The Role of Political Narratives and Rhetoric in the Application of the Rule of Law
Political Rhetoric, “Othering,” and the Rule of Law
July 2026
Download This Article (.pdf)
This article examines how political narratives have been reflected in several key court decisions and application of the law throughout history.
The rule of law requires that legal rules be applied consistently, impartially, and without arbitrary discrimination. In constitutional law, that ideal is reflected in the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and in the Fifth Amendment’s due process protections. When political rhetoric and narratives characterize some members of society as “other,” and this rhetoric is reflected in court decisions, the protections afforded by the Constitution are diminished. The adoption of rhetoric by the courts undermines the rule of law both directly and indirectly: directly, by upholding systemic discrimination, segregation, sex discrimination, ancestry-based restrictions, and other unequal regimes; indirectly, by imposing doctrinal barriers that prevent plaintiffs from converting obvious inequality into constitutional relief. This article discusses how political rhetoric has affected application of the rule of law throughout history.
The Construction of “Other”
Although the rule of law is generally thought to be a commitment to democratic principles, neutrality, equal protection, and due process, many court decisions throughout history have failed to apply the rule of law in a manner that provides meaningful equal protection or due process rights for those categorized as “other” (referred to in more recent jurisprudence as “protected classes”).1 To be clear, the concept of “other” has consistently changed and shifted throughout time and across space and is not new.2
Scholars have documented instances in US history when political rhetoric and narratives have deemed certain groups as “other,” particularly when this characterization benefits certain economic classes or a political agenda.3
The concept of “other” has been present since the country’s founding and is evident in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.4 This early establishment of “other” led to interpretations that underpinning American democracy is a political narrative that the founders were different from, and therefore superior to, their imperialistic European counterparts that conquered other parts of North America and much of the non-European world.5 This idea—that the Revolutionary War and the wars that followed were merely between different groups of European colonizers—has been linked by some scholars to later concepts like “manifest destiny,” the “conquering” of the West, and the idea that those who overthrew the “colonialists” were entitled to the land.
The mindset that one group was more deserving of land ownership extended to broader applications of legal rights and protections. Despite the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution after the Civil War, many court decisions reflected and legitimized the unequal application of the rule of law.6
Shortly after the Civil War, the Supreme Court limited the Fourteenth Amendment’s reach. In the Slaughter-House Cases,Privileges or Immunities Clause, and in the Civil Rights Cases,8 it held that the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to governmental action, not to the behavior of private citizens. These cases laid the groundwork for the state action doctrine. Both cases used derogatory language about non-white races and ethnic origin.9 The result was not neutral enforcement of the rule of law, but rather judicial withdrawal from equal protection. This was reinforced in United States v. Cruikshank,10 which involved prosecutions under the Enforcement Act of 1870. After a white mob attacked Black citizens in Louisiana, the Court found that the indictments failed to properly allege violations of any right guaranteed by the Constitution, including equal protection and due process.
Some of the clearest failures of the rule of law are Supreme Court decisions that directly ratified this concept of “other” and the unequal treatment of people and citizens. Plessy v. Ferguson is a key example.
Plessy v. Ferguson and Justice Harlan’s Dissent
In Plessy v. Ferguson,11 the Supreme Court upheld racial segregation under a rationalization for the lack of equal protection known as “separate but equal” and legitimized a racial caste system that denied Black Americans equal protection of the laws. The rhetoric and use of “other” in Plessy was not unusual for its time, as it cited to numerous cases using similar language as justification for its conclusion that the states may exercise their police powers and “act with reference to the established usages, customs, and traditions of the people, and with a view to the promotion of their comfort, and the preservation of the public peace and good order.”12 The Court did not acknowledge the impact of these decisions on the rights of those deemed to be “other.” The Court stated:
A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races—a distinction which is founded in the color of the two races, and which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color—has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races, or reestablish a state of involuntary servitude.13
In reference to the protections to be afforded by the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court stated:
The object of the amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation, in places where they are liable to be brought into contact, do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power.14
The Court’s opinion by Justice Brown includes phrases such as “colored people” and “negro,” and, in reference to “Chinaman,” the Court wrote: “There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country.”15
Justice Harlan’s scathing dissent criticized the characterizations of certain groups as “other” and listed a number of future perils to the rule of law absent equal application to all. He noted how the equal application of the rule of law should be interpreted by the courts, stating that
in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.16
His prescient dissent further noted the lack of equal application of the rule of law based on this concept of “other.” He poignantly noted that
[t]he recent amendments of the Constitution, it was supposed, had eradicated these principles from our institutions. But it seems that we have yet, in some of the States, a dominant race,—a superior class of citizens, which assumes to regulate the enjoyment of civil rights, common to all citizens, upon the basis of race.17
Harlan further predicted:
State enactments, regulating the enjoyment of civil rights, upon the basis of race, and cunningly devised to defeat legitimate results of the war, under the pretense of recognizing equality of rights, can have no other result than to render permanent peace impossible, and to keep alive a conflict of races, the continuance of which must do harm to all concerned.18
He concluded:
We boast of the freedom enjoyed by our people above all other peoples. But it is difficult to reconcile that boast with a state of the law which, practically, puts the brand of servitude and degradation upon a large class of our fellow citizens, our equals before the law. The thin disguise of “equal” accommodations for passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead any one, nor atone for the wrong this day done.19
Although there have been advances, political narratives and rhetoric have limited equal application of the rule of law in instances where the courts and the executive branch have narrowed protections for those characterized as “other.”20 Numerous court decisions adopted the rhetoric of the time, legitimizing unequal protection and enforcement, avoiding neutral decision-making, eroding due process rights, and contributing to arbitrary and capricious standards that disproportionately target groups cast as “other.”21
From Plessy to McCleskey: Neutrality and the Rule of Law in Unequal Protection
The courts continued to uphold the concept of “other” even after landmark decisions granted an element of protection. For example, the Supreme Court finally rejected Plessy’s “separate but equal” standard in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education.22 But the concept of “other” reflected in the 1883 decision in Pace v. Alabama,23 which permitted symmetrical punishment of interracial couples as constitutionally sufficient, endured until 1967, when the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia24 that laws banning marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications violated the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.25 In rejecting both “white supremacy” and the theory of “equal application,” the Court stated:
The clear and central purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to eliminate all official state sources of invidious racial discrimination in the States. . . . There can be no question but that Virginia’s miscegenation statutes rest solely upon distinctions drawn according to race. The statutes proscribe generally accepted conduct if engaged in by members of different races. . . . There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy.26
However, in 1971, the US Supreme Court again found no equal protection violation when a city closed all public pools rather than requiring a municipality to integrate the pools and held that it did not violate equal protection and accepted the alleged facial neutrality, despite the obvious racist context.27
The Court has also narrowed rights or protections in cases involving the rights of women, other racial minorities,28 and LGBTQ communities.29 For example, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization,30 the Court overturned the long-standing legal precedent that had recognized a constitutional right to abortion under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Other cases resulted in decisions that have been criticized as inconsistent with contemporary interpretations of equal protection and due process. In Hirabayashi v. United States, the Court upheld a wartime curfew order applying to “all persons of Japanese ancestry,” concluding that “the curfew order as applied, and at the time it was applied, was within the boundaries of the war power.”31 Hirabayashi represents an especially important example of a rule of law failure: the Court acknowledged equality principles but subordinated them to wartime deference. The Court again approved wartime measures directed at persons of Japanese ancestry in Korematsu v. United States.32 Both cases are widely regarded as failures of the application of the rule of law in equal protection.33
Even where the Court no longer openly approves discrimination, it often limits equality claims through doctrines that require heightened standards for proving constitutional violations. For example, courts require that plaintiffs prove discriminatory intent, not merely discriminatory impact. That rule is most closely associated with Washington v. Davis, which held that racially disparate effects alone do not establish an Equal Protection violation.34 The Court reaffirmed and elaborated that framework in Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp., requiring proof that decision makers acted at least in part because of, not merely in spite of, a law’s unequal effects.35 In City of Mobile v. Bolden, the Court imposed an intent requirement in a voting rights setting, making it harder for racial minorities to challenge voter dilution.36
The same pattern appears in more recent cases involving protected classes. In Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College,37 the Court invalidated race-conscious admissions programs while presenting the decision as enforcing equal treatment. Critics describe this as an anti-classification model of equality that ignores persistent racial hierarchy and disables institutions from pursuing inclusion.
Capital punishment jurisprudence offers one of the clearest examples of the Court recognizing racial disparity while prohibiting broad constitutional relief. In McCleskey v. Kemp,38 the Court considered sophisticated statistical evidence showing significant racial disparities in Georgia’s death penalty system, especially in cases involving white victims. Yet the Court rejected the Equal Protection claim because the defendant could not prove that decision makers in his own case acted with discriminatory purpose.
McCleskey has become a central symbol of constitutional formalism. The Court did not deny the existence of troubling disparities. It held that those disparities were legally insufficient absent individualized proof of intent.39
Across all of these cases, a common pattern emerges. Courts often invoke neutrality, restraint, or procedural regularity while declining to confront how law functions in practice. In Plessy, the failure was direct: the Court openly approved unequal treatment. In cases such as Washington, McCleskey, and Students for Fair Admissions, the failure is often more indirect: the Court adopts doctrines that appear neutral while making it difficult for disadvantaged groups to obtain relief. As a result, the courts preserve their appearance of neutrality while failing to uphold the rule of law or provide any notion of equal justice or due process for those that are deemed to be “other.”
Contemporary Uses of Political Rhetoric
Several key actions by the Trump administration suggest that it is attempting to redefine what it means to apply the rule of law equitably. Executive Order No. 14160, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,”40 reinterpreted the Fourteenth Amendment in a way that would not guarantee citizenship to certain children born in the United States. The executive order provides that the Fourteenth Amendment excludes from birthright citizenship “persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’”41 In its filings in Trump v. Barbara,42 the Department of Justice cited writings by Alexander Porter Morse,43 a Confederate officer and a Louisiana attorney who advocated for a narrow interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause. Morse defended racial segregation in Plessy44 and supported voting restrictions based on racial stereotypes and bans on interracial marriage.45
Additionally, the civil rights division of the Department of Justice has shifted from enforcing civil rights and equal protection, which has been its focus since the 1950s, to pursuing cases against those politically opposed to the Trump administration, such as colleges and universities, student protesters, Democratic state and local officials, the Ivy League, and so-called “liberal cities.” The civil rights division has followed political priorities in the past, but current and former department officials say that it now seeks to serve the president’s agenda “in a more vigorous way.”46
The Trump administration is also attempting to eliminate any remaining vestiges of the disparate impact theory. Executive Order 14281, titled “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,”47 refers to the disparate impact theory as a “pernicious movement” that is “contrary to equal protection under the law” and that “imperils the effectiveness of the civil rights laws by mandating, rather than proscribing, discrimination.”48 The president also revoked a 60-year-old order that prohibited federal contractors from discriminating in employment covered by federal contractors.49 The current administration has threatened federal employees with “adverse consequences” if such employees fail to report on other employees who refuse its orders to purge diversity, equity, and inclusion from all federal agencies.50 Further, arguing that diversity programs “resulted in shameful discrimination,”51 the administration said it would not tolerate efforts to “disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language.”52 Though equality is used as justification, these efforts instead are likely to reverse previous laws that worked to eliminate systemic inequities.
Conclusion
Political rhetoric matters because it shapes the categories through which courts, officials, and the public understand danger, innocence, fitness, and belonging. Once some groups are cast as outsiders, legal doctrines that claim neutrality may become instruments for preserving unequal treatment rather than correcting it.
If the rule of law is to have meaning, courts must be willing to confront not only explicit discrimination, but also legal structures that predictably deny equal protection and due process to protected classes in practice based upon concepts of “other” and other political narratives.
Explore This Issue
A Fighter for Justice With a Vision for the Bar
President’s Message
By CBA staff
Pro Bono Adventures
Bar News Highlight
Related Topics
Notes
citation Brimah, “The Role of Political Narratives and Rhetoric in the Application of the Rule of Law: Political Rhetoric, “Othering,” and the Rule of Law,” 55 Colo. Law. 58 (July 2026), https://cl.cobar.org/features/the-role-of-political-narratives-and-rhetoric-in-the-application-of-the-rule-of-law.
1. The Supreme Court first used the phrase “prejudice against discrete and insular minorities” in United States v. Carolene Prods. Co., 304 U.S. 144, 152 n.4 (1938).
2. For example, the Quebec Act of 1774 was among the grievances in the Declaration of Independence and opposed by the colonists because it gave land to Catholics, who were labeled as “other” in opposition to the Protestants.
3. For the historical use of the phrase “make America great again” and its connection to characterizing certain groups as “other” both pre- and during Jim Crow, see “‘This Historian Dug Up the Hidden History of ‘Amateur Blackface’ in America,” NPR (Mar. 9, 2026), https://www.npr.org/2026/03/09/nx-s1-5738478/darkology-blackface-rhae-lynn-barnes.
4. In listing the grievances against King George III, the Declaration of Independence states, “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” The Declaration of Independence, paras. 2, 29, 1 Stat. 1, 1–3 (1776) (emphasis added). The Constitution, in the clause known as the Three-Fifths Clause, counted enslaved persons as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation and direct taxation. US Const. art. I, § 2, cl. 3. The Slave Trade Clause specifically permitted the importation of enslaved persons before 1808. US Const. art. I, § 9, cl. 1. The Constitution required persons “held to Service or Labour” who escaped into another state to be returned. US Const. art. IV, § 2, cl. 3. The Federalist Papers also addressed the issue of slavery, stating “that [slaves] partake of both these qualities; being considered by our laws, in some respects, as persons, and in other respects, as property. . . . The federal Constitution, therefore, decides with great propriety on the case of our slaves, when it views them in the mixed character of persons and of property.” The Federalist No. 54 at 336–41 (James Madison) (Clinton Rossiter ed., 1961). The Federalist Nos. 42 and 43 also address issues related to slaves.
5. In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville observed, “The European is to the other races of mankind what man himself is to the lower animals; he makes them subservient to his use, and when he cannot subdue, he destroys them.” de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, pt. 2, ch. 10. (Gosselin 1835). He also noted that slavery was the central contradiction in American democracy: “The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future existence of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory.” Id. He observed that American democracy existed alongside a racial hierarchy in which “the white man, the European” appeared “first in enlightenment, in power, and in happiness,” while “below him appear the Negro and the Indian.” Id. He further described European domination by stating that “when he cannot subdue, he destroys them,” underscoring the extent to which American democracy developed through the subordination of racialized others. Id.
6. The Supreme Court issued a series of decisions that substantially narrowed, limited, or undermined enforcement of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Regarding the Thirteenth Amendment, see Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883) (held that the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery but did not authorize Congress to prohibit private racial discrimination in public accommodations as a “badge or incident” of slavery); Hodges v. United States, 203 U.S. 1 (1906) (reversed federal convictions of white defendants who allegedly used threats to drive Black workers from employment, holding that Congress lacked Thirteenth Amendment power to punish such private racial interference with labor contracts); and Corrigan v. Buckley, 271 U.S. 323 (1926) (rejected federal constitutional challenges to racially restrictive covenants in the District of Columbia, declining to treat private racial exclusion in property arrangements as barred by the Thirteenth Amendment). The narrow approach in Hodges was repudiated by Jones v. Mayer, 392 U.S. 409 (1968), which recognized broader congressional power under the Thirteenth Amendment to eliminate badges and incidents of slavery in private housing discrimination. Regarding the Fourteenth Amendment, see Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873) (Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause could no longer be used as a national civil rights guarantee); United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875) (failed to enforce federal prosecution of private racial violence by holding that the Fourteenth Amendment restrains state action, not purely private action); United States v. Harris, 106 U.S. 629 (1883) (invalidated part of the Ku Klux Klan Act because Congress could not use the Fourteenth Amendment to punish private conspiracies absent state action); Pace v. Alabama, 106 U.S. 583 (1883) (upheld harsher criminal punishment for interracial sexual relationships); Berea College v. Kentucky, 211 U.S. 45 (1908) (upheld Kentucky’s power to prohibit a state-chartered private college from educating Black and white students together); and Corrigan v. Buckley, 271 U.S. 323 (1926) (treated racially restrictive covenants as private agreements not prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment, helping preserve residential segregation until Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948), which limited judicial enforcement of such covenants). Regarding the Fifteenth Amendment, see Williams v. Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213 (1898) (upheld Mississippi’s facially race-neutral voter registration scheme, including literacy and understanding requirements, despite its discriminatory design and effect); Giles v. Harris, 189 U.S. 475 (1903) (refused effective federal equitable relief to Black citizens challenging Alabama’s disfranchising voter registration system); and James v. Bowman, 190 U.S. 127 (1903) (held that Congress could not use the Fifteenth Amendment to punish purely private interference with voting rights, limiting federal enforcement absent state action).
7. Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36.
8. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 546 (1896) (citing Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3).
9. “Undoubtedly while negro slavery alone was in the mind of the Congress which proposed the thirteenth article, it forbids any other kind of slavery, now or hereafter. If Mexican peonage or the Chinese coolie labor system shall develop slavery of the Mexican or Chinese race within our territory, this amendment may safely be trusted to make it void.” Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36, 72.
10. United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875).
11. Plessy, 163 U.S. 537.
12. Id. at 550.
13. Id. at 543.
14. Id. at 544.
15. Id. at 561.
16. Id. at 559.
17. Id. at 560.
18. Id. at 560–61.
19. Id. at 562.
20. The exclusion of “others” by the executive branch, at the federal, state, and local levels, has often been upheld by the judicial branch. See, e.g., Mayor of New York v. Miln, 36 U.S. 102 (1837) (upholding the regulation of the admission of “foreign paupers”), and Trump v. Hawaii, 585 U.S. 667 (2018) (upholding ban prohibiting individuals from eight predominately Muslim countries from entering the United States).
21. See, e.g., Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1856) (held that persons of African descent could not be US citizens for purposes of federal diversity jurisdiction and invalidating congressional restrictions on slavery in the territories); Bradwell v. Illinois, 83 U.S. 130 (1872) (rejected a Fourteenth Amendment challenge to Illinois’s refusal to admit a woman to the practice of law); Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1874) (held that women’s citizenship did not itself confer a constitutional right to vote); Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (struck down portions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 on the ground that Congress lacked Fourteenth Amendment authority to regulate private racial discrimination in public accommodations); Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944) (upheld the wartime exclusion order that led to the removal of Japanese Americans to internment camps); Lassiter v. Northampton Cnty. Bd. of Elections, 360 U.S. 45 (1959) (held that literacy tests for voter registration were constitutional and not merely a device to make racial discrimination easy); Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986) (rejected a substantive due process challenge to Georgia’s criminal prohibition on same-sex intimate conduct); Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 551 U.S. 701 (2007) (invalidated race-conscious public school assignment plans adopted to promote racial integration); Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013) (invalidated the Voting Rights Act’s coverage formula); Louisiana v. Callais, 608 U.S. ___ (2026) (narrowed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act).
22. Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
23. Pace v. Alabama, 106 U.S. 583 (1883).
24. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967).
25. Id. at 2.
26. Id. at 10–12.
27. Palmer v. Thompson, 403 U.S. 217 (1971).
28. Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81 (1943).
29. In United States v. Skrmetti, 605 U.S.495 (2025), the Court declined to apply heightened scrutiny to restrictions affecting transgender minors and did not recognize transgender status as a suspect or quasi-suspect class.
30. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org., 597 U.S. 215 (2022).
31. Hirabayashi, 320 U.S. at 83, 102.
32. Korematsu, 323 U.S. 214.
33. “Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and—to be clear—’has no place in law under the Constitution.’” Trump v. Hawaii, 585 U.S. 667, 710 (quoting Korematsu, 323 U.S. at 248 (Jackson, J., dissenting)). See also Civil Liberties Act of 1988, Pub. L. No. 100-383, § 2(a), 102 Stat. 903, 903–04. Specifically, Section 2(a) of the Act contains the Statement of the Congress, which formally recognizes that a grave injustice was done to these individuals through evacuation, relocation, and internment actions that were carried out without adequate security reasons and were motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.
34. Washington v. Davis, 426 U.S. 229 (1976).
35. Vill. of Arlington Heights v. Metro. Hous. Dev. Corp., 429 U.S. 252 (1977).
36. City of Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U.S. 55 (1980).
37. Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harv. Coll., 600 U.S. 181 (2023).
38. McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1987).
39. See also Peña-Rodriguez v. Colorado, 580 U.S. 206 (2017) (held that where a juror makes a clear statement indicating that racial bias was a significant motivating factor in the verdict, the Sixth Amendment requires courts to consider evidence of that statement despite ordinary no-impeachment rules protecting jury deliberations).
40. Exec. Order No. 14160, Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship, 90 Fed. Reg. 8,449 (Jan. 20, 2025) (issued by President Trump).
41. Id.
42. Trump v. Barbara, 146 S.Ct. 879 (2025).
43. Brief of Chinese American Legal Defense Alliance as Amicus Curiae in Support of Respondents 22–24, id., https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/25/25-365/397261/20260225125920004_25-365%20Brief.pdf.
44. Id. at 21.
45. Id.at 22–23.
46. Thrush, “Justice Dept.’s Civil Rights Division Pushes Trump’s Culture War Agenda,” N.Y. Times (Apr. 18, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/18/us/politics/trump-doj-civil-rights.html.
47. Exec. Order No. 14281, Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy, 90 FR 17,537 (Apr. 28, 2025) (issued by President Trump).
48. Id.
49. Exec. Order No. 11246, Equal Employment Opportunity, 30 Fed. Reg. 12,319 (Sept. 24, 1965) (issued by President Lyndon B. Johnson), revoked by Exec. Order No. 14173, § 3, 90 Fed. Reg. 8,633, 8,634 (Jan. 31, 2025) (issued by President Trump).
50. Green and Aleaziz, “Trump Administration Escalates D.E.I. Crackdown in Latest Threat to Federal Workers,” N.Y. Times (updated Jan. 25, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/us/politics/trump-order-discrimination-federal-hiring.html.
51. Id.
52. Id.