Ugly agency, uglier metaphor

By A.J. DiCintio

A recent news item reporting that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is prowling about the nation looking for a company to sue over the apparently unconscionable practice of requiring a high school diploma as a condition of employment prompted the thought that since its inception, the EEOC has been disfigured by the kind of dangerous ugliness that has come to characterize all of post-sixties Washington.

In its various manifestations, this uglification exists as the inevitable work wrought by anti-Jeffersonians in love with the power of central government or, since the sixties, super-government, as exemplified by our dictatorial liberal "activist" judges and the buffoon leftist legislative and judicial oligarchs who dominate the institutions of the European Parliament.

But to return to tracing the progression of the EEOC's ugliness. . . It begins with the 1965 Civil Rights Act, which mandated the creation of a five-member bipartisan commission empowered to "receive, investigate, and conciliate complaints [of] . . . discrimination."

The Act further stipulated that if efforts at conciliation were unsuccessful, individuals (not the Commission) could sue for redress of their grievances. Finally, it allowed that when the EEOC found "patterns or practices" of discrimination, it could refer cases to the DOJ for possible litigation.

Now, there are two significant observations that must be made about the EEOC's birth.

Before making the first, it is necessary to recall the genius exhibited by Mark Twain when he condemned the hypocritical blusterers who refer to themselves as "Honorable Members of Congress" as possessed of "the smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts."

With that instance of Twain's genius brought to light, even grade school children can understand why Democrats who breathed life into the EEOC exempted federal politicians from the laws they empowered the agency to enforce, meaning that to their heart's content, the contemptible frauds were free to discriminate on the basis of "race, color, national origin, sex, religion, and [the desire for] retaliation."

Second, it is imperative to remark that although the Act attempted to limit and bring some common sense to government's suing its own people, it didn't, as is usual for nearly all federal legislation, include any provisions that would allow citizens at the state and local levels to play a role in putting the brakes on runaway federal power.

Therefore, even without the specific metamorphosis that occurred, the EEOC inevitably would have descended into its current revolting state, the only difference being that today it would exist in a symbiotic relationship with a huge, metastasized mass of its own rampaging cells located deep in the bowels of the Department of Justice.

But the metamorphosis as we know it did occur, as power hungry liberals who criticized a "toothless tiger" maneuvered to bring about two hugely important changes to the EEOC.

The first was the passage by Congress of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, a law that granted the EEOC the power to bring suits on its own and expanded its jurisdiction regarding "respondents" (i.e. those it accused of discrimination) to include unions, employment agencies, the federal government (Members of Congress excepted), state and local governments, and educational institutions from grade school to college.

However, to feed their insatiable appetite for power, the agency's compulsive liberals needed more than the right to sue just about every American institution.

So it was they supplemented the idea of "disparate treatment" (i.e. outright, conscious discrimination) with the concept of "disparate or adverse impact," a theory of discrimination designed to keep the EEOC's power loving obsessives in business right up to the moment the last star in the universe twinkles its last tired pulse of photons.

Problem was, they couldn't propel the theory into motion without a little juice from Congress and a gigantic amount of energy exerted over time by liberal activist judges. But they got both.

Thus, they were successful in establishing a national legal principle holding that "discrimination also [occurs] when neutral policies or practices [have] a disproportionate, adverse impact on any protected class."

In Plain English, this means the EEOC may find an employment practice unlawful even though it is meticulously fair and neutral.

Who gets not just the first and last but the only word regarding the existence of "disparate impact" and what to do about it?

Well, the same liberal politicians, bureaucrats, and judges, who decide who gets into the protected class.

And the same liberal politicians, bureaucrats, and judges who are so deeply ensconced within the fortified labyrinth that is the level of government most remote from the Constitution's "We the People" that an army of ten million citizens supported by an equal number of rat terriers just might have a chance to dig them out.

Mightily motivated to discover "facially neutral hiring and employment practices" it regards as discriminatory and bolstered by rulings of liberal judges who regard the concept of adverse impact as infinitely expandable, the EEOC has spend the last 35 years raining terror on American institutions, public and private.

As with all reigns of terror, this one is marked by the worst kind of madly irrational, disgustingly anti-intellectual, frighteningly dangerous behavior.

For instance, the EEOC maintains that people who never even applied for a job at a company the agency deems guilty of discrimination under the doctrine of disparate impact are due recompense, with the gods of the EEOC able to determine not only every non-applicant who qualifies for payments but also to the penny how much the company much fork over to each "victim."

In another example known well even by citizens who only casually keep up with the news, the EEOC asserts that if tests, however valid and necessary they actually are, keep members of a protected class from securing an "appropriate" number of jobs or promotions, the test scores ought to be disregarded or, in the alternative, the entire testing program abolished.

Regarding the latter insanity, it is instructive to note that the EEOC, adhering to the insidious, incremental tactics preached by Saul Alinsky, the darling of every radic-lib community organizer, has not yet employed the doctrine of adverse impact to attack testing regimes in the medical and numerous other professions.

But as alluded to earlier, the capacity of the power loving mind to perceive things as "out of joint" and anoint itself as "born to set [them] right" by use of governmental power approaches infinity.

That's why, given time and opportunity, liberals will attack perceived discriminatory elements in every kind of test, licensing procedure, or evaluative system used with respect to every occupation, from dishwasher to rocket scientist.

To put it another way, today liberal dogmas cause you to worry about the competence of your community's firemen; tomorrow, if liberals have their way, you'll have nightmares regarding the qualifications of your hospital's pediatricians and neurosurgeons.

Finally, it is good and just to perceive the ugliness of the EEOC and speak out against it.

However, it is immensely more important to look upon the EEOC as a metaphor for something that having slopped unto itself an astounding mass of power over the past half century is enormously uglier, with respect to the danger it poses to the people's life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, than any single agency.

Specifically, that something is Washington, the insatiably obscene, obscenely wasteful, horridly revolting hog that can resist the advances made by every amoral, cash-flashing, power-digging, hypocritically swaying, special interest sow he meets as much as he can pass up an opportunity to suffocate the people of the fifty states with the dead, arrogant weight of his stinking, blubberous heft.

© A.J. DiCintio