Welcome to Chief Justice John Robert's halcyon world. Where black and white are simply tones on the Philco, children are seen but not heard, mother is in the kitchen baking cookies and "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race". You know, sometimes simplicity just passes for clarity.
Yesterday, in a "controversial" decision, the highest court in the land struck down two voluntary school integration programs.
Because Roberts--joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito--could not get a fifth vote for his more sweeping views, Thursday's ruling is unlikely to prompt a wholesale revisiting of government programs on race, to the relief of many civil rights activists.The party of so called moral values and fiscal conservatism seems determined to leave this country morally and financially bankrupt before they are done. It's no wonder they have to resort to stealing votes.Even so, the statement by a unified bloc of justices that, with only narrow exceptions, race should not be a factor in such programs, represents perhaps the strongest showing for this long-held view of conservatives, and it gave them hope that ultimately it would prevail. Liberals, however, said the day is far off when the nation can or will plausibly ignore the role of race in remedying social ills.
Comments (7)
You know what's really annoying? This decision, along with the two earlier in the week and the one about price floors yesterday, give district courts no bright line rules on how to deal with these issues. Part of the point of having a high court is to provide certainty on an issue, and this courts seems to enjoy muddying the water more than deciding. The whole idea of race being a factor but not the deciding factor just encourages school districts to obfuscate methodology and give plaintiff's headaches. awesome.
I actually blame much of the murkiness on Justice Kennedy who has developed the annoying habit of voting with the conservatives for portions of the opinion but then writing a separate concurrence as to other portions. People are going to be beating their heads against the wall trying to figure out what the majority opinion actually says for most of these 5-4 cases.
And maybe it's simpleton of me but I don't see how randomly assigning students in a district to particular schools in a way that achieves a certain mixture of racial diversity constitutes "discrimination" on the basis of race. This isn't like the previous racial preference cases they've decided where schools were determining on an individual basis whether a particular student of a particular race got into college or law school. (And even then, some of those were upheld.) If it's a random process that ascribes no benefit or burdens based upon a student's race, then I don't see how it's discriminatory.
I decided yesterday that I officially hate the Roberts court.
I agree, but Kennedy is your new swing vote. You have to pitch your argument to him.
I really think the court decided (at least for the Seattle facts) that the problem was that the race was the tie breaker, and specifically disallowed that. So now a school district needs to include race some place before the last decision but weight it to a degree that it achieves the same result and we can go right back. I think Bollinger held up points given for race, I cannot remember which one was the Michigan Law case and which one was the undergraduate one.
Their entire rationale seems like Zeno's paradox to me.
4-1-4 decisions are terrible.
These decisions aren't the fault of Justice Kennedy. You need to place the blame squarely where it belongs - Harry Reid.
Someone please pull him aside and tell him what filibuster means because if he had actually done his job when he was Minority Leader and filibustered the hell out of these people, we wouldn't be reliving 1954.
I wonder if he truly believes now that it wasn't worth it to rock the boat.
Had Reid filibustered either Roberts or Scalito, the GOP would have invoked the "nuclear option" to have Cheney rule that filibusters are unconstitutional, with the GOP caucus supporting that. When you have a bunch of people who don't hesitate to shred the Constitution when it gets in their way, I'm not sure what you're supposed to do.
What shocked me was the personal attacks in Roberts' opinion. He's supposedly for collegiality, but personal attacks against justices in opinions does NOT further that goal. It only hardens divisions that exist. I wish we could make people understand that a bad Supreme Court has SERIOUS consequences. We shouldn't have to lose Roe in order to do that either, but I'm afraid that it will take something as dramatic as the overturn of Roe to wake people up to the fact that a GOP president is generally BAD NEWS for our rights as citizens.
1) You don't mean "unconstitutional", right? If so, please explain, because I am at a loss.
2) Point me to the personal attacks (page number, section, whatever) so I don't have to read the whole thing.
I think nasty sniping at the Justices in the majority or in dissent is pretty common and simply means that it was a hotly contested decision. I can definitely remember reading such things back in law school from cases decades old.