If you want to see a prime example of the lawlessness of the Civil Rights Division under the Merrick Garland-run Justice Department, look no further than the “Consent Decree” with Cobb County, Georgia, that DOJ tried to sneak through before the Trump administration took over.

The consent decree aimed to institutionalize racial discrimination in the hiring practices of, and promotions within, the local government’s fire department.

Fortunately for the interests of justice and the residents of Cobb County who depend on having competent firefighters to protect them, a federal judge in the Northern District of Georgia, William M. Ray, stopped this abusive maneuver just four days before common sense returned to the federal government and the de-weaponization of the In-Justice Department began. Ray denied the joint motion filed by DOJ and Cobb County to approve the proposed consent decree.

In doing so, the judge stopped a pernicious conspiracy.

Consent decrees are essentially agreements between the two parties in a lawsuit to settle the litigation. They must be approved by the judge overseeing the case, and judges rarely disapprove of such a settlement. Judges usually jump at the opportunity to get a case off their dockets, thereby reducing their workload. All too often, they just rubber stamp whatever the parties have agreed to.

But that didn’t happen with Ray, who served on the Georgia Court of Appeals before being appointed by President Donald Trump in 2018 to be a federal judge. Cobb County residents needing fire protection should be thankful for that.

Cobb County is the third-largest county in Georgia by population and is just north of metropolitan Atlanta. Cobb County used to be a strongly Republican county politically, but is now a majority Democrat county, with Democrats controlling three of the five county commission seats at the end of 2024.

As Ray explains in his order of Jan. 16, 2025, the Justice Department sued Cobb County in May 2024. The DOJ claimed that the fire department was engaged in racial discrimination for using “a written examination and a credit check to screen and select candidates for firefighter positions.” The fire department stopped using the credit check after 2020. But the DOJ still sued, claiming that the use of the exam and the prior credit check had an “impermissible disparate impact on African-American candidates.”

The political Left has long attacked the use of credit checks by employers, claiming they are discriminatory without offering any evidence to support such claims. They are a rational, reasonable background check for employers to avoid exposing themselves to potential liability for financial and other misbehavior by employees. Objective written examinations intended to test the competence of applicants in their field have also long been peremptorily attacked even when there is no evidence of intentional discrimination in the design of those tests that would justify those attacks.  

That is the situation here. The Justice Department never produced one iota of evidence that Cobb County’s use of an examination and a credit check was discriminatory under the applicable federal statute, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As the judge says, the issue of “whether the written examinations or credit inquiries at issue were helpful or necessary to some degree in determining the applicant’s fitness for firefighter positions” was never litigated. 

Ray cites the applicable Supreme Court precedent from 2009 in an almost identical case involving firefighters in New Haven, Connecticut, Ricci v. DeStefano. In that case, the court ruled against the city after it discarded the use of a written test for promotions simply because white candidates outperformed black candidates on the test. The court held that before engaging in intentional discrimination to remedy an “unintentional disparate impact,” an employer must have a “strong basis in evidence” to believe it will be liable if it fails to engage in race-conscious, discriminatory hiring or promotions.

Ray applied this precedent even though he mentioned in a footnote that “one might wonder if such decisions remain the prevailing view of the current Justices.” He noted that there is “scholarly debate whether it is constitutional for federal law to prohibit practices or policies which are race neutral on their face if there is a disparate impact, especially when there was no discriminatory intent.”

According to the judge, he was being asked to approve Cobb County agreeing to “intentionally discriminate in the future for the asserted purpose of remedying an alleged disparate impact, without a clear and tested evidentiary basis or good-faith belief” that such a remedy is warranted. In fact, this consent decree would have required the county to establish 16 “priority” positions for African-American hires, with retroactive seniority, and $750,000 in “monetary relief to be distributed among eligible African-American claimants.”

In other words, Cobb County would have to set up a quota hiring system for firefighters based on race without being able to do any testing to ensure that the employees it hires are, in fact, competent to be firefighters. Cobb County would be implementing a discriminatory spoils system that would be a “form of intentional discrimination based on race” to resolve an unproven, untried claim.

According to Ray, he was being asked to approve the terms of an agreement that would constitute a violation of the “foundational principle of Title VII” that “bars employers from taking any adverse action” due to race.

Ray would have none of it. As he said in his conclusion, “the Court will not approve of an agreement which may violate the rights of others without a sufficient evidentiary basis to show that such race-based action is warranted.”

One has to wonder why Cobb County would agree to such a settlement. Is it because the county commission is now controlled by Democrats, and they wanted to accommodate a Democratic administration? Their defense was so lackadaisical that Ray added a footnote at the end of his order warning the county that if the “new administration of President Trump” continues this case, he may “appoint a special advocate to represent” Cobb County, a step that “seems justified” because the county “so easily agreed to this settlement.”

What should happen instead is that the Trump administration should dismiss this unjustified and unfounded attack on the firefighters of Cobb County, an attack that endangered the safety of residents and their right to have firefighters protect them who are hired and promoted based on their competence, not their skin color.

Republished from The Daily Signal.