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Automakers Face Potentially Massive Race-Discrimination Class-Action Lawsuit Thanks to Obama Administration
“Decisions on which car dealerships to close as part of the auto industry bailout — closures the Obama administration forced on General Motors and Chrysler — were based in part on race and gender, according to a report by Troubled Asset Relief Program Special Inspector General Neal M. Barofsky: ‘Dealerships were retained because they were recently appointed, were key wholesale parts dealers, or were minority- or woman-owned dealerships.’ Thus, to meet numbers forced on them by the Obama administration, General Motors and Chrysler were forced to shutter other, potentially more viable, dealerships. The livelihood of potentially tens of thousands of families was thus eliminated simply because their dealerships were not minority- or woman-owned.”

It’s likely that these race-based closures of auto dealerships violated Supreme Court rulings like Adarand Constructors v. Pena (1995), which say that the federal government can’t use race except to remedy the present effects of its own past discrimination, as I explain below. What this means is that terminated dealers could bring a billion-dollar class-action lawsuit challenging the use of race under 42 USC 1981 and the Constitution, based on cases like Gratz v. Bollinger (2003) (that Supreme Court decision let white college applicants bring a reverse-discrimination class action over a university’s use of race as a factor in admissions, even though it’s seldom clear in such cases exactly which white applicants would have gotten admitted if race hadn’t been used to admit some minorities)....