THE TERM “SACRED COW” IS NOW A SACRED COW: That’s how these “bias response web sites” work.  They encourage students to feel wronged by trivial things.

The author of that piece–Christian Schneider–sent a freedom of information act request to the University of Wisconsin-Madison asking for all the complaints filed with that university’s “Bias or Hate” reporting web site.  He got back 107 complaints.  One of them was a complaint by a student against a professor who had said in class that some theories and beliefs are “scared cows” that cannot be critiqued in academia.  The student, who wrote that he “grew up in India,” called the professor’s use of the term racist.

I’d like to see a lot more of these freedom of information act requests for complaints aimed at bias response web sites.  This stuff needs to be exposed.

MINNESOTA IS CONSIDERING A CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT GUARANTEEING EVERYONE A “QUALITY EDUCATION”: But there’s a boatload of misunderstanding about what gets called “education inequity” these days.  Minnesota probably needs to work on understanding the facts a bit better before it goes off and amends its constitution.

MINNESOTA CONSIDERS MAKING A “QUALITY EDUCATION” A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT: Yeah, right, that’ll do it. Turning education over to the courts always works so well, doesn’t it?

TEACHERS IN SOUTH BEND MUST BE INCORRIGIBLY RACIST: Or maybe, just maybe, that isn’t the right explanation.

I GUESS THERE IS NO REAL CRIME IN HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, FLORIDA:  Undercover cops hired 118 handymen, then arrested them all for not having licenses.  If an elected official approved this, he would lose my vote for sure.

WHY DOES WASHINGTON STATE LOVE TO IGNORE ITS VOTERS?:  John Rosenberg writes on preferential treatment by any other name.

PELOSI ACKNOWLEDGES DEFEAT:  Yup.

LAWSUIT BY GROUP TARGETED BY SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER HAS GREEN LIGHT:  We need as many of these as possible (as well as more awareness of the fact that the SPLC is a revenue-raising factory not a serious civil rights organization).

#TomPerezResign:  It’s trending.  Sanders supporters aren’t happy.  And they can be rather unruly when they aren’t happy.

BRITS ARE FREE AT LAST:  I am very happy over Brexit–even downright jolly.  I’ve been bouncing around singing Rule Britannia, annoying my gentleman friend, and scaring the cat.

If the Brits can cast off the European Union, we Americans can get rid of some of our bureaucratic drag too.

WASHINGTON STATE LEGISLATURE MAY PROHIBIT STATE FROM CONTRACTING WITH PRIVATE COMPANIES TO RUN PRISONS: Such companies are the bête noir of many Progressives, including some members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. When we did our (badly researched) report on immigration detention centers back in 2015, our then-Chairmen wrote a fevered Statement: “The ‘incarceration industrial complex’ has extended its tentacles from running traditional prisons on a for-profit basis, to their new growth market—immigration detention.” “Jailing people for profit is obscene,” he wrote.

In Part B of my Commissioner Statement to that report, I respond to the arguments against privately prisons and immigration, noting, among other things, that prison and detention center employees, whether they work for the government or a private company, “profit” from jailing people. There’s no way around that.

The truth is that private companies do as least as good a job as the government at running these facilities and usually better. Unsurprisingly, therefore, prison guard unions are their fiercest opponents.

It’s true that correctional companies have an incentive to lobby for high incarceration rates. But so do prison guard unions. You don’t cut down on that by getting rid of private correctional companies. Indeed, it may be just the opposite.

BREXIT: BRITONS NEVER, NEVER, NEVER SHALL BE SLAVES: I am about as pleased as a foreigner can be about Brexit. Sic Semper Bureaucratis.

THE LITTLE SISTERS TAKE ON BIG BROTHER: Count on this: The bigger and more complex government becomes, the more conflicts we can expect between religious conscience and the duty to comply with the law.

As if to illustrate my point, the Supreme Court recently agreed to decide two cases—including one brought by the Little Sisters of the Poor—that bear on religious objections to Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate. (Yes, if you are experiencing déjà vu, the Little Sisters of the Poor have been to the Supreme Court on this issue before.) This time the focus is expected to be on the Trump Administration’s efforts to grant religious exemptions to employers like the Sisters.

I won’t weigh in on the legal issues presented. I’m not smart enough to do them justice in this short space. My point is more political or maybe strategic. Bloomberg quotes an evidently anxious expert as saying that if the Trump Administration’s efforts are upheld, it “could open the door to federal agencies issuing many more [rules granting religious accommodation].”

For good or ill, that’s obviously true. I have mixed feelings about it. To me at least, for conservatives to rely too readily on religious accommodations to deal with governmental expansions seems like a loser’s game.

In a report issued a few years ago by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on “Peaceful Co-Existence” between government and religion, I wrote this:

While the targeted religious accommodations approach may sometimes be a good idea, it is not always the best strategy for people of faith. Targeted religious accommodations make it possible for ever-expanding government bureaucracies to divide and conquer. They remove the faith-based objections to their expansive ambitions, thus allowing them to ignore objections that are not based on faith. The bureaucratic juggernaut thus rolls on. People of faith should not allow themselves to become just another special interest that needs to be appeased before the next government expansion is allowed to proceed. They have an interest in ensuring the health of the many institutions of civil society that act as counterweights to the state—including not just the Church itself, but also the family, the press, small business and others. They also have an interest in ordered liberty in all its manifestations. A nation in which religious liberty is the only protected freedom is a nation that soon will be without religious liberty too.

The other side of the coin is this: The Commission report that quote appeared in got a lot of attention when it was released, because the Chairman’s Statement (which I discuss at length in my Statement) was essentially a screed against Christianity. It was astonishing. To this day, I can’t imagine what got into him. But it served to remind me that Christians (and no doubt people of other faiths too) really do have opponents in high places.

JON CALDARA:  Denver Post Fired Me Because of Political Correctness.

(I sympathize.  I got hammered for this once too.  I got death threats even.  Still, I am pretty sure I am right on the law.)

ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN A MEMBER OF THE FEDERALIST SOCIETY?: The Wall Street Journal reports that the Judicial Conference is thinking of prohibiting judges from being members of the Federalist Society. It’s too political—or so the Judicial Conference believes.

If the Judicial Conference does ban judges from being members of the Federalist Society, it will need to do the same for the ABA. Unlike the Federalist Society, which takes no stand on any legal or political issue, the ABA weighs in on countless issues, always taking the leftward leaning side of things. The ABA files amicus curiae briefs before the Supreme Court, again with a consistent slant to the left. The long march through the institutions infiltrated the ABA long ago.

Similarly, membership in “affinity bar associations” like the National Hispanic Bar Association and the National Bar Association (which is for African American lawyers), and the National Association of Women Lawyers will need to be prohibited. Those left-leaning organizations routinely take stands on controversial issues and file amicus briefs. The Federalist Society never does and never will.

I can’t tell you how proud I am to be a member of the Federalist Society. It’s true that its members are overwhelmingly conservative or libertarian. But to say that it is not monolithic understates it. Lawyers actually engage in civil debate at the Federalist Society. It always attempts to present all sides of legal and public policy debates at its functions (including different strands of conservatism and libertarianism as well as left-of-center views). That does not happen at law schools these days. There is far less ideological diversity on campuses than you routinely find at the Federal Society’s Annual Lawyers Conference.

Two personal anecdotes are worth mentioning here.

1. In 1996, I co-chaired the Yes on Proposition 209 Campaign here in California. That measure, which passed with a strong majority, prohibited the State of California (including its universities) from discriminating against or granting preferential treatment to any individual or group based or race, color, sex or ethnicity in the operation of public education, public employment or public contacting. Needless to say, the Left hated it.

At the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools in January of 1997, a panel with OVER TWENTY speakers was presented. All of them opposed Proposition 209. Despite being both a law professor present at the conference and the second ranking person in the 209 campaign, I was not invited to speak. (That’s okay.  I’m not exactly Cicero, so maybe the AALS didn’t think I was a good enough speaker.) But there were at least three other law professors who had worked on the campaign who were also ignored

Meanwhile, the Federalist Society put on its own Proposition 209 panel at a nearby hotel to which all law professors were invited. If I remember correctly, the panel had five speakers. Three of them opposed Proposition 209 and two supported it (including me). Yet the Federalist Society is the organization that that Judicial Conference thinks is too political.

2. A few years later, I was on a panel at the Federalist Society’s Annual Lawyers’ Convention. The topic was again affirmative action. The staff had worked to get speakers on both sides of the issue. But for some reason the left-of-center speaker did not show up. Much to the Federalist Society’s embarrassment, all it had was an empty chair. To remedy the problem, after I and the other panelists had given our prepared remarks, I stood up again and argued the other side of the issue the best I could. (I’m a lawyer. That’s what lawyers are supposed to be able to do.) The crowd appreciated it. I was later told that I was persuasive to at least one person in the audience.

The Judicial Conference tries to sound evenhanded by putting the American Constitutional Society in the same category as the Federalist Society. I should point out that the American Constitutional Society is (so far) a pale imitation of what the Left imagines the Federalist Society to be. It has far fewer active members and (weirdly) is far more political than the Federalist Society. But membership in the ACS shouldn’t be prohibited either—not unless membership in organizations like the ABA are prohibited too.

The Judicial Conference can argue that it isn’t preventing judges from being members of the Federalist Society prior to becoming judges. Nor is it preventing judges from attending Federalist Society events. But invariably a prohibition on membership will be taken as a sign that the Federalist Society is something bad … something that lawyers with a judicial temperament will avoid.  The truth is more like the opposite. Lawyers who are interested in hearing all sides of an issue gravitate towards the Federalist Society, not away from it.   The Judicial Conference should be pleased that to have judges who are members.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): For perspective, what’s going on here is that the left expects the right to dominate the judiciary in the near future, and on its way out wants to change the “ethical” rules to block the right from behaving the way the left did when it had hegemony. A standard move and, of course, utterly unprincipled.

DENVER POST WRITER FIRED AFTER ARGUING THERE ARE ONLY TWO SEXES:  We’re doomed as a nation if we’ve reached the point where one cannot state the obvious.  More here.

MORE BAIL REFORM FOLLIES:  Even De Blasio has said he is willing to tweak the new law.

CAMPUS REFORM: “Millions for minorities in STEM: Is more money the answer to increasing diversity?” Answer: No, it isn’t. Ending race-preferential admissions would go a lot further to increasing racial diversity in STEM professions. And I plan to keep saying so till college and universities start listening.

IN NEW MEXICO, PEOPLE STILL DON’T REALIZE THAT THE SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER IS A FRAUD: I’d be pleased if they would read this little history.

Alas, I wish it were easier to get the facts out to everyone.

HUG-A-HERO DOLLS:  This is really quite charming.  Children can get huggable dolls imprinted with a photo of their deployed parent.

HERE’S AN AGENCY THAT COULD USE A THOROUGH RE-STRUCTURING:  The Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (“OFCCP”) was supposed to ensure that federal contractors do not discriminate.  Alas, in the Orwellian world we live in, it instead ensures that they do.

“BAIL REFORM”: It’s unusual for wrongheaded reforms to unravel as quickly as New York’s appears to be doing.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights will be conducting a briefing on bail reform in May. Maybe by then everyone will agree that New York’s effort was a mistake, and they will have moved on to something else.

SHAKE, RATTLE AND ROLL:  On this day in 1994, the Northridge quake shook Southern California.  It was the first (but alas not the last) earthquake to scare the living daylights out of me.

IT SEEMED LIKE  A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME:  On this day in 1883, President Chester Arthur signed into law the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, thus abolishing the federal “spoils” system and creating a civil service based on … uh … merit.

Just three years prior to becoming President, Arthur had been Collector of the Port of New York, which made him NYC’s grand poobah of political patronage.  He was the last person on Earth one would expect to be the angel of death for the old way of doing things.

But Arthur had ascended to the Presidency after a disappointed job seeker assassinated President James Garfield.  Americans were hellbent on getting civil service reform and feared Arthur would stand in their way. Arthur, ever the politician, enjoyed pleasantly surprising them.

The “spoils” system (called that by its detractors) had a lot of faults.  But its virtue was that job holders tended to actually believe in President’s agenda.  And if they didn’t or weren’t doing a good job, it was easy to get rid of them.  The system that replaced it has both virtues and vices too.  But as time goes by, its vices are increasingly on display.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: On this day in 2001, Wikipedia went live.  Its English language version now has 5,995,387 entries.