When President Donald Trump last week fired two Democratic commissioners of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Charlotte A. Burrows and Jocelyn Samuels, along with EEOC General Counsel Karla Gilbride, The New York Times predictably howled it was a “late night purge.”
Democrats will likely launch a legal holy war to overturn Trump’s action — because it was a dagger strike at his effort to once and for all end affirmative action.
The EEOC firings followed Trump’s executive orders canceling federal diversity, equity and inclusion mandates and prohibiting federal agencies from imposing racial, ethnic or gender quotas.
For more than half a century, the EEOC has been dishonestly dictating quotas to American businesses, schools and other institutions.
The agency compels submission through reckless lawsuits, ruinously unending investigations and public shame — tarnishing companies and other targets with accusations of racism or other bias.
It’s been at it for decades: In 1994, then-chair Gilbert Casellas said, “I hope people worry when they get a call from the EEOC,” just as they fear a call from the IRS.
Many businesses do, and for good reason: It creates from whole cloth new offenses that can’t be found in federal statute books.
Under former President Joe Biden, the EEOC devoted itself to inventing new “protections” for LGBTQ+ employees and made transgender access to bathrooms a transcendent civil-rights issue.
On its own decrees, the EEOC vastly expanded the definition of illegal sexual harassment to include “misgendering” a transgender person.
Biden’s EEOC also decreed that women who claim they need time off or other accommodations to pursue abortions are entitled to special treatment.
If Trump had not acted, Democrats would have controlled the agency until at least 2026 — but because the president fired two of the three Democratic commissioners, it now has only two commissioners and is without a quorum, blocking its ability to undermine Trump’s policies.
Trump has appointed Andrea Lucas, an EEOC commissioner since 2020, as its acting chair. Lucas says she’ll prioritize “rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination” and “protecting American workers from anti-American national origin discrimination.”
“Biology is not bigotry,” she declared last week. “Biological sex is real, and it matters.”
From now on, the EEOC must “protect the sex-based privacy and safety needs of women,” Lucas said — unwinding the immense damage it has done on that score since the 1990s.
Back then the agency sued Women’s Workout World, a chain of female-only health clubs, claiming it violated civil-rights law by refusing to hire men to work in shower and locker areas where women were nude. The argument got clobbered by a federal judge.
Later, the agency threatened to sue Lillie Rubin, an upscale women’s clothing chain, for not hiring men for sales tasks that included assisting women as they tried on clothes in dressing rooms.
Even earlier, the EEOC tried to make private companies bow to its gender mania.
In 1995 it sued Hooters restaurants, claiming that hiring only female servers somehow violated the rights of potential male waiters.
That failed lawsuit illustrated how civil-rights campaigns have gone from permitting black Americans to sit at lunch counters to entitling federal agents to dictate the cup size of the person serving lunch.
The Trump administration seeks to revoke sweeping EEOC “guidance” — Washington’s favorite euphemism for the federal government’s shrouded iron fist.
For example, the EEOC in 2013 issued “guidance” that effectively made it a federal crime to refuse to hire ex-convicts.
Because racial minorities have higher rates of incarceration, the EEOC commenced legally harassing and suing private companies, like Sheetz Convenience Stores just last year, that rely on criminal-background checks for job applicants — even though the EEOC itself uses similar checks for its own hiring.
Because background checks have a “disparate impact” on groups with high rates of criminal records, the EEOC decided, such checks presumptively violate civil rights law.
The agency has repeatedly gotten thrashed on this issue in federal court. As far back as 1989, federal judge Jose Gonzalez Jr. called its position “an insult to millions of honest Hispanics. Obviously a rule refusing honest employment to convicted applicants is going to have a disparate impact upon thieves.”
But the EEOC ignored his ruling and continues trying to jam progressive values down America’s throat.
Democrats claim that Trump cannot fire the commissioners because the EEOC is an independent agency not beholden to the president, but the law is unclear.
Trump will likely speedily nominate two new Republican commissioners who will harmonize with the administration’s core values.
The fight is headed to federal court, and it may be months or years until the battle is resolved.
But Team Trump’s race to nullify the EEOC’s pernicious and oppressive guidelines is a huge step toward placing this wayward federal agency back under the law.
James Bovard’s latest book is “Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty.”
