Wednesday, April 23, 2014

A good SCOTUS ruling, but lacking the finality it should have established

The majority of the justices did the right thing in upholding Michigan's ban on affirmative action, but it would have been nice to see a resolute quashing of the notion that race still has some role to play in public policy.  As John Podhoretz observes in the New York Post today:

And yet the court’s majority (in various configurations) continues to say there are increasingly vague and undefined circumstances in which race can and should “play a factor,” circumstances that prevent it from declaring the entire kit and caboodle of affirmative action unconstitutional.
In 2003, in another ruling on the University of Michigan, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor declared that affirmative action should have an end date — say, 25 years from 2003. In doing so, she implicitly acknowledged that the policy offends elementary fairness — else why end it at all?

And the dissenting opinion of Sotomayor makes it clear why electing Freedom-Hater presidents is a bad idea.  You get Supreme Court justices who go in for that Progressive view of the Constitution, in which it must be interpreted in subjective ways that reflect sociocultural conditions in a given moment of the nation's life:

While the Constitution “does not guarantee minority groups victory in the political process,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “it does guarantee them meaningful and equal access to that process. It guarantees that the majority may not win by stacking the political process against minority groups permanently.”

 Actually the Constitution doesn't say a thing about "minority groups."  The whole struggle of originalists (count me in) has been to perfect the actual practice of the Constitutional principle of equality of anyone and everyone before the law.

Then there are the stats on the harm done to those who are inadequately prepared for the level of academic rigor at certain schools but are admitted anyway - but that's a subject for another day.

This one was about two things: the above-mentioned absence of race-consciousness in the Constitution as established by the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, and the rights of states to decide matters fraught with sociocultural considerations - without federal interference.

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