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In six weeks, Donald Trump’s second term is already the most disruptive in U.S. history. There is no shortage of topics I could write about this week; I considered writing about Ukraine or maybe federal workers. In the end, I decided to write about a topic that’s in the news about which I have a unique perspective.
I have been a Republican activist for over 30 years, and I served for almost 15 years on the Republican State Central Committee (SCC), so this is a little bit of inside baseball. I am writing on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). If you have been following the news, you know that The Trump administration is trying to eradicate DEI initiatives at every level of government. President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing federal agencies and contractors to end DEI-related initiatives on his first day in office. In response to the changing political climate, private companies from Goldman Sachs to Google to John Deere are scaling back or eliminating DEI programs. This week, U.S. District Judge Adam B. Abelson, a Biden appointee, issued an injunction blocking some of Trump’s actions. Time will tell how successful the administration will be in its opposition to DEI. Despite these efforts to dismantle DEI in government and industry, there is one bastion of DEI that Donald Trump could undo with a single word if he wished, and that is DEI in the Republican Party.
DEI in the Republican Party? How is that even possible?
During my years as an activist, I witnessed firsthand that diversity isn’t a new concept within the Iowa Republican Party. In 2008, while serving on the SCC, I wrote a political blog called Hawkeye GOP. At the time, there were multiple left-leaning and right-leaning blogs in Iowa. One of the left-leaning blogs made the comment that the SCC was too white. They were wrong. Even without an official DEI policy in Iowa GOP, the SCC was very diverse. Of 19 members, 5 were minorities. Two Black, one Indian (from India), one Hispanic, and me. I am 1/2 Pacific Islander, 1/4 Black, 1/4 Chinese, and my mother had a Hispanic surname (Cruz). Five minorities out of 19 is over 26% — almost three times the percentage of minorities in the general population of Iowa in 2008. This wasn’t about meeting quotas; these were the people elected by Iowa Republicans at their conventions.
At the national level, the approach is different. The Republican National Convention and the Republican National Committee don’t just adopt DEI initiatives — they adopted a policy that Republicans have opposed long before the term “DEI” was even coined. National rules enforce a rigid sex-based quota system.
Every presidential year, the 50 states and six U.S. territories send delegations to the Republican National Convention. The party does not place limits on who may attend the convention. For most delegates, the convention is a big party, an opportunity to meet with friends and Republican dignitaries from across the country. It gives delegates a chance to celebrate the official selection of the party’s presidential and vice presidential candidates.
But the week before the convention, before the festivities begin, the committees meet. The smoky back rooms are long gone, but the committees are where the convention’s work happens. The committees create the convention rules, build the party platform, settle disputes about seating delegations, and more. Party rule subjects these committees to quota. Each state is required to send one man and one woman to each committee. In 2008, I attended the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. I was also elected to serve on the convention platform committee. Since I am a man, the other Iowa delegate on the committee had to be a woman.
The National Convention is not the only place where the GOP applies quota-based DEI. The governing body of the GOP is the Republican National Committee (RNC). States and territories each send delegates to the RNC. My party, the party that opposes DEI, requires that one delegate be a man and the other a woman. In 2012, I ran unsuccessfully for a position on the RNC. Even though four men were running (and I think there were two women running), we had to run against each other for the National Committeeman position. According to party rules, the top positions in the GOP are also subject to DEI; if the RNC chair is a man, the co-chair must be a woman and vice-versa.
Over the last three decades, Iowa GOP platforms have called for an end to affirmative action and, more recently, DEI. Several of those platforms included statements calling for an end to quotas in the party. If Trump is serious about ending DEI, he can start by ending quotas in the Republican Party.
David Chung is a Gazette editorial fellow. [email protected]
