No doubt, the biggest policy-related news of the past 24 hours has been President-elect Trump's nomination of Harmeet K. Dhillon as Assistant AG for Civil Rights. This is the right person, and the right move.

We've already written about how the Federal government apparatus of civil rights, which is currently used to compel a DEI agenda across American society, could also be used to dismantle it.

You may have run across the phrase "wokeness is just civil rights law." This case was made first and most eloquently by Chris Caldwell in his book The Age of Enlightenment, and most recently by Richard Hanania in The Origins of Woke. (If we're doing a "DEI reading list" we would add Chris Rufo's America's Cultural Revolution, which is more of a history than a legal/policy analysis, but an outstanding book.) The basic idea is that the regime of civil rights law, and specifically the doctrine of disparate impact, which (violently summarized) holds that the mere fact of differences in outcomes among groups is ipso facto evidence of discrimination, have essentially caused the DEI revolution. Positively, for universities and companies, and thence every other institution in society, the rhetoric of DEI is just marketing-speak wrapped around an act of legal compliance; negatively, criticism of the DEI regime is muted because it opens up its author to civil rights litigation. (Caldwell tells the story of a university administrator who mused outloud about the negative impact of female entry into the workforce on American society; later, a female academic who had been denied tenure used this statement to argue she had been discriminated against, and won.)

None of these ideas are new and, at this point, they should be familiar to everyone in the right-of-center policy space.

However, your correspondent will claim fatherhood of another phrase: "wokeness is just civil rights law, but also, wokeness is illegal under civil rights law."

The doctrine of disparate impact exists, but so does the language of the Civil Rights Act (and, arguably, the 14th Amendment), which bans discrimination on the basis of race, including, on a plain reading, "reverse discrimination" (as affirmative action is called, less prudishly, in Europe).

This is the paradox at the heart of civil rights law: it's illegal to take race into account when making hiring (or promotion, etc.) decisions; but it's also illegal to not achieve a certain outcome in terms of racial mix. It's impossible to comply with one rule without breaking the other. This kind of quantum singularity civil rights law exists in a kind of Schrodinger's space, where each new litigation is a new opening of the box to find out whether the cat is alive or dead, whether racial discrimination is illegal or legally mandated. Presumably, this absurd state of affairs is on track to continue until the Supreme Court delivers some sort of landmark decision, or until Congress decides to settle the issue by statute, or until the Earth is swallowed up by the Sun.

Or…

Or there's a third scenario. In that scenario, a combination of cultural backlash (which is well underway) and vigorous anti-discrimination investigation, enforcement, and litigation from the Federal government create such a significant shift in The Way Things Are Done that everyone sort-of tacitly decides to forget about "disparate impact" and DEI, and free association and meritocracy are returned to America. (And in such a world, an eventual coup de grâce via Supreme Court decision or statute would only be all the more likely.)

But for that, you would need an emboldened Republican Administration with a strong democratic mandate (check), but also the right appointments at DOJ.

Which brings us to this appointment. It's hard to think of a better person for the job than Harmeet K. Dhillon, who has made her name in the last four years as one of the most prominent anti-woke and anti-DEI litigators in America. (And yes, it doesn't hurt that she's a woman and non-white—sometimes you have to use woke to fight woke.) She has the two requirements for the job: she's an excellent lawyer, and she's fearless.

We can't wait to see what she gets up to.

Policy News You Need To Know

#Chyna — We don't cover foreign policy as you know, except when it might impact domestic policy. So we thought we would point out that China is conducting some of its most extensive military exercises yet in the vicinity of Taiwan. This is worth putting on your radar, not just because it's a show of force (and bullying) by China, which you already knew, but also because if and when China does decide to invade Taiwan, it will begin as a "military exercise." And if China decides to invade Taiwan, that'll certainly reverberate on domestic policy.

#Energy — Punchbowl has a good overview on the new House Energy and Commerce chair, Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-KY): passing President Trump's energy and spectrum agenda in the reconciliation bill, but also: "Health is a huge interest of Guthrie’s. He’s been chair of the health subcommittee … On energy, the Kentucky Republican’s priorities include permitting reform and repealing EV mandates. … Guthrie has plenty of tech ideas too: Beating China to 6G, connecting more Americans to broadband and addressing Big Tech’s treatment of conservative speech. He’s talked about taking another run at overhauling privacy laws too, which failed to make it through the committee earlier this year."

#Populism — "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy." This was the headline of some dumb post that some content management intern posted on the website of the World Economic Forum, intending to laud collaborative consumption startups that add a bit of efficiency to economic life by renting things you might normally own, like Uber or Airbnb. Shorn of its context, the screenshot of the headline was memed by the internet into a statement of intent by the globalists. The reason this resonates is that, since at least Greek and Roman times, property has been tied to both political and economic independence. Roman legionaries fought because they would be allotted a plot of land in the countries they conquered. Jefferson believed that only a nation of propertied men could produce the kind of republican citizenship he envisioned for the United States of America, and feared the financial superpower Hamilton wanted to build. A society of renters is, of course, a society of dependents. It may be more economically efficient in some way for us to rent things like housing, transportation, media, computing, and more, but there are costs in terms of personal and economic security. All of which is a long-winded way of saying: big hedge funds want you to own nothing. And you'll be happy. Or something. The WSJ has an item on how "Wall Street is betting billions" on built-to-rent homes as home ownership—aka the American dream—"slips out of reach" of more and more people. Whatever policy remedy you may or may not favor (we hear you, YIMBYs), this is surely a deplorable state of affairs that should alarm everyone, and an indication of a sickness within the socioeconomic settlement.

#Labor — Sen Schumer has invoked cloture on the nomination to extend Lauren McFerran's tenure on the NLRB. This is important because it would lock in a 3-2 Democrat majority on the important board for the next two years. He does need 50 votes, however, and it's not clear that moderate Democrats (sorry, "Independents") like Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin will vote for. (Via Axios)

#Process — New GOP leader John Thune wants to put two reconciliation bills forward next year, with the first one, apparently, focusing on border security, defense, and, no doubt, other things. He is looking for revenue-raisers. Axios has more.

#Tariffs — In NR, Cato's Scott Lincicome and Adam N. Michel, some of the most vigorous advocates for free trade in DC, who are always worth reading, make the case against using tariffs as revenue raisers.

#Immigration — Interesting X thread from Mike Lee (who has really taken to the medium over the past year or so, which we love to see—more of this from members of Congress, please!), on the 14th Amendment and whether or not it protects birthright citizenship. You will recall, the text of the Amendment grants citizenship to people born in the United States "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof." The key point from Lee: "Congress has the power to define what it means to be born in the United States 'and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.' While current law contains no such restriction, Congress could pass a law defining what it means to be born in the United States 'and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,' excluding prospectively from birthright citizenship individuals born in the U.S. to illegal aliens." You can (and should, given how intelligent Lee is) read it both ways: Congress can do this (which will displease a bunch of people on the left); but also, only Congress can do this (which will displease some people on the right, who believe the President can do it via executive order).

#Opportunity — Very cool new paper from NBER: removing degree requirements from public sector job opportunities allowed more people with equivalent skills but no degree to get those jobs. Credentialism is a cancer on American life, so it's good news to see that if you do remove such requirements, you get qualified people to do those jobs.

#FamilyPolicy — R Street's Jacob Bastian has an overview of Sen. Romney's Family Security Act as a potential reform to the CTC. In our view, the Family Security Act takes exactly the wrong position on two key issues related to family policy: it doesn't include a work requirement; and it phases out for higher earners. Apart from the benefits of encouraging work, failing to include work requirements turns a child tax credit (or child allowance, or whatever you want to call it) into a welfare program, making it politically toxic as well as socially destructive; and the point of family policy is not to redistribute from the well-off to the less-fortunate, it is to redistribute from the childless to the fertile within the same socioeconomic stratum. The latter point is key, as we tried to explain in a previous briefing.

#SupplyChains — Good new report from RAND on how to mitigate supply chain risk. The bottomline is: it's hard. "Supply chains are oriented toward efficiently filling demand in the near term. Long-term consequences of disruption do not generally receive attention from organizations whose immediate interest is in filling an immediate need," the authors point out. But trying to rectify the problem through heavy-handed regulation is probably a dead-end. So what can we do? More research and more awareness-raising, the authors say, essentially, while (we assume) throwing up their hands.