IF IT HAD BEEN TRUMP, THEY’D BE GOING FOR IMPEACHMENT #3:  Biden Fires EEOC General Counsel for Protecting Religious Rights.

POWERLINE:  Coke Demands that Its Law Firms Engage in Unlawful Discrimination.

Note that Mirengoff is asking any lawyers with knowledge of how law firms are reacting to the Coke policy to write him.  Confidentiality is guaranteed.

BIDEN MOVES TO FIRE EEOC GENERAL COUNSEL:  Sharon Gustafson’s term as General Counsel at the supposedly independent EEOC doesn’t expire until 2023.  So far, she has refused to resign.  (Of course, if Trump had done this, it would have been an outrage.)

FAKE NEWS FROM AL JAZEERA: Sorry, but I take this one personally. As many of you know, last year, I co-chaired the “No on Proposition 16” campaign here in California. I was also the campaign’s second largest donor (behind the first highest by 1 cent), even though I am by no stretch of the imagination a wealthy woman. Our campaign was outspent by about 14 to 1. We tried as best we could to make up for that disadvantage by working 14 times as hard. And somehow, we managed to win. (It helped a lot that California voters agreed with us .)

Al Jazeera, however, has managed to find an American academic who attributes Proposition 16’s defeat to the supposed big money financing of an “anti-affirmative action industry.” I know … it’s just Al Jazeera.   What was I expecting?  Still, it’s annoying.  I assume I’m not supposed to cuss on this blog, so I’d better stop now …

A TRILLION HERE, A TRILLION THERE, PRETTY SOON YOU’RE TALKING REAL MONEY:  Stanford University panel on ethics puts price tag on slavery reparations:  $10 to $12 TRILLION.

NO BOYZ ALLOWED IN THE GIRLZ TREE FORT:  Biden’s new “Gender Policy Council” focuses  only on women’s issues.  But these days it’s boys and men who are struggling most. 

OF COURSE:  Berkeley teachers’ union honcho videotaped while delivering his child to an in-person private pre-school (while arguing for continued closure of public schools).

ARE WE REALLY THAT FAR GONE?:  Senator Rand Paul asked Biden’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, “Do you support the government intervening to override the parents’ consent to give a child puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and/or amputation surgery of breast and genitalia?” This was not a crazy question.  The nominee–Dr. Rachel Levine–is a trans activist and self-described champion of transgender youth.  He got a deliberately evasive non-answer to his question.

How could any responsible U.S. Senator vote yes without an answer to that question?  As Paul notes, 80 to 95% of prepubertal children with gender dysphoria snap out of it by late adolescence.  Minors can’t even go to the movies without parental consent.  How can it be that they can decide whether to the chop their body parts off?

ON THIS DAY IN 1732, THE MAN WHO WAS FIRST IN WAR, FIRST IN PEACE, AND FIRST IN THE HEARTS OF HIS COUNTRYMEN WAS BORN: Never did I imagine that it would one day be considered transgressive to point out that George Washington was a great man.  But since that time has apparently arrived, let me say this:  George Washington was a great man.  

GEORGE LEEF:  How the College Board Mangles the Teaching of History.

AND WE’RE SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE THEY CARE ABOUT THE DISABLED?: The various bills pending in Congress to raise the minimum wage to $15 will also eliminate the special provision in the law that allows Down Syndrome and other seriously disabled adults to take jobs at less than the minimum wage.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report a few months ago endorsing that move (despite receiving comments from thousands of parents of Down syndrome workers pleading with us not to). My colleagues either (1) don’t understand that a $15 minimum wage for Down syndrome workers will be a huge job killer; or (2) don’t care. My dissent is here.

JOHN FUND:  Remembering Rush–A Conservative Messenger Who Changed the Dialogue.

ON DRAMATICALLY RAISING THE MINIMUM WAGE: Here’s a passage from a 1990 article by historian James C. Cobb about the effect of the extension of the federal minimum wage to agricultural workers in 1967. The article is specifically about the effect in the Mississippi Delta area:

Another crucial reason for reduced agricultural employment in the Delta was the $1 per hour minimum wage law that went into effect on February 1, 1967. Social scientists and planners had seen such a law as the key to freeing black farm workers from the archaic system of credit and paternalism that had throttled them since the end of the nineteenth century. At first glance, a mandated wage of $1 per hour might seem a blessing to workers accustomed to receiving $3.50 for a twelve-hour day. Those who advocated the minimum wage law had presumed that planters would maintain employment at pre-1967 levels. Instead, the new law jerked the slack out of a system that was not yet fully mechanized and modernized. A year after the law took effect, a planter explained:

“Hell, last year was the first time we really found out what labor efficiency could mean. We knew we couldn’t use any more casual labor because of the minimum wage, and now we’re finding out we don’t need as much specialized labor either…”

One estimate suggested that the new law put twenty-five thousand able-bodied hands in the Delta out of jobs …. The elderly and partially disabled who were unable to move were thrown into far more desperate situations than when they had clung to bare subsistence as occasional field hands who could usually count on thirty days work in June and July chopping cotton and pulling weeds at $3.50 per day. … The wife of a day worker found the new law no blessing: “That dollar an hour ain’t worth nothing. It would have been better if it had been 50 cents a day if you work every day.”  Although planters continued to allow elderly or totally destitute blacks to remain in their shacks rent fee, when such dwellings became vacant, planters put a torch to them.

Yes, I know this is obvious:  Minimum wage laws put people out of their jobs.  But it looks like a lot of people are going to have to learn the hard way soon.

MINIMUM WAGE MINIMIZES EMPLOYMENT:  Fast-food workers demand that their jobs get automated.   Or at least that’s how I read it.

DAVID LEWIS SCHAEFER:  Russia 1917, America 2021.

JOHN FUND:  California’s Coming Recall Election.

IT BLAMES TRUMP, OF COURSE: “Report: 40% of US COVID deaths could have been avoided.”

What this Fox News article doesn’t point out is that the “experts” involved in this study–Drs. Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein–are the authors of a string of outlandish, highly politicized “studies.”

Jeff Jacoby wrote about their rent control study back in 1995. He quotes Woolhandler:

“‘If rent control vanishes, dozens will die,’ said Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, an internist at Cambridge Hospital and associate professor at Harvard Medical School….

“‘One-third of our heart attack patients at Cambridge Hospital live in rent-controlled apartments. By allowing landlords to force them out, the governor and state Legislature are implementing the death penalty—a social policy sure to kill.’”

Jacoby also quotes Himmelstein:

“As doctors,” pronounces Dr. David Himmelstein, “we don’t have the power to change the law or get a person another apartment. But we do have the power to appeal to the moral consciousness of politicians as well as landlords.”

As Jacoby put it in 1995: “If only conservatives could be as sensitive and morally refined as Drs. Woolhandler and Himmelstein. Then they would realize how massive the death toll can be when liberals don’t get their way.”

Woolhandler and Himmelstein were also the authors (along with then Prof. Elizabeth Warren) of an over-hyped study of bankruptcy that wildly claimed that half of all bankruptcies stem from illness or injury. My response to that one is here.

It’s surprising to me how these folks manage to get so much attention for their work.  But they definitely do.

WILLIAM JACOBSON:  Exposing Critical Race Training in Higher Education.

IMMIGRATION REPORT: The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is more or less shut down for a while. Our Chair, Catherine Lhamon, resigned on Inauguration Day to take a position at the White House as Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council for Racial Justice and Equity. Given that Trump had appointed two new commissioners in the last year, that has made our normally eight-member Commission majority conservative (4-3). Nevertheless, since a quorum is five and the progressive caucus is determined not to allow us to conduct a business meeting at which they could be out-voted on something, nothing is likely to happen before Biden fills the vacant seat.

Our state advisory committees are, however, still in business. Recently, our California State Advisory Committee released a report entitled, “Understanding the Impact of Immigration Enforcement on California Children on K-12 Schools.” The interesting thing about this report is that it contains a vigorous dissent from the three conservatives on the committee—Maimon Schwarzschild, Nancy Eisenhart, and Velma Montoya. Here are some comments from the dissent:

“The Committee document dwells largely, if not primarily, on an emotionally inflammatory claim that children are victimized by immigration law enforcement.”

“Regrettably, many of the Committee’s ‘findings and recommendations’ are based on dubious and controversial academic research and exaggerated testimony from politically-motivated advocacy groups—testimony that was challenged by other official and expert testimony as well as by thoughtful and cogent statements at the SAC Community Forum … only to be virtually ignored by the Committee.”

“Nearly 90% of the public comments to the SAC supported consistent and effective enforcement of the immigration laws, and expressed deep concern about the erosion of public order, and of the rule of law itself, from failure to enforce the law, and in particular from ‘sanctuary’ policies which obstruct enforcement of the law.”

This is a new (and healthy) Commission policy to permit state advisory committee members to file dissents that are longer than one page.

JOHN ROSENBERG: “Equity”?

As Rosenberg points out, Lani Guinier (Bill Clinton’s ill-fated nominee to head DOJ’s Civil Rights Division) was a reasonably respectable academic.  Like many academics, she had succumbed to the desire to say something completely novel.  That’s how you get ahead in academia.  The problem with novel ideas, however, especially in overcrowded fields like law, is that they are usually novel only because they are silly ideas.  So it was with Guinier’s cumulative voting idea.  It was silly and entirely unsuited to the real world.  On the other hand, I had a conversation with Guinier years ago and found her to be quite insightful on some of the issues facing legal education.

Biden’s nomination of Kristen Clarke for the Civil Rights Division is a different thing.  She is literally a racist.

Related (From Ed): ‘Neo-Racism’ in the Justice Department. “Will Clarke enforce civil rights law, or does she share the ideological commitments of what John McWhorter has called neo-racism, which rejects color-blindness in favor of destructive racialism? Expressing regret for one’s youthful radicalism is expected for a nominee facing a potentially tough Senate confirmation process. But what Ms. Clarke has shown with her behavior as a lawyer and an activist is that she is an untrustworthy champion of American civil rights.”

JOHN FUND:  Reagan:  The Movie.

JOHN FUND:  Undecided Congressional race in NY shows what’s wrong with how we conducted elections in 2020.

ON THIS DAY IN 1943, FOUR ARMY CHAPLAINS SACRIFICED THEIR OWN LIVES TO SAVE THE LIVES OF OTHERS: In case you’ve never heard of them, they’re usually referred to by their admirers as “the Four Chaplains.” They were: Lt. George Fox (Methodist minister), Lt. Alexander Goode (Reform rabbi), Lt. Clark Poling (Dutch Reformed minister), and Lt. John Washington (Roman Catholic priest).

On January 23, 1943, the SS Dorchester, which had been converted for wartime use to a troop ship, left New York harbor bound for Greenland. About 900 men, including Fox, Goode, Poling and Washington, were on board.

During the pre-dawn hours of February 3, a German torpedo hit the ship, leaving a gaping hole below the waterline and knocking out the ship’s power. In the darkness, panic ensued, which the chaplains did their best to quell. When the supply of life preservers ran out, they gave their own life preservers to the men. “It was the finest thing I have seen or hope to see this side of heaven,” one survivor later said.

The last that was seen of them, they were locked arm in arm in prayer as the Dorchester began to sink beneath the waves.

The whole thing took only about 20 minutes.

The sad part of the story is that, even with life preservers, most of the men on the Dorchester died. There weren’t enough lifeboats, and the Atlantic waters were frigid. The other ships in the small convoy rescued as many as they could. But the sinking of the Dorchester was the single worst loss of American lives in a convoy of WWII.

When I was a girl, my mother and father would always attend an annual service in honor of the Four Chaplains. A nation that fails to honor its heroes—of all kinds—is liable to have fewer of them when they’re needed.

ON THIS DAY IN 1925:  Balto and his fellow sled dogs saved the day in Nome, Alaska by delivering life-saving serum during a diphtheria outbreak.  In total, about 20 human “mushers” and about 150 sled dogs participated in this heroic, 674-mile, mid-winter relay.

NOT THE BEE:  Stacey Abrams nominated for Nobel Peace Prize.