While the center-right spins up a recent District Court ruling that looks like another nail in the coffin of nationwide injunctions (restraining judicial tyranny is never a bad thing), another Judge Timothy Kelly just punched the DEI cabal in the throat.
Background. Private Contractors sued the Federal Government on First Amendment grounds (among other things) for terminating funding because their work incorporates DEI.
Foreground. They did a lousy job of proving any of the claims they made, especially the one where taxpayers have an obligation to fund protected speech.
The government need not subsidize the exercise of constitutional rights to avoid infringing them, …
“even where the Constitution prohibits coercive governmental interference with specific individual rights, it does not confer an entitlement to such funds as may be necessary to realize all the advantages of that freedom.”
If you want to bathe in the legal minutiae, there is ample opportunity here. Suffice it to say, what seems obvious to the common man-that Joe cannot be forced to pay for Jane’s speech-has miraculously appeared in a court decision. Not for the first time. “The Supreme Court has “reject[ed] the notion that First Amendment rights are somehow not fully realized unless they are subsidized by the State.”
The Plaintiffs tried to prove that the refusal to fund that activity penalized it. And while there are grounds on which federal funding of an activity might infringe in other ways this is not the same thing or even in the same ballpark. The plaintiffs are free to continue to DEI as much as they want as long as it does not violate anti-discrimination law, which it amusingly does.
In other words, they are not entitled to federal money on speech grounds because the speech they claim was infringed was discriminatory and (very likely) subject to legal action by the government if it affected hiring, retention, or promotion.
One final point, and not a new one. This is yet another example that, despite the Left’s bi-polar caterwauling to the contrary, money is speech.
