The Biden Administration Is Still Banning White Farmers From Federal Aid

President Biden’s farm loan forgiveness program is outrageously unconstitutional. It is a law that would selectively pay off the loans of farmers based on race. A non-white farmer would see his entire loan paid off. His neighbor, who is white, would not qualify for the program. It was predictably challenged in court with predictable results.

Every court to reach the question has issued a preliminary injunction, thus barely any money got out the door before it got halted. You may have thought it was over, but it’s not.

After taking an uninterrupted string of losses in defending the program’s racial preferences, the government has changed tactics. It has argued that it is wasteful and unfair to force it, the United States of America represented by the Department of Justice (the world’s largest law office), to have to defend its unconstitutional program in multiple places at one time. {snip}

Largely, this change in tactics has worked. In case after case, courts have stayed their cases. Those nationwide injunctions you may have read about? They are pretty much now moot or dissolved outright. The government staved off a much-needed reckoning.

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Under the program, which was billed as coronavirus relief, non-white farmers with loans from the Department of Agriculture would get their loans forgiven in full, plus an extra 20 percent on top. It doesn’t even matter if the farmer was an actual victim of discrimination or had received previous settlement awards for being a victim of discrimination, or if the farm was devastated by COVID lockdowns. The program makes race the most important characteristic.

In only one case in the country did a judge outright reject the government’s stay request, that of Rob Holman, a Tennessee farmer who is unfortunately ineligible for the program because he is white. {snip}

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“Systemic inequitable treatment” is how the government justifies its race-preference for farm loan forgiveness. {snip}

“Systemic racism” got a hard look when the government was taken to court in June. Courts demand evidence, after all. It’s a different game from, say, Twitter or Congress. You actually have to prove what you say. The bigger the claim, the more powerful evidence the courts expect. If America is, and has always been, racist, it ought to be pretty easy to prove.

When the government flipped its cards over, it had nothing. They offered a mountain of evidence, citing every historical wrong going back centuries. But the judge only went on to agree (understating things a bit) that the government’s facts “are less useful than they may appear to be.” Indeed. The judge then stopped the program across all 50 states.

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