Since before the Declaration of Independence, equality under the law has been a central feature of American identity. The Fourteenth Amendment expanded that constitutional precept to actions by states, not just the federal government. For example, if a state government wants to use race as a factor in pursuing a certain policy, it must do so in the furtherance of a compelling reason—like preventing prison riots—and it must do so in as narrowly tailored a way as possible.
This means, among other things, that race-neutral solutions must be considered and used as much as possible. So if a state were to, say, set race-based quotas for who receives its construction contracts and then claim that no race-neutral alternatives will suffice—without showing why—that would fall far short of the high bar our laws set for race-conscious government action.
Yet that is precisely what Illinois has done.
Illinois’s Department of Transportation and the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority have implemented the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Disadvantaged Business Entity (“DBE”) program, which aims to remedy past discrimination against minority and women contractors by granting competitive benefits to those groups. While there may be a valid government interest in remedying past discrimination, Illinois’s implementation of the program blows through strict constitutional requirements and bases its broad use of racial preferences on studies that either employ highly dubious methodology or are so patently outdated that they provide no legal basis on which to conclude, as constitutionally required, that there remains ongoing, systemic, widespread racial (or gender) discrimination in the public-construction-contracting industry that only the DBE program can rectify.
Read more at http://www.cato.org/blog/illinois-uses-racial-preferences-no-good-reason
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