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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27528 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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This could be really interesting.

  1. Adding political party registration as a protected class could end up changing the character of many institutions and organizations. For example, forcing universities to hire Republicans would have major long-term effects on the values of future college graduates.
  2. This law conflicts with the principles of freedom of association and equal protection. It'll force the issue up through the courts (no way it doesn't get an instant challenge up to the Supreme Court) and with this Court the result could be something wild like reversing Griggs v Duke entirely.
  3. Even if it stands, it will bring quotas to the fore as a political issue and make the public conversations more clearly about group spoils vs. overall efficiency. It adds such onerous requirements for businesses to make any useful predictions about people that there will be tons of examples of waste and inefficiency due to the law. In an accelerationist way this could be good for getting back to a more reasonable set of laws.

Adding political party registration as a protected class

I'm unclear on how "political party registration status" will be interpreted. Does it mean that they "can't create" "have to pay attention to" a disparate impact on Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, etc.? Or does it merely mean that they "can't create" "have to pay attention to" a disparate impact on people who are registered and people who aren't registered?

"Original public meaning" is failing my poor spectrum-y brain.

Currently disparate impact has a carve-out for business critical reasons (which is why Google can’t be successfully sued for the fact that fewer than 15% of software engineers are black, for example). If that is maintained, then a college could argue that, say, only 5% of qualified candidates for an English literature professor job are Republicans and so they don’t actually do anything wrong if 95% of the English faculty are Democrats.

Reversing or at least heavily limiting disparate impact seems inevitable with this court. Roberts and ACB will be unhappy with it but if something as ridiculous as this happens they won’t really have a choice because of the sheer volume of litigation it would unleash.

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