The United States of America recently had an election for state and local representatives and one side, the Democratic party, won big in Congressional seats.
With a clear mandate, there is now concern that some things are not just campaign rhetoric. When it comes to Georgia Agriculture Commissioner-elect Katherine Juhan-Arnold, the worry is that she is a benevolent racist and will penalize farmers in defiance of discrimination laws that have existed for over 60 years. Laws that, ironically, had to be created because her political party maintained controlled over Georgia and other southern states for over 100 years - from the end of the Civil War until they lost control of the Georgia legislature in 2002.
It may just be an offhand claim in an interview by someone with no experience. But it has recent precedent, which is why legal groups are alarmed. Twice during the Biden administration, farmers had to take his U.S. Department of Agriculture to court over discrimination. In one case, the president had a federal farm loan forgiveness program and it excluded white farmers. In another, pandemic relief programs for Texas discriminated against white people and Biden lost again.
California has Proposition 65 cancer warning labels on harmless products and ridicule by the entire world because the public believed lawyers who said they would never engage in nuisance lawsuits, and legal groups are concerned this is not just a claim by someone in an interview and will try to enact racist policies in office.
The 14th Amendment was ratified so Democrats who lost the Civil War could not claim black people were not full legal citizens and keep them from voting or suppress their Constitutional rights.(1) The Biden administration argued 'equity' for "socially disadvantaged" people allowed them to engage in picking winners and losers because of the 14th Amendment.(2)
Except benevolent racism is still racism and illegal.
Nonprofits like Southeastern Legal Foundation, which represent people pro bono in cases of government overreach, worry she might actually follow through on her campaign rhetoric. Like the Biden administration, she will eventually lose in court but, groups worry, that process takes years, and discrimination in funding may drive farms out of business. There are 2,100,000 family farms nationwide, only 0.4% are large enough to have an estate tax and 50% of those farms make under $10,000 per year. Like the farm run by Katherine Juhan-Arnold. If a state official or Congress violates the law and engages in racism, they will lose in court, but not before lives are ruined.
It may be that campaign claims are just that. President Barack Obama pledged to 'lift the ban' on human embryonic stem cell research and then only added a few more lines to what his Republican predecessor, President George W. Bush, had funded. Because Congress told him the guardrails were put in place by President Bill Clinton,a fellow Democrat. President Donald Trump promised 'no new wars' but attacked Iran. Reality pushes campaign speeches to the background.
So it may be that Katherine Juhan-Arnold was just engaging in populism to gain votes. It may be she just didn't know any better. Her only agriculture experience is a two-acre boutique farm that made so little money she filed a Form 990-N. Except one year, where she got a donation that put it at $120,000 and she gave herself $36,000 of that. Once she has the job she may learn what many outsiders learn once they are inside government - casual beliefs spoken in interviews can't just become policy, because discrimination will land you in federal prison.
NOTES:
(1) The Democrats who were allowed to maintain control of the south during the reconstruction period and beyond supported segregation and created laws to maintain "the color line", with precedent under Plessy v. Ferguson - a ruling that was ironically made by a conservative Supreme Court. Because SCOTUS accepted state arguments about enumerated powers of the federal government under the Constitution and anything outside those belonged under state control. Enumerated powers was why Democrats felt they had the legal right to secede over slavery years before Plessy and felt it affirmed laws they created to maintain control after they lost the Civil War. Though Democrats didn't use that term for "the color line", their mandates were derided by Republicans as "Jim Crow laws" - the name of a racist minstrel character popular in the southern US.
(2) His attorneys also argued that a man-made pond was a navigable water of the United States and that the CDC could institute rent control. They also lost those in court. There are a lot more instances where there was clearly no elected official steering the policy ship and staffers were just doing whatever they wanted for allies.
