Congresswoman Gives Supreme Court Minority Quota Mandate

In a disturbing trend among federal lawmakers, a crazed minority quota mandate has been issued for the second time in a few weeks during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing on an unrelated subject.

The latest inappropriate decree by a legislator to hire more minorities in government came during a recent hearing with U.S. Supreme Court justices who are asking for more federal security funds due to the volume of threats the court receives.

Justice Clarence Thomas told the House subcommittee that allocates the court’s funding that it needs money for a dozen additional police officers, though ideally it could use double that amount. Thomas has attended the annual appropriations hearings since George H.W. Bush appointed him to the bench in 1991.

During the largely boring and typically uneventful exchange with committee members, Thomas got bombarded by the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, according to a reputable news report. California Democrat Barbara Lee pressed Thomas on the lack of diversity among the Supreme Court’s prestigious clerkships.

She skeptically asked Thomas about the court’s efforts to attract clerks from minority groups and particularly from law schools that are not in the prestigious Ivy League. Thomas said the clerks he considers have previously worked for other federal appellate courts and come from a wide range of schools.

Within that pool, Thomas, who is black, said, “Hispanics and blacks do not show up in any great numbers.” Lee essentially blamed Thomas for the problem by pointing out his votes against affirmative action and claiming that “what’s in the pool has to do unfortunately with some of your decisions on the Supreme Court that have really shut out any people of color in some of these institutions.”

A few weeks ago a Florida Democrat (Debbie Wasserman Schultz) issued a similar edict to the director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the nonpartisan agency that provides Congress with crucial economic data on pending legislation. Wasserman Schultz, who essentially controls the CBO’s funding, actually ordered the agency to create a quota system to hire more women and minorities.

The CBO’s director, Douglas Elmendorf, said he’s tried hiring more minorities by recruiting at historically black colleges and universities but claims there aren’t many women and minorities who qualify to work at the agency, which requires candidates to be U.S. citizens due to the delicate nature of the work. Not many U.S.-citizen women or minorities are earning doctoral degrees in economics, which makes the hiring pool small, Elmendorf told Wasserman Schultz.

The notoriously liberal lawmaker from south Florida insisted, telling the CBO director that he’s “got to reach down much further” by taking a “leadership role” in raising awareness of math and economics as careers for women and minorities. She also told Elmendorf that he needs to start a program to get children well before college because by that age women and minorities have already decided against math and economics.