When Katz’s Met the DOJ

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

 

In 1888, Katz’s Deli opened on New York City’s Lower East Side. A century after it adopted its current name, the Obama administration began investigating it and other popular restaurants.

Most people know Katz’s from a memorable scene in When Harry Met Sally, but earlier generations on the Lower East Side knew it for its ‘Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army’ campaign during WWII when the owner’s three sons were all serving on the front lines. Presidents, from FDR to JFK to Reagan, members of Congress and all sorts of politicians stopped by for a snack and to get a photo at an authentic Jewish deli for their campaigns.

But the Justice Department’s targeting of Katz’s Deli not only lasted longer than When Harry Met Sally, but it also lasted longer than WWI and WWII combined, and no amount of salami could get rid of the greedy government lawyers who made for a much less romantic couple than Bill Crystal and Meg Ryan, and offered a much less happy ending than the classic movie.

While China, Iran and Russia hacked us, cartel members crossed the border, and terrorists carried out attacks, the Justice Department single-mindedly dedicated itself to the much more vital task of conducting inspections of Katz’s Deli bathrooms in 2011, 2018, 2020 and 2024.

Katz’s Deli is only 18 years younger than the United States Justice Department, but its claim to fame is serving pastrami sandwiches while the federal government’s skill is destroying all that it touches. The old school deli has hosted plenty of episodes of Law and Order, but under Obama, the law showed up not to have a sandwich in between takes, but to drag the deli into court.

And finally extracted its pound of fresh hand-cut meat from the neighborhood’s last survivor.

After 13 years, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which had also taken the lead in spurious investigations of Trump, celebrated New Year’s Eve with a settlement and a $20,000 penalty because the iconic deli, which has been around in one form or another for 136 years, had not sufficiently adapted itself to the 2010 version of ADA disability regulations

No disabled people had actually complained about Katz’s. While some eateries, especially on the other side of the country in California, have been plagued by serial ADA litigants, the only ones to object to Katz’s entrance, tables and bathroom were Justice Department lawyers.

And being a government toilet lawyer is only a moral disability, not an actual physical disability.

Katz’s real problem was that it had been listed as a recommended restaurant by the 2011 Zagat Guide, and some bright suit at the Southern District of New York decided to use it as a guide for finding restaurants for the government to sue. This grand project, announced as the Manhattan Restaurants ADA Compliance Initiative, had DOJ employees going to restaurants at taxpayer expense and then, instead of leaving a tip, suing the restaurant for non-compliance.

The targets were multicultural and iconic, including Carmine’s Italian restaurants in the Theater District, Rosa Mexicano, and Katz’s. Rosa was shaken down by the DOJ’s best for $30,000, Carmine’s for ten big ones and now Katz’s for $20,000. The DOJ’s boastful press release notes that, “a handful of restaurants closed before the accessibility review could be completed.”

That $60,000 would have been a fraction of the cost of the destructive project to taxpayers. The price of 13 years of federal litigation would likely be in the hundreds of thousands or millions.

And you can buy a lot of turkey sandwiches and matzo ball soup for that kind of bread.

But, as a certain New York Times journalist opined about big government in the USSR, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.” And you can’t have big government in the U.S. without closing a bunch of restaurants and dragging the rest through endless litigation.

The Americans With Disabilities Act, one of the worst legacies of the first Bush administration, allows the DOJ to go after restaurants “even if no one has complained about or has been injured” which turned the ADA into the Evil Power-Hungry Lawyers With No Disabilities Act.

The restaurants first realized they were targeted when the government sent them a 17-page ‘survey’. The DOJ “inspected” some locations in the style of old Mafia goons and crooked cops.

Those that did not go along were quickly sued by the Justice Department.

The Southern District of New York’s project to destroy restaurants was associated with the era of Preet Bharara, one of the worst ambulance chasers and worst men to ever occupy a role as a federal prosecutor, whose accomplishments included setting off an international crisis with India by arresting one of its diplomats, investigating internet comments on a conservative site and indicting politicians for bragging rights in cases that would later be thrown out.

When Bharara was fired by the Trump administration, it cleaned some of the stench out of the SDNY office, and put an end to Bharara’s ambitions to clamber to public office on a trail of bodies, but the evil that federal prosecutors do lives on after them, and even with Bharara consigned to podcasting and media appearances, the DOJ’s war on a deli dragged on.

Katz’s Deli had survived two world wars and the gentrification that eliminated most other old family businesses across that stretch of Houston Street leaving behind brick, glass and steel condos where studio apartments cost millions. Katz’s also survived a surge in meat prices, the pandemic and the neighborhood deli has now endured a record 13-year federal investigation.

Not for mob ties or racketeering, but for the size of its old-fashioned doors, tables and toilets.

Katz’s is one of the last survivors of generations of Jewish delis and Yiddish theaters at nearby Second Avenue. But those delis, like the more locally famous 2nd Ave Deli, had to battle crime, blight and an influx of housing projects in the sixties and seventies: Katz’s had to fight the DOJ.

According to the DOJ, Katz’s old school double doors are not an “accessible” entrance. In reality the double doors are wide, inside is a gentle slope leading upward past a golden rail to where the counters are, and it’s hard to imagine anyone having trouble making it inside. Everything looks much the way that it would have in the 1950s and hasn’t changed much since those days.

But according to the DOJ, the distance between sidewalk and the entrance is half an inch too much and that half an inch makes all the difference. Worse still, the opening width of the doors is 29.5 inches, which falls short of the 32 inch requirement by a whole two and a half inches.

The same year that the federal authorities found Katz’s wanting by half an inch, the federal budget deficit exceeded $1.3 trillion. If you are half an inch short of federal requirements, you have a major problem, but if the feds spend $1.3 trillion in money they don’t have, that’s fine.

A half inch for us is a major crime, a trillion too much for the feds is a rounding error.

Speaking of money, the DOJ complains that “Katz’s Delicatessen utilizes an uncommon method of payment at the restaurant; when patrons enter, they are handed a blank ticket, on which restaurant staff list the prices of the items ordered. Patrons pay for their meal as listed on the ticket, before exiting through a turnstile, which a patron must pass through to exit the building.”

The method, like the deli, is uncommon today, and is part of the nostalgia of the eatery. The nostalgia comes from inhabiting a world in which the federal government’s inspectors could not randomly show up anywhere on an unconstitutional authority dreamed up by a Kafka novel.

The Justice Department also took issue with the tables which supposedly have “insufficient dining surfaces for persons with disabilities”. The tables, like everything else, look much the same that they did 80 years ago and at the delis of generations past. They can be pulled in and out. There are chairs next to them. And the lines of people crowding outside like it that way.

During the pandemic, Katz’s Deli had to introduce outdoor dining for the first time in 130 years, leaving the interior a strange ghostly assortment of empty tables with no one sitting at them.

The DOJ also poked around the bathrooms and complained that the hand dryers protrude 2 inches too far, the side grab bar is 1.5 inches too short, and, in a masterpiece of legal legerdemain, “the mirror in both toilet rooms is 45.5 inches above the floor, exceeding the maximum height requirement” in violation of the ADA’s 2010 bathroom mirror measuring code standards as determined by the DOJ’s top toilet measuring experts.

American cities, including New York City, may be overrun by criminals and illegal aliens who burn people alive on subway trains, but at least the bathroom mirrors will be at the right height.

Apart from the $20,000 fine, Katz’s will now be obligated to make all sorts of changes, including the old-fashioned ticket payment system that the DOJ’s lawyers objected to, and that will irreversibly alter the look and feel of one of the last remaining Jewish delis in the area.

That will be one more accomplishment of Barack Obama and the Justice Department.

The consent decree also allows the Justice Department to return at any time to inspect the deli. So if you’re ever at Katz’s and see people in suits and tape measures crawling around on the floor and inspecting the toilets, you know that they’re hard at work for the government.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
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Transgender Activists Hijacked the ADA's Disability Protections to Threaten Women

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

Last year, the Fourth Circuit Court ruled that Mr. ‘Kesha’ (actual name unknown) Williams, a male inmate in the Virginia prison system who demanded to be housed with women, had his rights to be a woman protected as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

According to the Fourth, the only reason men like Williams were not protected by the ADA was a “desire to harm a politically unpopular group” by the senators who drew up the bill. And so any man who believed he was really a woman could claim to be disabled and sue under the ADA.

The Supreme Court refused the case despite a compellingly reasoned protest from Justice Alito.

Now the Biden administration is demanding that a Georgia prison castrate one of its prison inmates because the ADA provides a right to castration for men who think they’re women.

There are two problems.

Men are not women. And the ADA specifically bans protection for anything transgender. It is hard to think of another law that so very clearly explained exactly what it did not want to be used for, that courts and administrations disregarded and decided to abuse it to do anyway.

When Congress passed the ADA, it excluded mental problems brought on by drug use as well as, “compulsive gambling, kleptomania, or pyromania” and “transvestism, transsexualism, pedophilia, exhibitionism, voyeurism, gender identity disorders” and other “sexual behavior disorders” from the list of disabilities that were protected by the law. Simple? No.

The law is as clear, but in a world where a man can be a woman, the law is not the law.

James Blatt, a Pennsylvania seasonal stocker at the Cabela’s outdoor chain, wanted to use the ladies room. The retailer, some of whose female employees may have been less than thrilled at the idea of sharing a bathroom with a large man (Mr. Blatt had posed at one point in a t-shirt reading “A Transexual Menace”) and he was fired after being accused of threatening another employee’s child.

Blatt (who insisted that he was really a woman named Kate Lynn) sued Cabela’s claiming that denying him the use of the ladies room was a refusal to accommodate his “disability”.

The ADA had specifically ruled out men claiming to be women as a disability, so his lawyers argued that the ADA itself was unconstitutional because it didn’t cover the right of men who think that they are women to use the ladies room.

The Obama Justice Department jumped into the case and argued that since the ADA exclusions specified “gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments”, it could be ignored because according to it transgender beliefs were all really a physical problem.

And so every single man who claimed to be transgender was also instantly disabled.

In reality, the ADA’s “physical impairment” reference was to people who were born with actual physical problems or suffered an accident.

But Judge Joseph F. Leeson, Jr., an Obama judge, instead offered up a ruling worthy of the proposition that any man can be a woman, claiming that “gender identity disorders” only refer to “the condition of identifying with a different gender” but don’t cover “a condition like Blatt’s gender dysphoria, which goes beyond merely identifying with a different gender and is characterized by clinically significant stress.”

The difference between “gender identity disorders” and “gender dysphoria” is stress.

A man who thinks he’s a woman, but isn’t too stressed about it, has a gender identity disorder, but if he’s really stressed about it, then he suffers from gender dysphoria.

Never mind that James Blatt’s own filing had described him as being diagnosed with “Gender Dysphoria, also known as Gender Identity Disorder” or that the American Psychiatric Association had just changed Gender Identity Disorder to Gender Dysphoria in its latest edition of the DSM meaning that one is just another name for the other.

The Fourth Circuit similarly claimed that when the ADA was enacted “gender identity disorders did not include gender dysphoria” when that is demonstrably false.

The Blatt v. Cabela’s Retail, Inc ruling ushered in a wave of ADA lawsuits.

When the Senate had debated the ADA back in 1990, a handful of Republicans with some foresight had warned that this would happen.

“If this were a bill involving people in a wheelchair or those who have been injured in the war, that is one thing. But how in the world did you get to the place that you did not even [ex]clude transvestites?” Sen. Jesse Helms asked. “Do we really want private institutions, particularly schools and day care centers to be prohibited from refusing to hire a transvestite because some Federal court may find that this violates the transvestite’s civil rights to wear a dress?”

Senate Democrats had denied that this was on the agenda. Sen. Ted Kennedy dismissed the idea this could even happen. “Some of the behavior characteristics included on this list are not disabilities to begin with and individuals with such characteristics would not be considered people with disabilities even without this amendment,” Sen. Tom Harkin contended.

Some 25 years later, Democrats codified exactly that meaning while ignoring the exclusions that they had granted to Republicans as a compromise to convince them to vote for the ADA.

As Justice Alito pointed out, Congress had gone to great lengths to create “catch all” terms covering every possible definition of transgender delusions including “transvestism, transsexualism” and “gender identity disorders” and even “other sexual behavior disorders” to make it as clear as it could conceivably be that the ADA cannot cover this kind of thing.

Federal courts are not just ignoring what the Constitution or similarly old documents say about anything, they decided to completely ignore what legislation from 1990 said in black and white.

Alito pointed out that the entire reasoning in the Fourth Circuit decision “does not meaningfully distinguish physical impairments from ‘mental impairment[s]’” despite building its entire case around the idea that the ADA exclusion doesn’t apply because transgender delusions are now a physical impairment. (The proposed Obama legal strategy.)

But that’s because there’s never been any medical basis for transgenderism. Despite a horror show of teens exposed to sterility and cancer risks with hormones, and castrated and mutilated young people who will never be able to have children or form families, there’s zero basis.

The transgender argument leaps from invented definition to invented definition, claiming to be both genetic and purely a state of mind that either requires massive medical intervention or nothing more than a change of name depending on the whims of the man in question.

But all of this is whim..

According to the Fourth Circuit, the court could set aside the ADA’s exclusion because “in light of the ‘basic promise of equality . . . that animates the ADA,’ we see no legitimate reason why Congress would intend to exclude from the ADA’s protections transgender people who suffer from gender dysphoria. The only reason we can glean from the text and legislative record is ‘a bare . . . desire to harm a politically unpopular group[, which] cannot constitute a legitimate governmental interest.’”

The judges of the court nullified the actual words of the ADA because they claimed that the elected officials who wrote and passed the bill could not have had any legitimate reason for their actions. They have determined that the intent of part of the law was, in their opinion, illegitimate, and therefore they choose to dismiss it. Whether pyromaniacs and pedophiles will get the same protection will depend on whether the Left decides to take up their cause.

There is an intimate connection between the preposterous notion that a man can become a woman and that laws mean whatever judges want them to. When a man is a woman, then a law need not be a law. If words only mean whatever we want them to, then there is no meaning, only the exercise of raw power backed by any convenient pretext, legalism or lie.

Laws require words to mean something. When words mean nothing, laws also mean nothing.

If we can’t agree on even the most basic concepts of reality, like ‘what is a woman’, then we also can’t have a society of laws or a legal system based on anything except power.

Anyone who will say that a man is a woman cannot be trusted to uphold the letter of the law.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.