The Trump administration's U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has dismissed a slew of lawsuits filed under former President Joe Biden, including legal challenges to state-level abortion bans, merit-based hiring of first responders, and COVID-19 inquiries.
Last week, Trump's DOJ dropped legal action against Idaho's near-total abortion ban, which includes exceptions for cases involving rape or incest as well as when the mother's life is endangered.
In August 2022, following the fall of Roe v. Wade, the Biden admin tried to circumvent this pro-life law with a lawsuit arguing that the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), a 1986 federal statute ensuring access to services at emergency rooms regardless of a patient's ability to pay, mandates an abortion if it's deemed medically necessary to prevent "serious health consequences," not just concerning the life of the mother.
The lawsuit—launched by then-U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland—had been based on claims that Idaho's Defense of Life Act forced hospitals to airlift women out of state for emergency abortions. However, in previous court proceedings, plaintiffs failed to provide evidence that patients had ever been denied emergency care under these circumstances.
Last month, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the dismissal of several Biden-era DEI lawsuits accusing various police and fire departments across the country of racial discrimination over their hiring and promotion practices.
In one of the cases lodged against a fire department in Cobb County, Georgia, the judge refused to grant a settlement proposed by the Biden administration due to a lack of evidence proving that physical fitness tests and credit report checks are racially discriminatory toward minorities. President Joe Biden's DOJ claimed that the standardized testing and credit checks had an "impermissible disparate impact on African-American candidates."
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As ex-DOJ civil rights attorney Hans von Spakovsky explains, the court typically approves these settlements, since such agreements lighten the workload, but that one specifically sought to set up a DEI hiring quota, which the judge likened to an unjust "racial spoils system."
"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," the judge, a Trump appointee, ruled in January.
Under a consent decree, Cobb County would have been required to establish 16 priority positions for African-American hires, with retroactive seniority, and pay black claimants $750,000 in monetary relief. Spakovsky notes that the Biden DOJ tried to sneak this consent decree through before the Trump administration took over. This effort sought to coerce counties into conducting DEI-based recruitment, regardless of qualifications, and spending massive sums of taxpayer funds for payouts to previous applicants who had scored lower on the entrance exams.
In addition, the Trump admin is tossing out other civil rights cases related to alleged discrimination. Among them, the DOJ intends to drop a 2023 lawsuit alleging anti-immigrant employment practices at Elon Musk's SpaceX.
Biden's DOJ sued SpaceX for supposedly engaging in employment discrimination against asylum recipients and refugees. The administrative complaint alleged that Space X "routinely discouraged asylees and refugees from applying and refused to hire or consider them, because of their citizenship status, in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA)."
According to Musk, federal regulations restrict SpaceX from hiring non-U.S. citizens or those without lawful permanent residency. On X, Musk said SpaceX is legally barred from doing so under International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) because rockets are advanced weapons technology. Hiring anyone who is not a permanent resident of the United States would therefore violate international arms trafficking law. "In other words, it was both illegal to hire asylum seekers and illegal not to hire asylum seekers!" Musk retorted.
In court filings, SpaceX said that export control laws impose "strict limitations on who it can employ."
On Thursday, U.S. attorneys filed an unopposed motion in Texas federal court seeking an end to a pause in proceedings so they could submit a notice of dismissal, which would dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning the charges cannot be brought again.
More recently, the DOJ is moving to dismiss the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)'s years-long lawsuit against Utah-based healthcare company Xlear, which sought to offer the American public an alternative COVID-19 prevention and treatment product.
In 2021, the FTC alleged that Xlear's "unsupported" statements about the efficacy of its saline nasal spray in preventing and mitigating novel coronavirus infections violated federal law, specifically the COVID-19 Consumer Protection Act. "Companies can't make unsupported health claims, no matter what form a product takes or what it supposedly prevents or treats," said Samuel Levine, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. "That's the lesson of this case and many others like it, and it’s why people should continue to rely on medical professionals over ads." Xlear countered that the FTC lacked statutory authority to require clinical data from non-pharmaceutical health products, such as supplements.
Reacting to the impending dismissal, Xlear CEO Nathan Jones said in a statement that for four years, Xlear has been legally harassed and heavily censored. Jones noted that the federal government "shuttered the marketplace of ideas" when Big Pharma corporations were racing to develop a COVID-19 vaccine during the pandemic.
The company says the civil lawfare stifled scientific inquiry at the time. "Americans have the right to access and act upon scientific information beyond the pharmaceutical industry's monopoly," says Xlear, which had to cough up more than $3 million to cover the costs of defending itself in this case.
Xlear is celebrating this "huge loss for Big Pharma" as "a groundbreaking victory" for science, health freedom, and the small business community at large.
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