Farmers Rise Up, Quote SCOTUS' Own Declaration in Move to End Race-Based USDA Aid Payments
A group of Texas farmers is seeking an emergency injunction to prohibit the Biden administration from discriminating against farmers on the basis of race or sex.
The injunction request is part of a lawsuit filed March 29 to force the United States Department of Agriculture to abandon a policy of favoring “socially disadvantaged farmers” for disaster relief, according to a statement Monday from the Southeastern Legal Foundation, a conservative organization representing the plaintiffs.
“When natural disasters strike, they don’t discriminate based on race or sex,” states the injunction request, which was filed Monday. “Neither should the Department of Agriculture (USDA).”
In a statement on its website, the Southeastern Legal Foundation accuses the USDA of weighing the scales in favor of “women, American Indians or Alaskan Natives, Asians or Asian-Americans, blacks or African-Americans, Hispanics or Hispanic-Americans, and Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders.”
As a result, the Southeastern Legal Foundation and the Mountain States Legal Foundation filed the lawsuit in federal court in Amarillo, Texas, on behalf of farmers Alan and Amy West, Bryan Baker, and Rusty Strickland.
The farmers have had their family farms for decades, according to the Southeastern Legal Foundation, “and have suffered from the effects of droughts and the COVID-19 pandemic—USDA is harming them by favoring other producers at their expense based on factors including race and sex that were not authorized by Congress.”
Rather, “USDA provides more relief money to ‘socially disadvantaged’ farmers…In short, farmers who fail to meet the ‘socially disadvantaged criteria – including Plaintiffs – received far less assistance for their losses than if they were of a different race or sex,” according to the Southeastern Legal Foundation.
Besides lacking congressional authorization, such discrimination against non-socially disadvantaged farmers — men and whites — is unconstitutional, according the SLF argues.
Foundational to the call for an injunction against the Biden administration’s discriminatory action is the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court’s prohibition on racial preferences in college admissions, Just the News reported.
Its emergency injunction request quotes a line from that ruling, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, that declares: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”
The Biden administration is doing the opposite, according to the Southeastern Legal Foundation.
“On the day President Biden took office, he declared his administration would adopt a ‘whole-of-government equity agenda,’” Kimberly Hermann, SLF executive director, said on the group’s website.
“Equality is a constitutional mandate which does not permit intentional discrimination, but ‘equity’ relies on racial classifications to achieve outcomes across racial categories.
“USDA is attempting to control outcomes with intentional discrimination, but this cannot stand under our laws,” Hermann said.
Braden Boucek, SLF’s vice president of litigation, said in the statement that the “USDA is just one of several agencies under the Biden Administration acting as though it can act independently of Congress.”
The farmer plaintiffs say the Biden administration discriminated in disbursement of about $25 billion through eight programs Congress approved for disaster and COVID relief, Just the News reported.
“The American people, through Congress, trusted USDA to help victimized farmers with disaster relief, not hurt them further by discriminating based on race and sex,” Boucek said, on the SLF website.
“The Constitution exists to curb the power of runaway bureaucracies. We are holding USDA accountable in court and will not rest until constitutional balance is restored.”
So on it goes, in the continuing war on racism and, American leftists and the Biden administration turn to – what else? Racism and sexism.
Which says that until the Democrats started messing with things, maybe the previously perceived problems had already been essentially solved.
But instead they’ve given us an ongoing nightmare from which we’re waiting to wake up.
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