Wisconsin amendment would bar unjust preferences, defeating agencies’ so-sue-me attitude
One of the best sales pitches for a constitutional amendment on Wisconsin’s November ballot comes inadvertently from the proposal’s critics.
It goes like this: Racial discrimination is already illegal, so whatever you do, Wisconsin, don’t shut down the government’s ability to go on racially discriminating.
The text of the amendment puts it in the embroidered language of law, but the question posed to voters is straightforward: Should Wisconsin’s constitution “prohibit governmental entities in the state from discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, public contracting, or public administration?”
Since racial discrimination polls about as well as influenza, you’d figure a yes vote is a done deal. Still, critics are trying.
A leading one, the head of the League of Women Voters Wisconsin, Debra Cronmiller, gave it a try in an interview with WisPolitics, saying that voting against racial discrimination would be meaningless — and meaningfully bad.
The ballot question, she said, “starts with, you know, ‘Should discrimination be illegal?’ It’s like, well, it already is constitutionally prohibited in Wisconsin.”
Really? More on that in a moment, but what’s the harm in stating it clearly?
Plenty, said Cronmiller: “If passed,” the new amendment “would make it illegal to give preferential treatment to any group.”
“We have minority contracting preferences, we have women-owned business preferences,” she went on. “All could be on the chopping block.” Whole bureaucracies in “many of our city governments,” devoted to preventing equal treatment in favor of smoothing out “discrepancies” — these ”could all become illegal,” said Cronmiller.
Remarkably, she intended this as a warning, not a promise.
Wisconsin’s constitution doesn’t exactly say government racial discrimination’s illegal — it just says “all people are born equally free and independent,” with courts later parsing what that means. The parsing has left a lot of unequal treatment in place.
There are at least dozens, likely more, of racial preferences in Wisconsin government, said Dan Lennington, managing vice president at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. “If they’re already unconstitutional,” he said, “then why are they still in effect?”
Perhaps it’s the “so sue me” attitude of agencies. Cronmiller warned that voting for the amendment would mean lots of court action: “Does Wisconsin want to be litigating equity versus equality for the next 20 years?” she asked.
Already there, said Lennington. He reeled off programs that his organization is suing over lately.
There’s a program that forgives up to $30,000 in student loans for new teachers in hard-to-fill spots in Wisconsin schools — unless your skin is the wrong color. Then? Nothing for you.
There’s the “Supplier Diversity Program” that, when state government is buying a highway or a building or such, gives an extra 5 percent advantage to bids from firms owned by people of a preferred race. You’re a supplier and your ancestors were from Japan or Poland? Too bad, so sad.
“Tony Evers runs a supplier program that spends $200 million a year that is closed off to white-owned businesses,” said Lennington. “Obviously we have a problem in the state with race discrimination.”
The problem is that people running such programs and those defending them do not seem to see such racial discrimination as wrong.
That’s why they pop up so frequently: Milwaukee County prioritizing repairs to its tattered parks according to the racial composition of nearby neighborhoods, for instance. Green Bay’s school district waitlisting a dyslexic boy because it was “prioritizing additional resources to First Nations, Black, and Hispanic students,” and he didn’t fit those ethnic boxes.
Or take the case the Wisconsin Supreme Court decided last summer: The state had been handing out “minority retention” grants for college tuition for four decades —specifically excluding broad categories of Wisconsin students because of their race. A Madison kid’s parents had to sue because, a previous U.S. Supreme Court’s decision outlawing such racial discrimination notwithstanding, Wisconsin said his being of Thai and European ancestry made him unworthy.
Even then, liberal justices foot-draggingly agreed only in terms that “read like strong dissents,” as a newspaper put it, and a state senator who had gotten one of the grants announced she’d try figuring out an end run.
“This is the gospel for leftists,” said Lennington, that we live in a “systemically racist” society, so “we need to reverse the outcomes by discrimination against whites and Asians.” In this, he’s simply paraphrasing Ibram X. Kendi, the prophet of woke who wrote, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”
Meaning the amendment is absolutely necessary: “When we have President AOC,” said Lennington, or progressive control of both Legislature and governor’s office, government-run discrimination “is going to come back like a raging disease.”
If Wisconsinites really do want our government to stop racially discriminating, we’ll need to put it in our constitution.
Patrick McIlheran is executive editor at the Badger Institute.
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