Before he was tapped to be Vice President Kamala Harris's running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz (D.) signed into law a bill that established racial quotas throughout the state's health department, from a requirement that two members of a pregnancy task force be "Black or African American" to rules governing the composition of a "health equity" council.
The legislation, which Walz signed last May, created race-based membership requirements for five separate committees—the Community Solutions Advisory Council, the Health Equity Advisory and Leadership Council, the Equitable Health Care Task Force, the Task Force on Pregnancy Health and Substance Use Disorders, and the African American Health State Advisory Council—while setting up additional race-conscious programs. Legal experts who reviewed the quotas said they were patently unconstitutional and would be easy pickings for a plaintiff.
"Any time the government uses a racial classification without a compelling state interest, that is unconstitutional," said Adam Mortara, the lead trial lawyer for the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the 2023 Supreme Court case that outlawed affirmative action in college admissions.
Some of the requirements Walz signed into law are highly granular and involve multiple racial groups. The council on pregnancy and substance abuse, for example, must include "two members who identify as Black or African American," "two members who identify as Native American," and two additional members who are "Tribal representatives appointed by the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council." Other councils have quotas for Hispanics, Asian Americans, "LGBTQIA+" people, and the disabled.
It is not clear whether white people who "identify as" minorities are eligible for the positions. Walz and the Harris campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
The quotas form a stark contrast with the image of an avuncular Midwestern moderate that Walz and his allies have sought to project since his rollout in Philadelphia on Tuesday evening. Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) described Walz as a "heartland-of-America Democrat" with politics "right down the middle." Others have noted that Walz, a former football coach who served in Congress from 2007 to 2019, had a voting record to the right of many House Democrats.
But his record as governor of Minnesota has been far more progressive. Walz signed laws allowing abortion through the end of pregnancy, expanding health insurance to illegal immigrants, and preventing the extradition of children who travel to the state seeking gender surgery. After George Floyd's death at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis, the state also became ground zero for the racial unrest of 2020 and the wave of race-conscious initiatives that followed it—including a triage system that rationed COVID drugs based on race.
Walz presided over that system, which prioritized "BIPOC" individuals for scarce therapies and gave race more weight than certain risk factors, as health systems across the country were under strain due to a new and highly contagious variant of the virus. The scheme was scrapped in January 2022 amid moral outrage and legal threats.
Since then, Walz has dutifully rubber-stamped racial policies emanating from his state's activist class, ranging from the legally dubious to the downright bizarre. In 2023, for example, he signed a law updating the Minnesota Human Rights Act to ban discrimination based on "hair texture" and other "traits associated with race," including "hair styles such as braids, locs, and twists." A few months later came the law that mandated quotas on the health department committees, most of which were established that year.
The quotas appear to have created some hiring difficulties: An August job posting said that the Health Equity Advisory and Leadership Council was seeking "an additional three members to meet statutory requirements," which include the "representation" of nearly every protected class in the United States.
"To ensure the council's diversity," the post read, the health department "seeks applicants who identify as LGBTQ, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and/or as having a disability."
A separate "Equitable Health Care Task Force" has identical hiring criteria, while a "health equity" grant program must target counties with "a higher proportion of Black or African American, nonwhite Latino(a), LGBTQIA+, and disability communities," according to the 2023 statute.
"That's clearly illegal," said Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, a conservative public interest law firm. "The law prohibits states from intentionally discriminating."
There are also quotas within quotas as well as slots reserved for "racial equity" experts. The Community Solutions Advisory Council, which doles out "healthy child development" grants, must include three "Black Minnesotans of African heritage," three Latinos, three Asians, and three Native Americans. Within each group of three, one member must be a parent with a child under age eight. Other seats on the committee are earmarked for people with "expertise in racial equity" and "advocacy on behalf of communities of color and Indigenous communities."
The African American Health State Advisory Council must include both "African American individuals who provide and receive health care services" and "African American secondary or college students." And a "Long COVID" grant program must prioritize communities "disproportionately impacted" by the disease, including "Black and African Americans, African immigrants, American Indians, Asian American-Pacific Islanders, Latino(a) communities, LGBTQ+ communities, and persons with living disabilities."
Grant recipients, the law adds, "may also address intersectionality within the groups."