The Biden Administration is so concerned about preserving democracy and the norms that underlie it that they are, once again, ignoring Supreme Court precedents in order to do the right thing no matter how many Constitutional limits they have to blow through.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires that the government keep this type of data confidential when it is collected by the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.
But the FCC goes another way—one that violates the Constitution, as courts already found in two prior FCC cases.
— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) February 23, 2024
This time the issue is collecting DEI information from broadcasters, which has been tried before and found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court–twice.
We have this story via an FCC commissioner who dissented from the decision. He was previously the General Counsel of the FCC, so he knows of what he speaks better than almost anybody.
Let’s start with the FCC’s track record of pressuring broadcasters into discriminating on the basis of race and gender in violation of the equal protection guarantees of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) February 23, 2024
There is one and only one reason for the FCC to require broadcasters to publish their DEI-related employment stats, and it has everything to do with making broadcasters vulnerable to pressure from activist groups pushing them to change the racial and gender balance of their employees.
The point is to outsource what the government can’t do to pressure groups: impose de facto quotas.
The Court has twice rejected similar attempts by the FCC, but they seem to believe that in this case, the third time is the charm.
The FCC claims that there is no evidence that forcing broadcasters to disclose this presumptively private information will have any impact.
The record is overflowing with it.
For instance, one filer states:
“We, the undersigned investors, with collective assets under management or advisement of approximately $266 billion, write to urge the . . . [FCC] to require the disclosure of equal opportunity employment…
— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) February 23, 2024
This is about empowering the ESG crowd to use financial pressure to change the employee demographics of media companies. This, in turn, is part of a pattern of government outsourcing to private companies the imposition of Left-wing policies that the government legally cannot.
That’s also why you see so many intelligence community graduates moving over to the Big Tech companies. You would think that CIA or FBI assets are not a perfect fit for Big Tech companies, but they have all moved into the “misinformation” and “trust and safety” divisions so they can implement censorship regimes in concert with their friends still inside the government.
Government grants go to nonprofits with Left-wing agendas, pushing for things the government cannot. It is the outsourcing of the cultural revolution in the way that post-9/11 intelligence and even military operations were outsourced to private contractors.
It’s legally dubious, morally wrong, and over the long term it has been pretty damn effective.
There is no plausible reason for forcing companies to release private employment data legally protected under privacy provisions except to give ammunition to outside pressure groups.
Unfortunately, it’s no surprise that our benevolent betters are fine with tearing up the Constitution. They have been working at it for years now.