For years now, progressives have weaponized the American Bar Association (ABA) to act as a woke gatekeeper over legal education – a key part of the left’s scheme to turn the courts and legal profession into tools to advance their partisan interests. But thanks to President Donald Trump, that stranglehold is finally being challenged.
Last month, the ABA voted to eliminate Standard 206, its controversial diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) mandate for law school admissions and staff hiring decisions. This significant victory for merit and common sense happened not because the ABA suddenly rediscovered political neutrality, but because of sustained pressure from the Trump administration.
The ABA has long enjoyed a privileged role in American legal education as the sole accreditor recognized by the federal government. That position gives it extraordinary leverage over law schools and ultimately who gets to enter the legal profession.
The ABA’s government-granted, near-monopoly authority was supposed to ensure that law schools met basic standards of educational quality. Instead, the organization’s progressive leadership has abused its authority for its left-wing political aims.
Standard 206 was one of the clearest examples of liberals’ brazen attempts to use the ABA to advance their partisan priorities. The rule coerced law schools into “proving their commitment” to DEI’s race-based preferences in admissions and staff hiring or risk losing accreditation.
This created legal and moral dilemmas. Law schools were expected to satisfy the ABA’s racial and identity preferences in admissions and staff hiring, even though discriminating on the basis of race or sex violates the U.S. Constitution, Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and state constitutional provisions.
Yet the ABA refused to yield in strong-arming law schools into embracing the very practices that voters and lawmakers had prohibited. Its accreditation requirements continued to mandate that schools admit and hire applicants based on race, sex, and other identity-based characteristics rather than merit.
The message to the law schools was simple: comply, or be ruined.
Some institutions learned this firsthand. The Deane School of Law at Hofstra University on Long Island was censored in 2022 for not “having a faculty and staff that are diverse with respect to gender, race, and ethnicity,” according to the ABA’s website. The school responded on bended knee in a statement saying that they had implemented “recruitment efforts that have improved diversity and inclusion.” This is merely one of many examples of law schools across the nation acquiescing to the ABA’s demands.
Standard 206 was a demonstration of liberals flexing their power by unabashedly promulgating diversity rules to achieve their preferred social-demographic changes in the country.
This tactic is a tried and true strategy for liberals. The Left learned long ago that elections are not the only way to govern a country. If you control the institutions that decide what is normal and mandatory, you can impose your worldview even when voters never approved it.
This is the logic behind their infamous mantra of completing a “long march through the institutions.” Beginning in the 1960s, American progressive activists urged their followers to move beyond street protesting and into education, government, philanthropy, media, and other professional bodies that lead and shape American life.
They captured the quiet rooms where rules are written and then manipulated the rules to fit their ends while maintaining a fiction of neutral standards.
By 2020, their scheme was no longer a theory and culminated in a complete demonstration of their power.
After George Floyd’s death and the rise of Black Lives Matter, nearly every prestigious institution in America seemed to discover the same progressive moral vocabulary overnight. This is because universities, corporations, most nonprofits, and government agencies were all full of progressive activists advancing a uniform line on race, gender, “equity,” and power.
What had once been radical theory was now institutional canon. It showed up in human resource departments, hiring policy, and eventually in the 2022 implementation of the ABA’s DEI-focused Standard 206.
Compliance with progressive orthodoxy became the price of entry into American law.
Progressive control of important societal institutions like the ABA appeared eternal, and any reform was hopeless. But the extraordinary reelection of President Trump in 2024 upended the status quo.
On day one of his second term in office, Trump issued an executive order titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” The order, which applies to all federally funded programs, directs federal agencies to end illegal DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and guidance, arguing that civil-rights laws require equal treatment based on merit rather than race, sex, or other protected characteristics.
The U.S. Department of Education then quickly followed up with a “Dear Colleague” letter warning federally funded schools that race preferences were illegal after the recent Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
The ABA immediately understood the threat.
Its council first tried the usual Washington maneuver of merely “suspending” Standard 206. But former Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to let the ABA hide the rule in a drawer until political conditions improved for them.
In a February 2025 letter to the Council, Bondi warned that the standard’s race and sex diversity mandate subjected law students and professors to unlawful discrimination and put the ABA’s privileged status as the federally recognized law-school accreditor at risk.
Notably, the Trump administration refused to rest and moved the fight from correspondence to direct institutional confrontation.
Trump’s April 2025 executive order on accreditation in education explicitly named the ABA, quoted Standard 206’s diversity language, and directed the Department of Education and Department of Justice to investigate whether the ABA had illegally discriminated through its accreditation power.
This changed everything.
The ABA could no longer pretend this was an internal standards debate among polite legal academics. It was now a federal recognition problem. If the ABA wanted to remain the government-blessed gatekeeper of American legal education, it had to stop using accreditation as a cudgel to advance its brand of identity politics.
After extending the suspension once, and after the Department of Education made clear that unlawful DEI standards had to be repealed rather than temporarily shelved, the Council finally bent. In May, Standard 206 was approved for repeal by the same progressive ABA leadership that had wielded it for decades.
Trump’s unrelenting efforts via authority entrusted to him by American voters are what forced the ABA to atone – albeit reluctantly. Conservatives should celebrate this victory and learn from it. Institutions that have for years violated federal anti-discrimination laws and the very principles upon which the American republic was founded must be brought to heel.
The liberal takeover of American institutions once appeared unstoppable and irreversible. But Trump’s bold, courageous leadership has proved that even the most ideologically captured institutions can be forced to serve their original purpose once again – so long as Republicans are willing to use the power that the American people delegated to them.
W.J. Lee has served in the White House, NASA, on multiple campaigns, and in nearly all levels of government.
