Just days after a federal appellate court denounced part of President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan as unconstitutional and racist, another federal judge has temporarily halted a second portion of the law on the same grounds.
Late last week, a federal judge in Wisconsin blocked the U.S. Department of Agriculture from giving preference to black farmers in a federal loan relief program on the grounds that white farmers who challenged the set aside were likely to win if the case went to trial.
According to NBC News, Judge William Griesbach ruled last Thursday that 12 white farmers from nine states “are likely to succeed” in showing that the Biden administration discriminated against them in doling out aid through a $4 billion program that was part of the American Rescue Plan. Griesbach noted in the ruling that the USDA’s “use of race-based criteria in the administration of the program violates their right to equal protection under the law.”
The ruling follows one handed down in late May by a federal appellate court in Tennessee.
There, the court determined a $29 billion program administered by the U.S. Small Business Administration that targeted restaurants violated the law by injecting “explicit racial and ethnic preferences” in prioritizing who qualified for funding.
“The government offers little evidence of past intentional discrimination against the many groups to whom it grants preferences,” the majority opinion in the 2-1 decision said. “Indeed, the schedule of racial preferences detailed in the government’s regulation … is not supported by any record evidence at all.”
Judge Griesbach reached a similar conclusion in Wisconsin.
“Aside from a summary of statistical disparities, defendants have no evidence of intentional discrimination by the USDA in the implementation of the recent agriculture subsidies and pandemic relief efforts,” Griesbach wrote, according to NBC News.
“Congress can implement race-neutral programs to help farmers and ranchers in need of financial assistance, such as requiring individual determinations of disadvantaged status or giving priority to loans of farmers and ranchers that were left out of the previous pandemic relief funding,” the judge added. “But it cannot discriminate on the basis of race.”
“The obvious response to a government agency that claims it continues to discriminate against farmers because of their race or national origin is to direct it to stop: it is not to direct it to intentionally discriminate against others on the basis of their race and national origin,” Griesbach noted.
As The Free Press reported on June 1, the $4 billion loan-forgiveness plan was a set aside for “socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers,” defined by the policy blacks, American Indians, Hispanics, Alaskan natives, Asian Americans or Pacific Islanders.
Whites, as the old saying goes, need not apply.
The two court rulings prove that, in fact, systemic racism does exist within the federal government. But unlike liberals claim, Biden is the one driving it and whites are its actual victims.
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