This is President Trumps boldest move so far even Reagan chickened out on it

By now no one should be surprised at President Trump’s sweeping reversals of the conventional wisdom on everything from A (asylum) to W (wilderness access)­ — sorry, no executive orders affecting anything beginning with Z yet.But in revoking President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Executive Order 11246 that launched our decades-long imposition of de facto racial quotas under the euphemism “affirmative action,” Trump has gone beyond the boldest imagination of any previous administration.A brief history: When the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s Title VII — the clause banning racial discrimination in hiring — was debated in the Senate, opponents charged it would lead to racial quotas.The Civil Rights Act’s floor manager, future Vice President Hubert Humphrey, denied the claim, saying, “If the senator can find in Title VII any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion or national origin, I will start eating the pages one after another because it is not in there.”Humphrey lied, essentially.The civil-rights lobby was already planning for Johnson’s executive order that called for federal contractors to adopt “affirmative action” — that is, quotas by another name.

Of course, since so many American companies do business with the federal government, this edict affected virtually the entire private sector.Although the original EO 11246 didn’t yet mention “goals and timetables,” it did require all companies to file “compliance reports” to the federal government, which were in many ways self-incriminating documents by design.And the only way to assure compliance and avoid the risk of federal or private civil-rights lawsuits was to adopt preferential hiring practices.By the late 1970s, half the Fortune 500 companies faced civil-rights lawsuits alleging racial discrimination.It was the most dishonest legal regime ever imposed, especially since Title VII included, at ...