Fighting City Hall

For John, BLUF:  Fighting back is expensive, but sometimes necessary.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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The source is Forbes and the author is Mr George Leaf.  The headline is "What Is The Worst Agency In Washington, D.C. Today?".  Mr Leaf settles for the EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.  His example is EEOC v. Kaplan and what he describes as "arrogance and hypocrisy recently [leading] to a scalding rebuke from the Sixth Circuit."

From the Sixth Circuit Court we have Judge Raymond Kethledge excoriating the EEOC.

In this case the EEOC sued the defendants for using the same type of background check that the EEOC itself uses…[T]he EEOC runs credit checks on applicants for 84 of the agency’s 97 positions…For that practice, the EEOC sued Kaplan.

A sort of modern day example of "Do as I say, not as I do".

And, of course there is the question of if modern economic conditions mean that employers are looking for the best "people" when they are hiring, rather than the "right" people.  Would education be a factor here?  That asked, Hispanic men do better in the employment statistics than anyone else, but with less education.  Life is complicated.

There are two lessons to be drawn here.

The first is that bureaucrats tend to be self-perpetuating.  They will find things to do to keep themselves sufficiently busy so as to avoid elimination.♠

The second is that no matter what Congress does in writing a law, once it is launched out into society it is there for bureaucrats and judges to play with as they see fit within their own ethical understandings.♥

Hat tip to the Instapundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Some of these thing last a long time, like the Board of Tea Appeals, which went for 99 years, before being abolished in 1996.
♥  Senator Hubert H Humphrey, the Happy Warrior, assured his colleagues when he proposed the program that it would not lead to bad things.  Often we miss the unintended consequences when we are looking to do good.