There's a New Fool-Proof Republican Strategy For Getting Out of Any Policy That Helps Non-White Citizens

DEI, of course, is the latest easily broken code used by Republicans holding critical jobs in the part. Anything that seeks to aid our fellow citizens who happen not to be white are simply called DEI and all the MAGA fools get the message through their bridgework. This is how you cancel an agreement aimed at rebuilding the sewage infrastructure in an impoverished county in Alabama. You declare that agreement was cancelled because it was an "illegal" DEI arrangement because it was aimed at helping Black people, and that's all you need to say. From The Guardian:

The decision could condemn low-income people in Lowndes county, about 40 miles south-west of Montgomery, to indefinitely continue living with no or failing sanitation infrastructure. Throughout recent decades, untreated sewage flowed from some residents’ toilets into their yards because the government has not provided sewer infrastructure, and residents could not afford septic systems. Failing septic systems in the region back up during rain, causing raw sewage to surface in yards, and some residents have dug ditches to try to drain it away from their homes. Local officials did not offer assistance, and instead threatened residents who did not install new systems with prosecution or property seizure.

Then, good ol' Papa Joe came riding into town.

The Biden administration negotiated the settlement with Alabama officials in mid-2023, using federal civil rights rules to resolve an environmental injustice for the first time.

A Biden effort to help black people? This aggression cannot stand, man.

“We will no longer push ‘environmental justice’ as viewed through a distorting, DEI lens,” the US Department of Justice assistant attorney general [for the civil rights division] Harmeet Dhillon said. “President Trump made it clear: Americans deserve a government committed to serving every individual with dignity and respect, and to expending taxpayer resources in accordance with the national interest, not arbitrary criteria.”

Ms. Dhillon who hates voting rights legislation like grim death, is here working on an elaborate paraphrase of the famous quote from Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, allows rich and poor alike to have yards full of shit." I think it needs work. For now, have some Southern fried Calcutta.

Many residents there face serious health risks. An independent study in 2017 found ringworm, which had largely been eradicated in the US. The justice department in 2021 opened an investigation after years of complaints, and as flooding increased with the climate crisis. It found local officials “failed to take meaningful actions to remedy these conditions” and often left residents to fend for themselves. The situation “doesn’t have anything to do with DEI”, said Sarah Stokes, an attorney with Southern Environmental Law Center, which is based in Birmingham and has worked on issues in the region.“It has to do with basic human rights, basic rights to water, basic rights to sanitation, and everybody deserves that—it doesn’t have to do with one group,” Stokes said.

Last February, the Department of Justice—and later the EPA—got out of the environmental justice business which, to be honest, it had not been in for very long. The reason given? Environmental justice was a DEI concern. I hope they all get ringworm, dammit.