Ramaswamy: End LBJ's Order, Stop Affirmative Action

The Supreme Court's decision against affirmative action in the nation's colleges was "a good one," but it won't end affirmative action completely unless former President Lyndon B. Johnson's executive order is repealed, GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said.

"If elected president, I have committed to repealing Lyndon Johnson's ill-thought Executive Order 11246, which mandates that federal contractors — approximately 20% of the U.S. workforce — adopt race-based hiring preferences," Ramaswamy wrote in an opinion piece for The Daily Caller.

Last week's ruling declared that race can't be a sole factor in college admissions and said institutions must look for new ways to have diverse student bodies.

Ramaswamy said the trickle-down effect of Johnson's mandate has been sweeping, as top companies "now regularly disfavor qualified applicants who happen to be white or Asian-American, which spawns resentment and condescension toward black and Hispanic hires."

Ramaswamy added that if he's elected, he will also direct the Department of Justice to "prosecute race-based preferences."

He also said that while the ruling ended "one of the worst failed experiments in American history," it will still start a new era of racial balancing and quotas, and "elite universities like Harvard and woke employers" will "play games" to benefit "marginalized groups."

Ramaswamy noted that Harvard is trying to subvert the court's decision by making academic success less of a priority and scoring applicants based on academic, extracurricular, athletic, and personal criteria, with scores aggregated for a first cut on decisions.

"It's not just that Asian applicants are getting lower personal scores than Black applicants, which has been born out by data," Ramaswamy said. "Harvard has constructed a methodology wherein the areas they often excel in (test scores and grades) have less bearing on the admissions outcome" to claim that the data analysis shows no bias.

"Affirmative action, racial quotas, and racialized thinking that have infected our governing class must be rooted out at every level," said Ramaswamy. "That takes more than a Supreme Court ruling on the letter of the law. It takes a fundamental change in the national mindset. It will take a leader who can remind America that we were a nation founded out of a wholesale rejection of Europe's stratification of society along class, ethnic, and racial lines."