Three days short of 45 years before the Supreme Court largely invalidated race-based affirmative action in college admissions as a violation of equal protection under the 14th Amendment, it struck down even more blatant racial quotas in medical school admissions.

Yet activists keep finding racial quotas in even government organizations, where they seem hardest to defend, raising the question of how many taxpayer-funded bureaucracies continue flouting a precedent settled since the Carter administration.

Medical advocacy group Do No Harm sued the Minnesota Department of Health on Friday, arguing its Minnesota Health Equity Advisory and Leadership Council's racial quotas violate the 14th Amendment and are "demeaning, patronizing, and unconstitutional."

Its lawyers at the Pacific Legal Institute brought a nearly identical case a month ago against South Carolina's Commission for Minority Affairs, which the red state's law requires be majority-black, on behalf of Asian American and Native American women.

A white California teacher sued his union last year for creating a "BIPOC At-Large" seat on its executive board limited to black, indigenous and people of color. 

The challenge with the greatest public importance may be a class action suit against the Federal Aviation Administration for creating a "biographical questionnaire" allegedly used to change the racial makeup of its air traffic control (ATC) specialist program by disqualifying most students who passed a skills-based test and met FAA pre-qualifications. 

Filed nearly 10 years ago and still updated regularly – the docket shows a scheduled hearing Friday was canceled – the case drew renewed attention in recent years due to 19 documented "near misses" at airports in one year and a system outage as well as pressure from Republican senators on the agency to abandon its "identity-based hiring strategy."

The parties filed a joint status report Jan. 17 that states they are "nearing the end of a multi-year discovery process, which has confirmed that the agency improperly considered race when redesigning its hiring process for ATCs," but the FAA is still withholding "more than 15,000 documents on the basis of privilege," some asserted improperly "on their face."

Do No Harm, known recently for a reinstated anti-white discrimination lawsuit against Pfizer and for spooking a medical school association into scrubbing diversity, equity and inclusion grants from its website, said one of its members is barred from the 18-member Minnesota HEAL Council because he is "not a member of a racial minority." 

"Member A" is a doctoral student pursuing a medical degree in Minnesota who is "qualified, ready, willing, and able to be appointed to the Council" but was rejected when he applied last year and remains at a "significant disadvantage" because of his race this year, the suit says. (Do No Harm's Pfizer lawsuit was initially thrown out for such pseudonymity.)

Do No Harm seeks to "vindicate its member’s constitutional rights, to ensure that every qualified individual has the equal right to serve on the Council, and to ensure that Minnesotans are represented by individuals not selected on the basis of race," the suit says.

It names Commissioner Brooke Cunningham as the defendant because the 2023 state law that "codified" the council, "administratively created" by the department five years earlier, requires the commissioner to make all appointments. Her spokesperson told Just the News it "cannot comment on pending litigation."

Its purpose is to "make recommendations on how to embed equity" and the law "expressly requires" members to represent specific groups, including African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinos and American Indians, but does not require "educational or professional qualifications."

The department explicitly recruits based on race, such as an August bulletin seeking "Asian American and Pacific Islander" applicants to meet that group's quota, though its application portal from October to December did not state any of its four open positions "were reserved for individuals of a specific race, ethnicity, or other statutorily required group."

Member A applied for a position "prior" to December, and the government says the commissioner has filled all the open positions as of Friday, the suit says. He plans to apply again when terms next end this December or any other vacancy happens.

"Even if the racial mandate … served a compelling governmental interest, it is not narrowly tailored to remediating past intentional discrimination," the suit says. It has no end date, no "good faith exception" and it "stereotypes individuals on the basis of race."

Not only are the quotas blatant racial discrimination, Pacific Legal Foundation said in a press release, but they make it hard to fill open seats, as shown by a "recent, months-long effort to fill an open seat" reserved for an "Asian American or Pacific Islander" applicant.