardless of what happened in this court case,” she said. “They continue to face a legacy of discrimination and disadvantage.”
US judge strikes down Biden climate damage cost estimate
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FILE – President Joe Biden speaks during the “Accelerating Clean Technology Innovation and Deployment” event at the COP26 U.N. Climate Summit, Nov. 2, 2021, in Glasgow, Scotland. A federal judge in Louisiana on Friday, Feb. 11, 2022, blocked the Biden administration’s move to increase the government’s cost estimate of future damages caused by greenhouse gas emissions, a key component of federal rules for oil and gas drilling, automobiles and other industries. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, Pool, File)Read More
FILE – Emissions rise from the smokestacks at the Jeffrey Energy Center coal power plant as the suns sets, near Emmett, Kan., Sept. 18, 2021. A federal judge in Louisiana on Friday, Feb. 11, 2022, blocked the Biden administration’s move to increase the government’s cost estimate of future damages caused by greenhouse gas emissions, a key component of federal rules for oil and gas drilling, automobiles and other industries. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)Read More
BY MATTHEW BROWN, MATTHEW DALY AND KEVIN MCGILLPublished 6:33 PM CDT, February 11, 2022Share
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Friday blocked the Biden administration’s attempt to put greater emphasis on potential damage from greenhouse gas emissions when creating rules for polluting industries.
U.S. District Judge James Cain of the Western District of Louisiana sided with Republican attorneys general from energy producing states who said the administration’s action to raise the cost estimate of carbon emissions threatened to drive up energy costs while decreasing state revenues from energy production.
The judge issued an injunction that bars the Biden administration from using the higher cost estimate, which puts a dollar value on damages caused by every additional ton of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere.
President Joe Biden on his first day in office restored the climate cost estimate to about $51 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions after the Trump administration had reduced the figure to about $7 or less per ton. Former President Donald Trump’s estimate included only damages felt in the U.S. versus the global damages captured in higher estimates that were previously used under the Obama administration.
The estimate would be used to shape future rules for oil and gas drilling, automobiles, and other industries. Using a higher cost estimate would help justify reductions in planet-warming emissions, by making the benefits more likely to outweigh the expenses of complying with new rules.
Known as the social cost of carbon, the damage figure uses economic models to capture impacts from rising sea levels, recurring droughts and other consequences of climate change. The $51 estimate was first established in 2016 and used to justify major rules such as the Clean Power Plan — former President Barack Obama’s signature effort to address climate change by tightening emissions standards from coal-fired power plants — and separate rules imposing tougher vehicle emission standards.
The Supreme Court blocked the Clean Power Plan before it ever took effect, and a more lenient rule imposed by the Trump administration was later thrown out by a federal appeals court.
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The carbon cost estimate had not yet been used very much under Biden, but is being considered in a pending environmental review of oil and gas lease sales in western states.
In Friday’s ruling, Cain wrote that using the climate damage figure in oil and gas lease reviews would “artificially increase the cost estimates of lease sales” and cause direct harm to energy producing states.
Economist Michael Greenstone, who helped establish the social cost of carbon while working in the Obama administration, said if the ruling stands, it would signal the U.S. is again unwilling to confront climate change.
“The social cost of carbon guides the stringency of climate policy,” said the University of Chicago professor. “Setting it to near-zero Trump administration levels effectively removes all the teeth from climate regulations.”
Republican attorneys general led by Louisiana’s Jeff Landry said the Biden administration’s revival of the higher estimate was illegal and exceeded its authority by basing the figure on global considerations. The other states whose officials sued are Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming.
Landry’s office issued a statement calling Cain’s ruling “a major win for nearly every aspect of Louisiana’s economy and culture.”
“Biden’s executive order was an attempt by the government to take over and tax the people based on winners and losers chosen by the government,” the statement said.
The White House referred questions to the Justice Department, which declined to comment.
Federal officials began developing climate damage cost estimates more than a decade ago after environmentalists successfully sued the government for not taking greenhouse gas emissions into account when setting vehicle mileage standards, said Max Sarinsky, a professor at the New York University School of Law.
Not fully accounting for carbon damages would skew any cost-benefit analysis of a proposed rule in favor of industry, he said, adding that the social cost of carbon had been “instrumental” in allowing agencies to accurately judge how their rules affect the climate.
“Without a proper valuation of climate impact, it would complicate agencies’ good faith efforts to make reasoned conclusions,” Sarinsky said.
A federal judge in Missouri last year had sided with the administration in a similar challenge from another group of Republican states. In that case, the judge said the Republicans lacked standing to bring their lawsuit because they had yet to suffer any harm under Biden’s order.
Friday’s ruling by Cain, a Trump appointee, follows a ruling by another Louisiana judge last summer that struck down a separate Biden attempt to address greenhouse gas emissions by suspending new oil and gas leases on federal lands and water. The judge in that case, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, is also a Trump appointee.
U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras, an Obama appointee, threw out the lease sale, saying the administration did not adequately take into account its effect on greenhouse gas emissions.
