In KCK, Trump deserves credit for busting affirmative action as he promised | Opinion
It is amazing how President Donald Trump gets things done that previous Republican presidents wouldn’t even dare.
His latest achievement is local governments across the country backing away from rules that encourage or require minority- and women-owned businesses to be cut in on local construction projects and services related to other city functions. From now on, contracts will be awarded in the colorblind fashion conservatives have advocated for decades. The latest to back away from race- and gender-based contracting is Wyandotte County Unified Government, which suspended its ordinances last week.
This summer, St. Louis suspended its program and then reinstated it months later. So far, similar programs in Kansas City, Missouri, remain in place, but Philadelphia, San Antonio, Houston and other mostly-Democratic local governments have considered abandoning their programs or taken steps to shutter them.
The moves come after pressure from Trump administration executive orders restricting the use of diversity, equity and inclusion programs and threats to cut off federal money to governments that don’t comply. Among federal cash spigots Trump threatened to turn off were funding for Meals on Wheels, supplemental feeding programs for women and children and homeless funding.
It is too bad that local governments needed Trump administration intimidation to do the right thing when the legal writing was already on the wall.
In 2023’s Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard, the Supreme Court overturned Sandra Day O’Connor’s 2003 decision upholding affirmative action, this time ruling that using race as a factor in college admissions was unconstitutional. The 6-3 ruling was the latest sign that courts were on the way to ending the race-based distribution of benefits like college slots and contracts.
In 1995, the Supreme Court had already limited race-based contracting by local governments to narrowly tailored programs aimed at demonstrable discrimination. Legal observers say even such limited programs would be unlikely to survive Supreme Court scrutiny today. Indeed, the overruled moderate O’Connor was the author of that 1995 contracting decision that used some of the same reasoning.
I very much doubt that judges who think letting kids into Harvard based on race is wrong will think deciding who builds parking lots based on race is OK.
Support for affirmative action has cratered with large majorities of white, Hispanic and Asian Americans in favor of the court’s action and even a slim majority of Black people on the side of the Republican-appointed jurists, according to nonpartisan pollster Gallup.
There’s a reason for that consensus across the color line. Most Americans — of all races and sexes — want to be judged fairly, by the content of their character, one might say, and not by the color of their skin or the shape of their genitalia.
In the Students for Fair Admissions case, Chief Justice John Roberts could have been writing about city and county contracts when he wrote: “Our acceptance of race-based state action has been rare for a reason. ‘Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.’ That principle cannot be overridden except in the most extraordinary case.”
If the Supreme Court doesn’t back race being a factor in deciding who gets to go to the University of North Carolina, it is unlikely that it would back race being used as a factor in who gets to fill potholes on State Line Road. If America is going to progress past a dark history on race, we’re going to have to stop making race so important. That’s the law and it is our highest aspiration. City and county governments shouldn’t need threats from the Trump administration to act like it.
David Mastio is a national columnist for The Kansas City Star and McClatchy.
This story was originally published November 18, 2025 at 4:00 PM with the headline "In KCK, Trump deserves credit for busting affirmative action as he promised | Opinion."
