President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday that has massive implications for the future of our nation. It revoked Executive Order 11246, which was issued by President Lyndon B. Johnson in September 1965. However, the new order from the president is actually truer to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 14th Amendment than LBJ’s, according to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt’s latest op-ed for Fox News.
The horrible turn taken by Johnson towards “counting by race,” was a deep one, a turn extended by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) in the 1978 Bakke decision and only finally and fully repudiated by SCOTUS in recent years is now federal policy that can be enforced by the Civil Rights Division at DOJ and the Office of Civil Rights at Department of Education. This is neither a “liberal” nor a “conservative” action. It is the Constitution speaking, as the Constitution was amended to eradicate the great stain of slavery after the long and bloody Civil War.
“The path to the original public meaning of the 14th Amendment has taken from 1868, when the 14th Amendment was ratified, until Tuesday to complete: Citizens of the United States may not have penalties inflicted upon them or awards given them based on any immutable characteristic or religious belief. No institution, from Harvard College, founded long before the Constitution was ratified, or the local convenience store, may lawfully violate this first principle of the 14th Amendment,” Hewitt writes.
The principle here is a simple one. It staggers the mind that the individuals who bellow the loudest about equality are also the same ones who are guilty of the very same racist favoritism they accuse their opposition of doing.
Just don’t discriminate against a person based on their race, gender, ethnicity, or religious belief. That’s it. I mean, it’s not rocket science.
“The 19th century SCOTUS took a horrible turn in the Slaughterhouse Cases which mangled the interpretation of the 14th Amendment and then the Plessy decision and the Supreme Court righted itself in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The Congress enshrined the core principle above in the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” the author continues.
When Johnson issued the executive order, he hadn’t really thought through what it was he was doing, the impact it would have on future generations. Hewitt points out that over the last 2 decades, “counting by race, gender, sexual orientation,” coupled with hardships and discrimination against people of faith, have now become deeply rooted in our nation’s institutions and even in our government.
Hewitt then explained, “The Supreme Court has flailed for almost 50 years to finally, and I hope irreversibly, settle on what Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Martin Luther King and most recently Chief Justice John Roberts has concisely and eloquently stated in the 2007 case Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 when he wrote, ‘The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.'”
The chief justice didn’t have enough allies of the originalist view on the Supreme Court bench in order to weld the principle into every level of our government. But that changed when President Donald Trump nominated and the Senate confirmed three brand new justices during his first term in office. Now the originalists are the majority, bandying six votes.
“The Supreme Court, built in part by President Trump, has already affirmed the original meaning of the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in recent years. Let any institution challenge this new EO and they will discover it is on the firmest of constitutional grounds. Bravo to the many hands that crafted it and especially to President Trump who signed it,” Hewitt concluded.