Speaker 1: And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent at the
Federalist and your experience Shirpa on today's Quest for Knowledge.
As always, you can email the show at radio at
the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at FDRLST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and
of course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is Daniel Lennington, Deputy counsel at the
Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. The Milwaukee based conservative
law firm has won some impressive victories for liberty, particularly
in taking on the destructive DEI movement in America. Dan,
as always, it's good to have you here on the Federalist.
Speaker 2: Radio a Low hey Man, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, you have been busy, haven't you at the
Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. Before we begin with
the DEI, the diversity, equity and inclusion litigation that you've
had a good deal of success on, of course, in
recent years, let's talk about how it all began. Folks
may not know about the Wisconsin Institute for Law and
liberty if there are in other parts of the country,
but Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty has
expanded well beyond the boundaries of the Badger State.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's right. We started off a small Milwaukee firm
about fifteen years ago, sixteen years ago now, and we
were originally involved very heavily in Wisconsin politics, litigation at
the state level, state Supreme Court, important issues about academic
freedom and Act ten which is now back in the news,
and all the original legal battles that were in that
very hot period of twenty eleven through two thousand and twenty.
But once President Biden was elected in January of twenty
twenty one, he took the oath of office, we took
it upon ourselves to take more of a national view
of our rule. And over the last four years we
filed a dozen lawsuits against President Biden. We have represented
clients from twenty six states around the country and represented
over eighty clients and have taken on some of the
most virulent parts of Biden's equity agenda. And some may
remember this right. When President Biden was elected, he passed
the assign the American Rescue Plan Act, which did a
number of things that was a trillion one point two
trillion or trillion dollars. And one of the things that
did is that it forgave loans that were due from farmers,
but if you were a white farmer, you could not
get farmer a loan forgiveness. And we brought a federal
lawsuit against that and got the first in the nation
injunction against that, a nationwide in junction against that program.
And from there we were off to the races, shutting
down programs that Biden was standing up to help restaurant
owners based on race, to help small business owners based
on race, into just having almost an extreme DEI agenda
that was treating America's America based on the color of
their skin and not their merit or their individuality. And
that is very offensive to us. And we were very
proud to be at the forefront of that and to
win many many lawsuits during the Biden administration. And now
and now we're seeing that we're moving into the ground phase.
My boss Rick Essenberg says, we've won the air war
and now we are going house to house. So that
is that is where we are right now with DEI
at the federal level.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is it feels a lot like a desert
storm in certain respects. It's certain that law fair is
as about as nasty as it can get, as we've
learned over the years from the left and what they're
capable of. But I think it's it's remarkable. I mean,
these these are important, critical cases for so many basic
rights that we all is, you know, seem to take
for granted until they're in peril, until in so many
cases we've seen, are lost. We're going to get into
the fact that the executive branch in our system of government,
in this wonderful republic, has the ability to do a
lot of things, as is being seen right now by
the forty seventh President of the United States, President Donald Trump,
and that's a battle that is ongoing. But as in
the executive branch, you can have all kinds of policies,
you can you have the ability to sign executive orders
and directives, but you can't do those in the name
of discrimination. And that's really where this battle is when
we're talking about DEI diversity, Equity and inclusion DAN. The
whole idea from the left as it has been pitched
in this bad Bill of Goods to the American people,
is it? You know, it's about giving people who have
been underprivileged, you know, people who haven't had the big
breaks over the years that some others have. But it
basically boils down they say it's about you know, restoring
you know, equality in America or bringing back equality. But
it has nothing to do with those principles. Equity and
equality are two divergent terms. And what it boils down
to is discrimination again based on race. And I think
so many Americans look at that movement, have looked at
that movement and said, well, wait a minute, isn't this
the sort of stuff that we fought against during the
civil rights movement in this country. I mean, you folks
are at the front line of all of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. I defined the EI as a catch all
term that refers to a policy of discrimination against individuals
based on group identity in order to make up for
past discrimination. So the idea is that we see this.
We have a lawsuit pending right now against the federal
government for a program for colleges to help college students
who want to go into graduate school, and the Biden
administration had set up this program that said, well, certain
racial groups are underrepresented in graduate school, and those are
Hispanic and Black and Native American groups, and so we
need to set up a program to make up for
that misalignment of their underrepresentation by giving special preferences to
those groups over students who are Asian and students who
are white. And so we've sued over that program, still pending.
We hope we will settle that program with the Trump administration.
We expect that to happen. But that's just That's an
example of DEI in the world is that the progressives,
they see the population of America as thirteen percent black,
and they believe that at least thirteen percent of all
benefits in whatever field you're talking about need to go
to Black Americans. So thirteen percent of all scholarships, thirteen
percent of all jobs, thirteen percent of all promotions, thirteen
percent of all government benefits, thirteen percent of scholarships and
higher education that could help kids progress. And so they
don't view people as people. They only view people as
members of racial groups, as sort of archetypes. Stand ins
that we don't view someone as just a person who
has individual interests, aspirations, pros, cons but that they are
basically using stereotypes. To just assume it is written in
our federal laws right now that if you are black,
you are disadvantaged. You are just automatic, you are defined
that the wordsocially disadvantaged is defined under federal law as
being a black person.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And that so you're telling me that Malia and Sasha
Obama and Oprah Winfree and Lebron James, those people are
all disadvantaged under federal law just because of their membership
in a racial group. Now we know that's all not true.
That's just a stereotype, and it's pernicious and it's bigoted.
But that is the basis of modern liberal and progressive
DEI values and policymaking.
Speaker 1: It is twisted, it is sick again. It is a
far distance from where we were going in America before
this really leftist Marxist movement that is so tied into
race identity politics, and that's exactly what it is. It's
interesting to me that you at the Wisconsin Institute for
Law and Liberty have been so busy on this front.
And this is such an explosive, an exploding portion of law.
You had to create a center, if you will, to
deal with it. You know, you created the Equality under
the Law Project, which is dealing with exactly what we're
talking about. When did that begin and how is it
going at this at this point that you.
Speaker 2: Know, that began very strongly in April of twenty twenty one,
and we filed lawsuits against Biden administration's race based programs,
and I have won in court seven out of the
twelve that we filed. We have five pending. We've represented
clients from all over the country. We have three attorneys
now working on this where we feel like we're punching
way above our weight level because there are many other
firms that have many more attorneys who we're doing. We're
getting a lot, a lot of firmer results and a
lot more robust results, and so we're very happy with
the team we have assembled.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: You know, we get calls from people and we represent
all of our clients pro bono. We never charge a cent,
and we get calls from all over the country. I
got a call just this morning from a small business
in North Carolina that got an email saying that that
there were Hurricane Helene grants being given given out to
small businesses that had had suffered from Hurricane Helene in
Western North Carolina. But in this this was this is
a program that's ongoing by a computer company called Lenovo
in conjunction with the Secretary of State of North Carolina.
But if it's only available for minorities and women own businesses,
and this is happening today in March sixth, twenty twenty five,
this email goes out to people who have just suffered
hurricane damage and are struggling to rebuild, who had been
frankly ignored by the Biden administration and now FEMA in
the Trump administration is going to fix them, but they
are not are fixed up their roads and bridges, but
now they're being told, well, the private sector in the
North Carolina they want to help you too, but sorry,
white male businesses, you can't get these grants. And so
it's been story after story. We've helped kindergarten kids who
have been told by their teachers that they have had
white privilege. We have been We've helped mothers who couldn't
get help for their dyslexic child because the school district
said that they wanted to help black and Native American
children first with dyslexia before helping white kids. We have
helped a mom who's from Thailand, whose son can't get
a scholarship because he's from Thailand, because the state government
here in Wisconsin does not believe that Thailand is part
of Asia. Of all things, that is not a joke.
Speaker 1: It sounds like it to me. And it sounds like
a product of the Wisconsin school system under Governor Tony
Eavers and as former DPI director as well, the suffering
of geography to begin with. But that is astounding to
me that you and what I guess is so astounding
to me, Dan, is that you and I know some
other fantastic attorneys on this front in the battle for
law and liberty, have won some very big decisions here,
some very big court rulings. Yet the left Democrats in
power continue to seem to they seem to continue to
double down on all of this. As you noted this
most recently with the private sector and what happened with
the hurricanes in North Carolina, South Carolina and elsewhere. Are
they not getting the message? What gives?
Speaker 2: No, They're they're not They're not getting the message.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: And I think politically speaking, you're seeing this, this this
inner struggle with the Democrats, and you even sought up
the state of the Joint addressed to Congress at President
Trump gave is that the Democrats don't quite know what
their identity is anymore, and they some of them have
tried to move on, and some of them are stuck
in the past, but they don't. They don't seem to
be getting it. And I'll give you an.
Speaker 1: I would have paused there for a moment, because I
think that is a hilarious statement. In fact, I love
that that Democrats, who have been so immersed in identity
politics don't know who they are anymore. They're having they
are having an identity crisis. I'm telling you what. The
time has certainly come, that's for sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is. They don't get it. And I'll just
give you another example. I mean, these things come to
me every single day. I just got an email from
a school board member here in Wisconsin that got an
email today from their principle, from their superintendent that said, yeah, yeah,
we know that President Trump has issued this executive order
that says public schools are not allowed to do DEI anymore.
And we know that President Trump has threatened that if
you are a public school district and you keep doing DEI,
which means discriminating against kids based on race. You will
lose federal funds. And so this email today, I'll just
read what this email says. It says to ensure that
terminology does not become a barrier to our mission of
providing all students with equitable education opportunities, we will be
adjusting the language associated with this roles effective Wednesday, March fourth.
The titles will change to quote Educational Access Coordinator and
Educational Access Coach and the former around. They used to
be called DEI coach and DEI coordinator. They have changed them.
This is just one school district in Wisconsin. The University
of Wisconsin has changed has changed de I to the
phrase inclusive excellence. That is there, that's what they call it,
of excellence, excellent, and black and Hispanic people are are
no longer black and Hispanic people. They are called ERSOK.
Do you want to you want to guess Matt, what
ERSOK is?
Speaker 1: I can only imagine. Yet it's another it's another acronym
for something.
Speaker 2: Under underrepresented student of color. So they have deleted the
words black, and they have deleted the words Hispanic and
now on their official spreadsheets for scholarship eligibility. They say, Ersoker,
this is all.
Speaker 1: Goddan from from mythological lore. This isn't this isn't no this,
this really is insane because really all they're doing, as
you're clearly stating here, is just changing the names so
that they can get around the policy or the laws.
Are they going to get away with that?
Speaker 2: Well, I wouldn't want to be on the on the
other side of the table from from these people who
Trump is appointed. Pam Bondi as Attorney General is as
serious as a heart attack about this stuff. There is
no joke with that. The Trump administration is going to
be extremely aggressive, as we've seen from these executive orders
in mandating equality and telling recipients of financial funds. Now,
this is the legal hook here. So if you take
federal money, you must promise that you don't discriminate based
on race. That is not a new law. That is
a law from the nineteen sixty four Civil Rights Act.
It's called Title six, and so that's always been the law.
That was the law in which Harvard lost its case
on back in twenty twenty three, where they were doing
affirmative action in higher education. So Title six has been
around forever. Title six is not new, and President Trump
is merely said, hey, private sector, in public sector, case
through twelve schools, higher educational opportunity institutions, government agencies at
the state level, county level, city level. You know all
that federal money you're getting from us, and you're on
the government dole. If you discriminate based on race, we
will take that money away from you. And that is
what's happening. That is a legal mechanism that has existed
since nineteen sixty four and it's not new. And this
is a you know, find out situation here to not
use the vulgar term mess around and find out, because
somebody's gonna find out. Amazon receives federal money, Ups receives
federal money. The universities around the country all receive federal money,
except for my Alma monor Hillsdale College. They are all
required to be non discriminatory. And the President Trump is
rightly explaining to them that DEI is race discrimination and
if we catch you do it, we're gonna take the
money away from you. And the most pool districts, for example,
Key through twelve school districts, get about ten and twelve
percent of their budget from the federal government. That's a
big chunk of money that you can lose by playing
games with changing your DEI coordinator to the educational access coordinator.
If you want to play that game, fine, If you
want to pretend that maybe they won't catch you, go ahead.
But that's like speeding down the highway at ninety five
miles an hour. You can do it at your own risk.
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Of course, as we know, the Left has been pretending
for a long time, for instance, that men should be
competing in women's sports and that there's no difference between
a man and a woman. We know their mo but
they You're right, if they want to press this issue,
they might find themselves like Al Green being escorted out
of the house shambers with the you know, by the
sergeant at arms. You know. It's just it is mind boggling.
I think to the average American that we are at
this place in the history of this country, given where
we have been, given all the things that you talked
about in nineteen sixty four civil rights law that was
the law of the land until the left decided to
tear it apart. Eventually, there has to be a tipping
point here, though obviously right, and that has to involve
all three branches of government. In my estimation, Congress has
got to do what it refuses to do, go to
work the hefty lifting of legislation. The executive branch, I
think is well on its way to doing what it
can do to try to remedy the situation. Then we
get to the courts, and we have so many different
interpretations on what should clearly be the clear reading of
the law.
Speaker 2: Why yeah, So I think I'll start with the courts.
There have been ninety eight lawsuits filed against the Trump administration.
There have been a number of temporary restraint order, which
are just temporary pauses on what the federal government does
in order to make sure that the courts have enough
information before they issue a final decision. I'm not too
concerned that these decisions have gone in the wrong way.
I think that eventually the US Supreme Court is going
to make two very important rulings. One is theyre going
to overrule a case called Humphreys Executor, which they have
signaled that they're going to do. And this is the
decision that prohibited the President from removing the head of
the Federal Trade Commission or one of the members because
Congress had given them a statutory term. If this case
is overruled, it means that the president can fire anybody
in the executive branch who exercises any policy making the judgment,
which so the president can't fire your local postman because
your local postman is not making policy decisions. But the
president can fire members of the Securities in Exchange Commission,
it can fire the head of the FBI, which he
has done and we've seen that. So the president is
what they call the unitary executive. That it says all
executive power shall be invested in a president, which is
what Article two says of the Constitution, And so I
think you're going to see that that's going to probably
be established pretty quickly. Right now. There was a decision
that came down today allowing the president to remove one
of these bureaucratic lawyers who had been holding up some
of the changes at the Merit System Protection Board. But
the other ruling that I think we're going to see
is this ruling on impoundment. So Ever since the founding
of the country, from you know, seventeen ninety one through
up through up through the nineteen seventies, the president has
had the power not to spend money.
Speaker 1: And that is an important concept that seems to get
lost in the whole battle over what is going on
with Doge, what is going on with a lot of
the temper tantrums coming out of the left the Democratic
Party today. But yes, that should be very clear. Yet
we have all kinds of judges that don't I shouldn't
say all kinds, but we have judges in this country
that don't seem to recognize that factor. Understand it, right? Yeah.
Speaker 2: So there was a law passed after the Nixon impeachment
or almost impeachment Nixon's resignation, part of the Reforms of
Governments back in the nineteen seventies called the Anti Impoundment Act,
which prevented a president from not spending money. That act
has not the US Supreme Court has not directly ruled
on that, and a lot of legal scholars believe that
the Anti Impoundment Act is actually unconstitutional. And so we're
going to have to see a case come up where
the president says, I'm not going to spend this money
and see what the Supreme Court says about it. Does
the president in his the person who has all executive power,
have a right not to spend money. And I think
that is a very very important case. There may be
a distinction in the case whenever that case comes out,
between when Congress makes a specific appropriation of money to say,
for example, we are appropriating two billion dollars for you
to rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge, and we are
telling you we would like you to do that, and
then the president is supposed to do that because that's
a very specific appropriation, rather than hey, President Trump, you
have this slush fund of ten billion dollars, go use
this to make America healthy again, and which would be
a more general grant of appropriation. And perhaps the president says,
I'll spend some of that now, some of it later,
some of them maybe I won't spend. That's sort of
the traditional use of impoundment, and so there may be
a distinction into how the president can refuse to spend
money and under what constraints and what the law actually
has to say, but that will be another issue. So
those are the two big legal issues that are coming
out of all these cases right now. Does the president
have the power to fire anybody he wants within the
executive branch that has policymaking authority? And two, does the
president have the ability not to spend money? Which is
I think if you are if you are in a
time machine from the eighteenth century and you come back
and you say, wait a minute, you're worried that your
president is not exercising power that you've given him, that's
your big problem. He doesn't want programs in laws to
be in effect. He's just refusing to exercise his authority
and spend money. You guys should be happy, that's your
biggest problem, because we just had a king.
Speaker 1: If that was not great, Yes, I think if you've
got a time machine with our founders and some of
these folks from the nineteenth century, they would have popped
into Congress, into the house the other night and said,
what is going on here? What is this all about?
And I think they'd say that with a lot of things.
Our guest today is Daniel Lennington, the Deputy Council at
the Wisconsin Institute for Law in Liberty, Milwaukee based conservative
law firm has won some impressive victories for liberty, particularly
and taking on the destructive DEI movement. Just back to
the anti impoundment laws in the idea that was established
long long ago, as you said at the inception of
this Republic, that it is up to the discretion of
the executive to say, we don't need to spend this money,
so we don't. That's really why it is in place.
That is the battle that is going on right now.
But Dan, when you look at what the Biden administration
did with congressional funding, one could argue that the Biden
administration didn't spend the money and certainly didn't spend the
money as it was intended by Congress to say, I
don't know, secure the border, not allow an invasion at
our southern border of millions upon millions of illegal immigrants.
And that's just one area that we can certainly debate
this issue on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was I mean, that was Obama was big,
you know, his what he used to call it prosecutorial discretion,
and he would do something called the Deferred Action for
Childhood arrivals Dhaka or Dappa. There's two versions of them then,
and he those were ultimately mostly upheld by the court saying, hey,
the president can choose the ways in which he executes
the law, and he has a wide amount of discretion.
Of course, that was good for the Democrats, and it
was good when you know President Biden decided to cancel
a bunch of student loan debt without any without any
congressional authority, and then getting smacked down by the Supreme
Court and said he's going to do it again anyway.
So you know, the lawless president I'm in the last
twenty five years. I'm more concerned about the Democrats being lawless. So, yeah,
there is the idea of prosecutorial discretion, idea of empowerment,
but we're going to have to see So another legal
principle that I think is really important, and we've highlighted
this to the Trump administration. We've written a report called
the Roadmap to Equality, which identifies seventy nine different executive
actions that we think the president should take to prohibit
his administration from discriminating against individuals based on race. And
what it comes down to is that there are dozens
and dozens of federal laws that required the eleven cabinet
agencies to stand up programs and to execute programs that
discriminate based on race. And we're telling the President that
he should exercise his power not to run those programs
because the president has taken an oath of office to
uphold the Constitution and he has a constitutional duty to
take care that the laws are faithfully executed. And for
the past dozens and dozens of years, both Republican and
Democrat presidents alike have both agreed, through their lawyers, their
attorney generals, their office of Legal Counsel, have agreed that
they have a duty not to enforce laws that are unconstitutional.
And prior presidents have done this many many times. And
so there are these laws on the books that discriminate
based on race, and we're asking the President and the
executive branch not to enforce them. Let me give you
one example. This is an easy example to understand. The
US Department of Agriculture provides insurance to dairy farmers. This
is called the Dairy Margin Coverage Program. This program, if
you want to be a part of the program and
get the insurance from the USDA, you have to pay
one hundred dollars fee under the US Code. If you're black,
you don't have to pay the fee. And so the
president not enforced that law that discriminates based on race.
There's another agricultural.
Speaker 1: Wait, hold on it is it black or your sock?
Speaker 2: Well, actually socially disadvantaged individuals, which is defined as black, Hispanic,
Native American, Okay Asian farmers.
Speaker 1: Because I know this term your sock is really it
really is hot. You know, I hadn't heard it since
I believe wasn't he a character on Perfect Strangers that
hit TV sitcom back in the nineteen eighties. No, in
all seriousness, that's that they're parsing the language. You say
that it's in the code, but really, at the end
of the day, it's about discrimination, isn't it. Yeah, it is.
Speaker 2: And these programs are all over the place. There are
grant programs for farmers that want to sell their goods
farmers markets. And if you're not on an approved list
of racial categories, you don't get that set aside. And
so Brooke Rollins is the head of USDA right now,
and Brooke Security Rounds should refuse to enforce that racially
discriminatory program. There are all sorts of are There is
a program from the Energy Department which offers rebates to
people who install new air conditioning their heating systems in
their house. You get cash rebates from the Department of Energy.
If you live in a disadvantaged community, you get two
hundred dollars more. And the disadvantaged community is labeled as
defined as minority community. There are all sorts of there's
dozens and dozens of these programs that are in the
US Code. And as far as the Executive Branch is authority,
the executive branch can decide not to enforce these discriminatory laws,
and that is a power of the executive bridge. Now,
of course the president could abuse this power. But with
with with these issues of explicit race discrimination against American citizens,
we think this is a really easy case and the
President should should do this. But this is not let
Congress off the hook. And that is where our biggest
beef is with with Congress, because they ought to be
passing laws and doing their job. They ought to be
going into the US Code. And we went to Washington,
DC a couple of weeks ago, that was several members
of Congress and said when you when you pass these laws,
you have to repeal all these discriminatory programs that that
President Biden in the Democrat Congress put on the books
under the Inflation Reduction Act. Remember that, Cherry. You remember
the instructure your Act, the by quote Bipartisan Infrastructure Act.
Remember the American Rescue Play an Act where America Americans
got rescued, We got rescued, and we got really from inflation.
With all these acts, you know, he spent five or
six trillion dollars. And when he spent all this money,
he inserted all of these racial preferences, these DEI programs
into the code. And so like, if we're going to
do you know these, you know, good luck to Congress.
They're going to pass the big beautiful bill, right, why
don't you just revoke all these and and you know
I've been hearing from you know, from the Thomas Massey,
the one representative who voted against the the the Reconciliation Resolution,
He said, why are we why are you guys complaining
about US A I D. Because you're going to have
a continuing resolution come up here in a couple of
weeks and you're just gonna fund you U S A
I d again, because that's what that's what a continuing
resolution does.
Speaker 1: Yeah, amazing, So you got to.
Speaker 2: Get serious, like are you going to be a lawmaker
or not? And so, I mean a lot of these
problems we have that end up in the courts and
complaints about the executive branch or this or that all
stem from the fact that Congress actually doesn't like to
take the time to write laws because it's.
Speaker 1: Hard to do work or to do its job. That's
what it is. They have jobs that they have to do,
and they simply have abdicated their authority. And we've seen
this up and down the line. This is what the
Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty has been fighting against
for a long time. It's, you know, basically bureaucratic decisions,
unelected bureaucratic decisions. And they it's not that the bureaucrats
in all of these cases certainly are breaking the law,
because again, Congress abdicated its authority, its responsibility and asked
it along to the unelected bureaucrat to say, well, this
is what we're going to do. You gave us this money,
you gave us this charge, you gave us this responsibility
and this power we're going to use that. Don't be
surprised when people in positions of moderate authority are given authority,
enhanced authority, and power. Don't be surprised when they use it.
And no, I don't feel rescued, but I'm curious. This
is a thought that keeps running through my mind with
these kinds of programs the Biden administration and others have
infused into these you know, these mega, massive trillion dollar programs,
these discriminatory policies, and that is is this an end
around to the left's push for reparations in America without
congressional approval.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean some people believe we've been on a
a program of reparations since nineteen sixty four, since the
Great Society. There has been significant transfer of tax dollars
into communities, primarily because the politicians believe that those racial
communities would be better off if there were checks set
to them, or benefit programs set to those neighborhoods or
those inner cities, and that we can make up for
all this horrible history of discrimination that we have in
this country by getting out our checkbook. And there have
been trillions and trillions spent on social welfare programs that
were and many times targeted directly at minority communities. These
communities today aren't much better than they were before. And
so we've just gotten a report that, for example, Milwaukee
Public Schools is the worst public school system in the country.
And you ask yourself that this city has been run
by Democrats for decades, and it has received tens and
hundreds of billions of dollars in handouts and payments from
the federal government and the state government. If the answer
is that all we need to do to solve poverty
and homelessness and poor educational outcomes is just to spend money,
then that is completely belied by the facts. It's almost
inverse correlation that the more money we're spending on kids,
the worst the educational outcomes are. Milwaukee Public Schools, a
majority minority school district worse in the country, spends over
twenty thousand dollars per year per child. All right, That
is more than the cost of tuition for a room
and tuition room and board for almost every campus of
the University of Wisconsin, except for the one of Madison,
which is ridiculously expensive thirty one thousand a year. So
we're spending more we're spending more per child K through
twelve in Milwaukee than we are than it costs to
educate a kid in college and pay for the room
and board. Is it just tells in that every year
the outcomes get worse. Tells me that this idea that maybe,
this idea of reparations, this idea that hey, we're going
to make up for past discrimination by paying certain racial
groups money, is not necessarily for their own good. Maybe
there's some political reason why this has been going on.
Maybe one party has decided that we will pump money
into these certain racial communities and in exchange, those communities
will vote for us, and we really don't care. And
in fact, maybe if it gets worse, an excuse to
keep spending more money. Maybe that is a crazy conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1: Are you that politically jaded to believe that there's a
party in this country that has spent the last sixty
plus years buying votes through taxpayer contributions. I can't believe it.
Of course.
Speaker 2: It's kind of like how they keep spending more money
in California on homelessness, and the more money they spend,
the more homeless people there.
Speaker 1: Are, and the more expensive of housing gets pricing the
homeless out. But it's just absolute insanity, and I think
we saw in November of twenty twenty four is finally
a reality check on that. So that raises the question
for you, as a hardworking attorney in all of this
and your organization, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty,
what's next? I mean you talk about this can't simply
obviously can't be done simply at the executive level. This
needs to be codified in law. What's next for the
Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty in this battle against DEI,
wasteful spending and all of the things that we discussed
that are just abuses of the constitution.
Speaker 2: Well, there is a lot of cleanup work to do.
We are, as I said, we're lobbing Congress to change
the law to get rid of these laws. We are
lobbing the executive branch to have them shut down these programs.
We have cases that we have filed that we are
asking the federal government to settle with us so that
these we can get court orders preventing these discriminatory programs
from going on forward. We are targeting non federal actors
right now. We are going after states that run minority
supplier programs. We just filed last week complaints against the
State of New York in the state of Wisconsin for
their multi billion dollar programs which hand out contracts and
procurement orders to companies based on the race of their owner.
There's a lot of racism at the government spending level
at the state level. We are continuing to root out
DEI at the university levels and investigating several universities and
targeting them with complaints when they are discriminating as students.
We are very active, and I've always been active in
K through twelve and represent a number of parents who
have faced race discrimination in DEI that has victimized their children.
And also we have been going after private companies. One
of the most scary areas we've seen DEI crop up
very quickly has been in healthcare, and we have been
finding health hospitals that have been treating patients differently based
on their race because of the systemic racism against African Americans,
and so African Americans need to be put at the
front of the line, not based on symptoms, not based
on any medical or scientific reason, but just that we
need to make up for past discrimination. We need to
put African Americans at the front of the line, and
somehow in the cosmic justice of that is going to
cure everything. And so when grandma and Grandpa go to
the hospital, there is a chance that they are going
to be evaluated first and foremost with the question of
what is your race rather than what are your symptoms,
which is what we would hope a hospital would do.
So we are very actively looking at what we call
health equity and rooting that out too. So there is
a lot of work to be done. You know, Trump
and his appointees are doing some great work. We have
we have work to do at Congress. We have some
gentle nudging we need to do with the executive branch
and those agencies. But the hard work is still going
to be at state, city, county level and with private
companies including hospitals.
Speaker 3: Elon Musk and Doge need help. The watch Dout on
Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every day, Chris helps
unpack the connection between politics and the economy and how
it affects your wallet. Coage is only highlighting the spending problems,
but Congress controls the purse strings. Congress needs to follow
through and step up to control this spending or we'll
be back where we started. Whether it's happening in DC
or down on Wall Street, it's affecting you financially.
Speaker 1: Be informed.
Speaker 3: Check out the Watchdot on Wall Street podcast with christ
Marcowski on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Well, i'll tell you what. It's the stuff that you
mentioned that some of these cases that you've talked about
are some of the most egregious and appalling examples of
what we've fought so hard in this country against for
so long. It's just it's amazing to me and to
think that, you know, there was a time in this
country where there were race preferences that were wrong thought
against those we worked on the battlegrounds. It's not a
perfect system by any means. But now to use discrimination,
which is the anti racism critical race theory idea here,
to use racism as a justification as a way to
correct previous examples of racism, that's just so inherently wrong
and evil. It's hard to wrap your mind around. I
will say, yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead, No, that's.
Speaker 2: Right, and it just you know, the way to think
about this is people should be treated as individuals. People
who need help should get help. We should never say
groups need help. Groups don't need help, groups don't need
people need help. Individuals need help. How come the medicaid
system is permitted to actually evaluate people as individuals and
to decide is their income level at a certain level,
do they have a hardship where they need Medicaid? And
we're allowed to figure that out, and we do figure
that out. We do figure out who needs medicaid and
we give them medicaid. But the minute you go to
the universities, they say, well, we can't really figure out
who needs to be admitted to the school. So we're
just going to say all the people of that color,
like we can't even we can't even treat them as
individuals and look at their application and say does this
person need a scholarship? We just have to say, ah,
they're a member of a group. Therefore they must need help,
they must be poor and disadvantage people. So you government
agencies are able to evaluate people to decide whether they
need help and are able to give that individual help
in that circumstance. And when you just use DEI or
affirm an action, you're just literally throwing up your hands,
and you're saying, well, everybody in that group must be disadvantaged,
must be poor, must be desperate. So I'm just going
to help everybody in that group no matter what. That
is a ham fisted way of doing it, not to
mention a bigoted way, in a stereotypical way of doing it.
So just treat people as individuals is really the only
thing that people need to remember. And people should not
be afraid anymore of talking about race. I mean, I've
been talking about race for four years, and you know
it is hard to talk about race, and people get
nervous about it. But when you focus on your principles,
and your principles are just equal treatment for people, all
these complicated arguments about DEI and systemic racism and affirmative action,
they'll sound silly and they all sound very easy to
argue against. Once you just think that, you know, we
should help people who need help, that's really the end
of the story.
Speaker 1: Well, it's refreshing to see in November that a majority
of Americans agree with that common sense ideas basic principles
right there. I will say for full disclosure that you know,
I'm not just interested in the legal activities of course
and to Wisconsin Institute Law and Liberty as accomplished over
the years. I've certainly covered this organization for many years
in the work they've done in Wisconsin and elsewhere. But
I'm also a client. It's kind of like the hair comfort.
It's a little size spurling action right there. You're absolutely right. Yeah,
you know so. I used to say, I'm not just
the president, I'm also a client. Well I'm not. I
have no connection in terms of ownership or involvement with
the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, but they have
taken me on as a client for a couple of
times as a journalist, particularly of late. I am a
client in I think a very important lawsuit against the FBI,
the Department of Justice, the Biden originally the Biden Department
of Justice, and it involves the trans killer. If you
recall back in Nashville in twenty twenty three, almost now
two years ago, and we have local law enforcement in
the FBI sitting on that trans killer's manifesto, the person
that stormed into a Christian school and killed in cold
blood three third graders and three staff members of that school.
We still as a public have not gotten the full story,
and that to me is, you know, that's an administrative
crime that's going on, and we have to understand why. Well,
the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty has represented yours truly,
and also the CEO of the news organization that has
been really covering that story from the beginning, that's the
Star News Network, and I just want to say thanks
for the good work. We're still hoping now that this
new administration will see the light on what the foil
laws truly entail.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the defendant in the case now is Cash Pttel,
and he publicly has said that the manifesto should be released.
It's my understanding that the papers and the entire manifesto
might be upwards of nine hundred pages. We've sort of
seen leaks of part of it. But I have worked
in the area of school safety for Attorney General Brad
Schimmel in Wisconsin. I worked for many years in the
area of school safety and law enforcement officers when they
want to develop new policies to protect schools, they always
want to know what was the motivation of the shooter? Yes,
why did they want to do this? And what were
the tactics and all sorts of things like that, and
it's important to know why killers kill. And we have
manifestos from all sorts of killers in the US history,
and the FBI was very quick to release manifestos of killers,
but the minute the killer is a transgender person, they
clam up and they don't want to release it. And
we found the lawsuit to get a copy of the
man festo, and hopefully we have asked Cash Betel a
couple of weeks a week ago, we've asked him to
settle the lawsuit with us, to give us the records
so that we could drop the lawsuit. And we have
not heard back, and it's been a little frustrating of
the delay. And I understand Cash has got a lot
of things going on, especially with the Southern District of
New York apparently hiding thousands of pages of the Epstein file,
so he is a busy guy. But but we would
like to settle this case and get these records. And
you know, I've heard there's maybe some news to break
on this. It's not my news to break, but hopefully
we will hear what the FBI was actually doing with
these records, which I think will be quite shocking when
we hear the entire story, but that'll be something off
to stay tuned too.
Speaker 1: Well. You know better than anybody there's always a story
behind the story, and we'll continue to cover it here
at the Federalist. And I know that you will continue
to advocate for the release of those records, and obviously
you'll continue to fight the good fight on the front
for ensuring equality, not this nonsense equity movement that is
going on in America that is so harmful and so divisive,
and well again, I think Americans, most Americans, have had
it up to here with all of that, and the
good work continues. Our guest today, I'm so glad to
have him on this edition of the Federalist Radio Hour.
Daniel Lennington, Deputy Council at the Wisconsin Institute for Law
and Liberty, otherwise known as WILL. You've been listening to
another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle,
Senior Elections correspondent at the Federalist. We'll be back soon
with more. Until then, stay lovers of freedom and anxious
for the fray.
Speaker 2: Hearn a fameboys the reason and then they faded away