Former Solicitor General Ken Starr predicted a mandated critical race theory curriculum would be struck down by the Supreme Court after President Joe Biden’s administration established education grant priorities for programs that agree to teach the controversial course load.
“We have to scream from the rafters,” Starr said of the race-based curriculum on The Laura Ingraham Show this week. “They can recommend [the courses], but thank goodness, the United States government cannot control. It can influence, to be sure, through its spending powers because every public school district receives federal funds — I understand that — but to mandate a particular curriculum, I think will be struck down by the Supreme Court.”
Starr, who was the independent counsel who investigated former President Bill Clinton, also said: “I would hope it would be unanimous, but hope springs eternal, but certainly by a supermajority. You’ve gone too far. You’ve exceeded your power in a federal republic [if you mandate the coursework].”
BIDEN WANTS TO USE TAXPAYER FUNDS TO PROMOTE CRITICAL RACE THEORY, IRKING GOP
His comments follow a proposed rule from Biden’s Education Department that would prioritize grants for institutions “that incorporate racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse perspectives into teaching and learning.” The potential rule changes, which were published Monday, referenced the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” a package of essays that argue chattel slavery defines America’s founding, in addition to remarks from controversial scholar Ibram X. Kendi.
“For example, there is growing acknowledgement of the importance of including, in the teaching and learning of our country’s history, both the consequences of slavery, and the significant contributions of Black Americans to our society,” the Education Department wrote. “This acknowledgement is reflected, for example, in the New York Times‘ landmark ‘1619 Project’ and in the resources of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History.”
It continued: “Accordingly, schools across the country are working to incorporate anti-racist practices into teaching and learning. As the scholar Ibram X. Kendi has expressed, ‘[a]n antiracist idea is any idea that suggests the racial groups are equals in all their apparent differences—that there is nothing right or wrong with any racial group. Antiracist ideas argue that racist policies are the cause of racial inequities.'”
Biden, on his first day in office, disbanded former President Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission, which was an attempt to push back on the critical race theory curriculum, which argues that the country and most of its institutions are by definition racist. Critical race theory also insists that white people in society have inherited privileges and the unconscious bias, racism, and oppression implicit in white people have to be remedied by equity and equality programs.
Trump’s commission focused on the United States’s “exceptionalism.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“1776 Commission — comprised of some of America’s most distinguished scholars and historians — has released a report presenting a definitive chronicle of the American founding, a powerful description of the effect the principles of the Declaration of Independence have had on this Nation’s history, and a dispositive rebuttal of reckless ‘re-education’ attempts that seek to reframe American history around the idea that the United States is not an exceptional country but an evil one,” a description of the proposal read.
