The corporate media are just now discovering what I learned in 2015, that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), under the direction of President Barack Obama, hires air traffic controllers (ATC) on the basis of race. Of course, President Biden, as part of his commitment to “equity,” took it further. His FAA “identified” certain disabilities as deserving of “special emphasis in recruitment and hiring,” including “epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, [and] psychiatric disability.”
How in the world did it come to this?
Twenty-nine years ago this week, I argued before the Supreme Court of the United States that the federal government’s policy of using race to award contracts was unconstitutional. My client, Randy Pech of Colorado Springs, was a college dropout who had parlayed his father’s retirement monies — no bank would loan him funds — into a small business building guardrails along federal highways. Although his was the lowest bid on a national forest job in southwestern Colorado and he had a reputation for doing excellent work on a timely basis, he was denied the subcontract because a federal agency awarded the prime contractor a $10,000 “bonus” to give the job to a minority-owned business.
Forty-one years after the Supreme Court ruled regarding public schools in Washington, D.C., “it would be unthinkable that the same Constitution would impose a lesser duty on the Federal Government” than on the states, and the solicitor general argued just that: Congress owed no duty to my client to adhere to the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee.
The court disagreed. In fact,
