National Center Honored with NCLA Award for Client Bravery

We're beyond honored to be chosen by the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) to receive this year's George Washington Award for Client Bravery.

At an NCLA event this week in Washington, D.C., Free Enterprise Project (FEP) Executive Director Stefan Padfield gratefully accepted the award on behalf of the National Center.

After the event, Padfield said:

Standing up against the divisive, neo-racist and neo-Marxist DEI agenda shouldn't earn one a bravery award, but so long as radical activists, craven opportunists and useful idiots continue pushing the DEI grift, we'll stand in the breach together with our allies till corporations judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

An NCLA press release about the evening's honors was picked up by Yahoo Finance and dozens of other outlets and included this paragraph:

NCLA also presented the National Center for Public Policy Research with our George Washington Award for Client Bravery last night. NCLA represented NCPPR in the lawsuit against SEC that persuaded the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to overturn Nasdaq's "Board Diversity Rules," which sought to impose gender, race and sexual orientation quotas on corporate board membership for Nasdaq-listed companies. NCPPR is also a Plaintiff in Davidson v. Gensler and NCLA's client in our suit against unconstitutional SEC rules that would require public companies to disclose their climate-related business risks and mitigation procedures.

In December, NCLA - on behalf of us and the Alliance for Fair Board Recruitment - convinced the en banc U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to vacate the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission's approval of Nasdaq's board diversity rules, arguing that the SEC lacked statutory authority to do so.

"We are grateful the court reached the right conclusion in this case," Padfield told USA TODAY at the time. "The SEC was reaching beyond its statutory authority to try and engage in progressive social engineering. The court's decision here is not only correct on the law, but also consistent with the will of the American people, who are sick and tired of seeing their government engage in divisive identity politics."