Center for Equal Opportunity - Strong Support Announced for SBA Proposed Rule

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Strong Support Announced for SBA Proposed Rule

Friday, 28 March 2008

CEO Press Release

Letter Today Urges That Discriminatory Set-Asides Be Strictly Limited

(Falls Church, VA) A wide variety of groups and individuals, including Linda Chavez and Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity, sent a formal letter to the Small Business Administration today, supporting the agency’s decision to restrict the use of gender discrimination in the award of government contracts. The administration recently announced a proposed rule that would limit carefully the use of set-asides for female-owned companies to those industries where it could be demonstrated that women were being denied contracting opportunities on the basis of sex.

The letter noted the “intense pressure” that has been brought to bear on the agency to change the proposed rule so that set-asides would be more loosely available. But it said that the SBA must “stand its ground” in insisting that the constitutional restrictions the Supreme Court has placed on discriminatory set-asides be followed. The letter is attached.

Among the signatories are public policy experts and representatives from small business, academia, and public interest legal groups, as well as organizations like the American Conservative Union, the Eagle Forum, Christian Coalition of America, Project 21, Concerned Women for America, additional grassroots activists, and of course the Center for Equal Opportunity.

The letter concludes: “The taxpayers should not have to foot the steeper bill that inevitably results when a contract is awarded to someone other than the lowest bidder. Nor, most fundamentally, should any American be treated as a second-class citizen simply because of his sex or some other immutable characteristic.”

The Center for Equal Opportunity is a nonprofit educational and research foundation. In particular, it studies civil rights, bilingual education, and immigration and assimilation issues

Read Letter

L-R: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Manhattan D.A. Robert Morganthau , Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, New Haven Firefighters Frank Ricci and Lt. Ben Vargas, attorney Peter N. Kirsanow, and Linda Chavez, chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity are sworn in before testifying on July 16, 2009 on the fourth day of confirmation hearings for US Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.

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