The 14th Amendment’s Requirement of Equality Under Law Is a Dead Letter Constitutional Guarantee

August 13, 2023 | Categories: Articles & Columns | Tags: |  Print This Article

The 14th Amendment’s Requirement of Equality Under Law Is a Dead Letter Constitutional Guarantee

Paul Craig Roberts

I explained and documented in my 1995 book, The New Color Line, that the EEOC had created in defiance of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment a two-tier legal system in which “preferred minorities” enjoyed rights superior to those of white American citizens to university admissions, employment, and promotion.  Less qualified blacks according to the objective admission scores can be admitted at the exclusion of more qualified whites, and less qualified blacks can be hired and promoted at the expense of more qualified whites.  I have stressed for many years that the failure of the courts to defend the 14th Amendment and the statutory language of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was resulting in the institutionalization of a status-based legal system totally at odds with the US Constitution.

Few, if any, have paid any attention.  The consequence is, as I said would be the case, that white Americans are legally second class citizens.  To be a second class citizen is certainly not a privilege.

My warning was unheeded that the racial privileges given to blacks would not be temporary as white liberals claimed, but would be institutionalized and subvert the Constitutional order.  This has clearly happened.

1964 was 59 years ago.  That is a long time for an illegal and unconstitutional policy to be tolerated.  Generations have passed.  The precedent of unequal treatment is set in stone.  How can it be removed?

The US Supreme Court recently ruled that the universities’ use of racially discriminatory admissions policies that favored blacks, the so-called “affirmative action” programs, were unconstitutional and ordered their end.  Perhaps more correctly, the Supreme Court ruled that “strict scrutiny” must be applied to preferential treatment.  In other words violation of the 14th Amendment is permissible in some circumstances.  It seems that every every part of the Bill of Rights is now subject to equivocation. 

Little good the Court’s ruling will do.  Without objective standards, it is difficult and likely impossible to tell if university admissions are discriminatory.  Consequently, university administrators have abandoned objective standards.  Today the standards are subjective, so how can discrimination be proven?

Additionally, preferences for blacks in order to amend for the past are ingrained in the existing moral order.  To challenge these preferences is regarded as racist and immoral. Thus, the demands of white liberals for the impeachment of the Supreme Court Justices for their racist and immoral act of prohibiting race-based unconstitutional preferred treatment.

The principle of special legal standing for American blacks is so ingrained that even Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented on the grounds that the Court’s belated defense of the Constitution “rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.”

In other words, Justice Sotomayor prefers special privileges for blacks to the US Constitution.

So does US District Judge Stanley Bastian, chief judge of the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Washington state, who ruled two  days ago that Starbuck Coffee was entitled to discriminate against white people in its hiring and promotion in order to raise its black employees to 30% of its work force, which is more than twice the proportion of blacks in the US population. In other words, Starbucks’ discrimination against white Americans goes far beyond achieving proportional representation, an original “justification” for racial preferences for blacks.  https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/article/judge-lets-starbucks-keep-its-race-based-hiring-quotas-5460141?utm_source=News&src_src=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2023-08-12-2&src_cmp=breaking-2023-08-12-2&utm_medium=email&est=c%2BFdxC9Lcoe5FDVuUiyGKH9SIYRXHQLjFpMWHH3zo1Q3ilK5vgo6nw%3D%3D 

White Americans are so accustomed to discrimination against them that they regard it as the natural order and continue to patronize Starbucks.  The younger white generation has been raised to expect and to accept discrimination against them unless they claim to be sexual perverts.

The United States of America has arrived at its demise.  Not even Supreme Court Justices and Federal District judges are supportive of, and willing to defend, the US Constitution.  Neither are law schools, corporations such as Starbucks, the Democrat Party, the media, Congress and the executive branch.  The US Constitution has been abandoned by every institution, governmental and private. The New York Times “1619 Project” describes the US Constitution as “a racist document.”

As, I have stressed for decades, the United States is the Constitution, what is the United States today without the Constitution?