Restoring equal protection and Republicans to propose healthcare reform (12-10-2025--Hour3)

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to vpeteclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. Speaking of the Supreme Court, but actually this is actually the best of Supreme Court at all. Well, but it is kind of because I expect this is going to get litigated too. The Justice Department issued a final rule updating its regulations under Title VI. Some people call it Title six of the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four. This rule. This is according to the Justice Department Press Relief Here. The rule ensures that the federal civil rights laws are firmly grounded in the principle of equal treatment under the law. I am as shocked as you. What is it going to do? The rule change? The rule update eliminates disparate impact liability. Good good. I have talked about this disparate impact for all sorts of cases over the years, I mean, just for so long. This is basically where you don't actually have to prove that there was any kind of discrimination intended by somebody or some company or drawing legislative maps for example. This disparate impact idea has permeated so much of gov CO, even the private sector. I've seen people that correlate and they argue that its causation is that ever since this disparate impact liability became the norm or was passed or was interpreted into existence, I think it was like seventy one or seventy two, nineteen seventy one or seventy two timeframe for the last fifty years. Ever since then, productivity has slowed. And I've seen the charts. Now, I don't know, I'm not an economist. I just I've seen the argument being made, and it's kind of persuasive. Why. Because companies became so worried about being sued and not being able to defend themselves that they dialed back on hiring based on merit and they started trying to check boxes, and in doing so, they lost productivity because they were no longer trying to get the best people, the best candidates for the job. They were trying to avoid lawsuits that they would be unable to defend themselves against, and not because they actually discriminated. It was because the disparate impact analysis. What is the disparate impact analysis. It is to say, if you have, like, let's say you're hiring for firefighters, for example, and you want your firefighters to be able to drag a two hundred and fifty pound sack of weights in order to mimic, you know, dragging a body out of a burning fire. And so you put in the criteria for the job description that you have to be able to drag two hundred and fifty pounds, and then the people who go through the fire academy who are able to do that, they get hired. The people who can't drag the two fifty they don't get hired. They don't make it through. And then you look at the graduating class from the academy and it's all men. That would indicate that, according to disparate impact analysis, that would indicate that you are discriminating against women. We're looking at the outcome and we're saying, ugh, this outcome shows that only guys have the job. Well, that means that you're discriminating against women, even though there is a real interest in setting up the criteria to drag two hundred and fifty pounds. That's one example. Like I said, this is all over the place. This idea, this disparate impact idea, permeates all sorts of rules and issues and hiring systems and such. Back to the DOJ's press release quote from Attorney General Pam Bondi, for decades, the Justice Department has used disparate impact liability to undermine the constitutional principle that all Americans must be treated equally under the law. No longer, this Department of Justice is eliminating its regulations that for far too long required recipients of federal funding to make decisions based on race. This is another example. Is racial outcomes, ethnic outcomes, gender outcomes. Right, anything that you can point to that says, oh, there's a disproportionate number of people of a certain ethnic, racial, or gender class that end up getting the job, getting a contract or something. If you can, if you can decipher any kind of disproportionality, then that's de facto proof of an intent, even though there's no evidence of intent to discriminate. The prior disparate impact regulations encouraged people to file lawsuits challenging racially neutral policies without any evidence of intentional discrimination. That's according to the Assistant Attorney General Harmey Dillon, she oversees the DOJ's Civil Rights Division. She says, our rejection of this theory will restore true equality under the law by requiring proof of actual discrimination rather than enforcing race or sex based quotas or assumptions. This is the same argument, this disparate impact analysis. It's the same thinking that is always wrapped up in the redistricting lawsuits. Right, North Carolina was ground zero for this kind of analysis. We saw it repeatedly, which was the North Carolina Republicans draw the maps, they get sued. They're accused of drawing racially discriminatory maps. Why well, because well Democrats, it's the suit till blues strategy. But they say, oh, you moved around too many black voters, and so the court says you can't use any kind of racial data. So the Republicans say, fine, we'll use partisan data. Only they use partisan data. And then the lawsuits come again and they're like, you're still using racial data, and the Republicans are like, we are not. We are strictly using Republican and Democrat partisan registration data and voter trends. But because the outcome looks the same, because ninety percent plus of black voters vote Democrat, then you look at the outcome and the outcome looks discriminatory even though there's no intent to racially discriminate. And so it's like you don't even have to prove intent, which is at odds with the point of the Civil Rights Act. You're not supposed to discriminate based on race, but by doing disparate impact analysis, it forces you to discriminate based on race, because now you're looking at people's race and you're saying, we don't have enough of a certain minority or a certain gender or whatever. We don't have enough of them in order to avoid a lawsuit, so let's hire more of them. Which is discrimination. You know. Stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life, and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video started in nineteen ninety seven, and Minhill, North Carolina. It was the first company to provide this valuable service, converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows, videos and albums. The trusted, talented and dedicated team at Creative Video will go over all of the details with you to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them off in person or mail them. They'll be ready in a week or two. Memorial videos for your loved ones, videos for rehearsal, dinners, weddings, graduations, Christmas, family vacations, birthdays, or just your family stories, all told through images. That's what your photos and videos are. They are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you, and they will tell others to come who you are. Visit creative video dot com. Let me jump over and chat with Corey. Welcome to the show. Corey. Hey you sweet, thank you for taking my car? Sure what's going on? Spost? I gave you your screen or my message here. I'm a worker at Walmart and I know a lot of ladies are probably gonna be upset with but it irritates myself that we hire people, tell them the qualifications to get the job, then when they get the job. They can't lift a tire. They can't lift a battery. Now I got to do three to four times for work at the same PASDM. Yeah, yeah, they get you. Hey, Corey, come lift this tire for me. I can't lift it. But they were Yeah. I mean theoretically they're supposed to be able to lift you know, fifty pounds or something unassisted. Right, yes, sir, Yeah, But as soon as I say something, oh, Corey, that's the squarem in eight, I'm like, what, so it's all right to work me to my grave. Yeah. No. And the reason why is that they're afraid of being sued by somebody who would say, oh, well, look, you know, you're not hiring women in the automotive department I'm assuming is where you are that they're not. They're not, you know, they're not hiring enough females in that department. Therefore that's the facto proof of discrimination. And so in order to avoid those lawsuits, they hire people without any kind of adherence to the criteria. I understand it, and I think we just as society, we need to be honest with each other. Men can't do everything women do. Women can't do everything men do. And let's just be honest what I said. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa whoa? Are you suggesting that men and women might be different somehow? Oh yes, sir, I'm going to go out on our huge lamb with that, right. Well, go ahead and starting off the limb. That's right, man, that might get you canceled, Corey. I appreciate the call, sir, Thanks. So much, Thank you, sir. All right, take it easy. Yeah, I mean, this is the problem. It is discrimination and I have since abandoned or long since abandoned, the quote unquote reverse discrimination phrase, because there is no such thing as reverse discrimination. It's all just discrimination, that's what it is. It's and recognizing that somebody like a female working in a warehouse may not be able to lift. And that doesn't mean all women hashtag not all women. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that no woman could lift the same amount of weight as a man. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that if a woman applies for the warehouse gig and she can lift all of the same weight requirements that a guy can lift, then she should get the job too. Now, if you're not giving her the job because she's a woman, Like, that's pretty stupid. I mean, you're trying to hire somebody that can lift the weight. Doesn't matter who can lift the weight, right, that's all that should matter. That's your criteria. But if you set a criteria out and then you're not following it in order to hire people, so you're checking boxes so you don't get sued, that means you're discriminating against people. You're discriminating against other people that would otherwise have gotten the job because they can lift the weight. Back to the DOJ press release here, for over fifty years, this is a statement from the chief of Staff and supervisory official for the Office of Legal Policy. Try to put that on a business card, Nicholas Shilling quote. For over fifty years, the prior disparate Impact rule fostered the very thing that the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four prohibited, which is the discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin. With today's rule, the Department reaffirms Congress's commitment to measure all Americans by merit. Congress enacted Title six as part of the landmark Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four. It prohibits discriminating on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities that get federal financial assistance. In nineteen seventy three, the federal government added to the law a new rule. Say here's the problem. This is what I was talking about in the last hour with Congress delegating this rule making authority to these quote independent agencies or government departments, and it lets them make up the rules. And when this was not something. That Congress passed, Congress didn't say, hey, we're going to do quotas. They didn't say that. I mean, they did with maybe affirmative action, but they didn't do that with the Civil Rights Act. They simply said you cannot discriminate based on race, color, or national origin. And so they created this disparate impact rule that was not part of the law, and it refers to the concept of imposing liabilities on a federal fund recipient only because there may be different outcomes for different people, even when there is no proof that the different outcomes were due to prejudice or due to an intent to discriminate. Title six has and will continue to prohibit intentional discrimination. Now, look, you can look at the outcomes and say, Wow, this company isn't hiring any isn't hiring any Hispanics, isn't hiring any blacks, isn't hiring any whites. It's not hiring you know one demographic of people. You can use that as evidence, but that isn't in and of itself proof of discrimination. You've got to have something else to rebut the or to prop up your argument, right, to buttress your argument. The Department's view, the new rule ensures that recipients of federal funding will be judged on their actual content, not on statistical outcomes or circumstances beyond their control. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina. Just a quick drive up the mountain and Cabins of Asheville is your connection. Whether you're celebrating an anniversary, a honeymoon, maybe you want to plan a memorable proposal, or get family and friends together for a big old reunion, Cabins of Asheville has the ideal spot for you where you can reconnect with your loved ones and the things that truly matter, nestled within the breath taking fourteen thousand acres of the Pisga National Forest. Their cabins offer a serene escape in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Centrally located between Ashville and the entrance of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. It's the perfect balance of seclusion and proximity to all the local attractions with hot tubs, fireplaces, air conditioning, smart TVs, Wi Fi grills, outdoor tables and your own private covered porch. Choose from thirteen cabins, cottages, two villas and a great lodge with eleven king sized bedrooms. Cabins of Ashville has the ideal spot for you for any occasion, and they have pet friendly accommodations. Call her text eight two eight three six seven seventy sixty eight or check out all there is to offer at Cabins Offashville dot com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. On Twitter message from Russ with a feel good disparate impact story. A while back, I saw a story about a former marine twenty five year fireman whose daughter wanted to join the fire department. He would not give her his blessing until she could drag and carry him six foot two, two hundred and thirty five pounds. She had to drag him one hundred yards and then he would give her his blessing. It took her almost a year to build up her strength and endurance to do it, but she did and Dad could not have been more proud. A good story, Russ, thank you. Uh let me see here, if there's a David on the text line says reverse discrimination should better be called unexpected discrimination. That's the thing. You don't need any adjectives or qualifiers. It's just discrimination, that's all it is. It's the same thing. Seven oh four numbers says Corey was the best caller I've ever heard on your show. Well, well, as long as you said it's not the best thing anyone's ever said on my show, then that's fine. It's the best caller. That removes me from the contest. So all right, he was great. Corey was great. Okay. So the Daily Caller News Foundation reporting that Senate Republican leadership announced that they will bring their own healthcare proposal to a floor vote. This will run in parallel with the Democrats push for an extension of the enhanced Obamacare subsidies. Okay, so this was part of the deal with the Schumer shut down in order to get the government reopened, the Senate promised Senate Republicans promised Senate Democrats that they will let the Democrats bring forward their proposal. That's what the Democrats claim to have one in order to reopen the government. And most people watching said, well, they offered you that like a month ago. Why didn't you take it a month ago? Other people said, well, why would you have shut down the government for that right? The Senate is scheduled to vote tomorrow on the Democrats proposal, which is a three year extension of the boosted subsidies right the increase the enhanced subsidies to Obamacare Democrats had secured as part of the deal that ended the record breaking government and shutdown for the promise to vote on these subsidies. That was what they wanted in order to end the deal which they were offered, but they rejected for weeks and weeks and weeks until after the No Kings rallies, and then after the election, the November election, and then after all of that and they didn't need it any more, They didn't need the shutdown anymore for political sloganeering and such. Then they agreed to the thing that the Republican said they could already do. Following internal debate over several Republican health care proposals and whether to schedule a side by side vote, GOP senators coalesced around a health savings account based approach. All right, So what the Republican plan. It's called the Healthcare Freedom for Patients Act. Under the plan, between one thousand to fifteen hundred dollars will be depot posited into hsas. The hsas would be paired up with the bronze plans on the Obamacare Exchange. And if you've never been over there, they have a Bronze, a Silver, and a gold plan. But everybody who's offering the plans they all have to offer the same coverages, which you have to offer the same coverages. There's really not any kind of unique value proposition going on there. You don't have a unique position against competitors because you have to offer the same coverages, and like, you know, fifty year old dudes have to carry insurance coverage for pregnancy, which is kind of weird, you know. So the hsas would be seeded with one thousand to fifteen hundred dollars. They would be tied to the bronze plans or catastrophic plans on the Affordable Care Act exchanges. As I read this, this is not for private plans, So if you have an HSA through your employer, for example, you're not getting this subsidy. It's just for people on the exchanges. The idea of redirecting federal subsidies from insurance companies directly to individuals has the backing of the President, so that's going to be the sales pitch here from Republicans. They're not dismantling Obamacare. They're simply saying we are going to divert the money away from insurance companies and send it directly to the individual, sort of like a voucher, if you will, but not really. It's an individual health savings account, so that's yours. You get to make the choices on it. So I'm sure this will get all sorts of opposition because Democrats are pro choice on only one thing. They don't like school choice, which is weird because the voucher. We already do this with. Medicare, like you get to go to your own doctors basically, and it's essentially a voucher system. But for some reason. They're okay with that, but they're not okay with school vouchers. But I digress. Trump has warned that extending the Obamacare subsidies like Democrats want would hand insurance companies a huge payday at the expense of the American people, which, of course it does. He is correct about that. Democrats, meanwhile, are pressing ahead with their three year extension of these soon to expire subsidies, despite the near certainty that the measure is not going to have the sixty votes to pass in the Senate. So a walk down memory lane real quick is that these enhanced subsidies were enacted by Democrats back in twenty twenty one. It did not get any Republican support. And what the enhanced subsidies did was it removed the cap for upper income people. It removed the cap and increased the subsidy amounts, dropping premiums to zero dollars for many enrollees. They're not paying anything. These are set to expire by the Democrat's own hand. They wrote this law, got no Republicans to support it. They're the ones that put this thing in place and put a sunset on it. The end of twenty twenty five. A clean three year extension with no eligibility changes will cost about three hundred and fifty billion dollars to the national debt over the next decade. Republicans say the Democrats plan, which goes even further than the one year extension that they had actually demanded during the shutdown, is primarily a political maneuver, because yes, of course it is. Obviously it is right. They wanted one year extension. Now they're asking for a three year extension, and they know it's not going to pass, but they don't care. They want the issue so they can say Republicans stopped you from getting your premiums zero dollar premiums. They want to kill you. It's the same line of attack Democrats have employed for forty years. It's so tiresome, all right. If you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events, and I know you do too, And you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources. Why, Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an app and it's a website, and it combines news from around the world in one place so you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check dot ground, dot news slash pete. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself check dot ground, dot news slash pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. Again from the Daily Caller News Foundation, this piece about the Republicans with their proposal for the Healthcare Freedom for Patients Act just affecting apparently people that are on the Affordable Care Act plans in the exchanges. They're going to propose one thousand to fifteen hundred dollars be deposited into hsas that are paired with the Bronze or Catastrophic plans on the exchanges. Now Concerns about fraud are also fueling the Republican resistance to the extension of these subsidies, because you'll never guess what happened when Democrats made this stuff quote free. There's a thing called the woodwork effect. We've seen it happen every time they expand Medicaid, same thing in North Carolina, every state. Whenever you make something quote free, you always end up with people coming out of the woodwork in greater numbers than you projected. And so you think you're going to have five hundred thousand new enrollees to a program, but it turns out to be six hundred and fifty thousand people. Oh my gosh, we didn't expect that. But you also end up getting fraud. Research has now shown that fraud is especially widespread among the zero premium plans. Critics say this creates opportunities. The zero premium plans create opportunities for bad actors to enroll people unwillingly, unknowingly, unsuspecting individuals get enrolled without their knowledge. And you can imagine why that might be lucrative. Right If you have a firm, a company, and your job or nonprofit, and your job is to help people guide them through the enrollment process, and you get a certain amount of money from the federal government by enrolling people and helping them out. There's an incentive there to get a lot of people enrolled in the government program. And so you know, you find some people they don't have insurance, or you just have their information somehow, and you can just enroll a bunch of people on the program. So you can get your slice. In fact, they have found cases like this is a big One of the big ones was out of Florida. I'm gonna go in depth more on this fraud stuff because there's a whole GAO report that came out on it. The Government Accountability Office. They recently uncovered rampant fraud and systemic failures in the ACA marketplace, including fictitious identities, in valid social Security numbers, and even dead people who were approved for the taxpayer funded subsidies. John Thune, Senate leader Republican, said this program desperately needs to be reformed. The Democrats have decided we're not going to do anything to reform it, and so we'll see where the votes are on Thursday. Senate Democratic leadership has already dismissed the Republican plan. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said their phony proposal is dead on arrival. Their bill is junk insurance. It's been repudiated in the past. The American people will repudiated once again, right, Okay, So really going after the merits of the proposal there. I see, just. Really digging deep into the policy wonkery in order to make that argument over in the House, because remember this is all just on the Senate side. Over in the House. Senate or sorry, the Speaker, Mike Johnson said that Republicans will vote on a healthcare proposal by the end of December, and we'll continue working on healthcare legislation into early twenty twenty six. Well, time is running out, guys. If the elections that we have seen are in fact any indication of the way the midterms are going to go, you do not have a lot of time if you are going to try to repeal Obamacare to fix the health care industry. Have you seen your premiums? Our premiums went through the roof for twenty twenty six. There was a piece over at PJ Media by Jamie Wilson headlined they broke America and blamed Trump and Wilson goes through a series of examples here, but the pattern is the same. You create a disaster Obamacare, deny responsibility, and then shove the wreckage at Trump's feet. For example, the economic fire that they lit with the stacks of cash right, printing money, printing money, money was hurled into green energy fantasies that went insolvent almost instantly. More money was shoveled into Ukraine. COVID era payments continued long after COVID ended. Inflation sword groceries doubled, housing prices became unrecognizable, entered, she builds, crushed families, and now that inflation is starting to come down, but it doesn't We're never going back to the pre Biden prices. Inflation just persists. So it's coming down, yes, slowly, yes, but now Democrats are blaming Trump for not reversing the damage. The only way you're going to reverse that is with like a massive recession, which I don't think we want. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.