Supreme Court allows states to ban affirmative action

By Scott Bomboy 2 hours ago

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court issued a historic ruling on affirmative action programs, allowing states to restrict their use in university admissions and at other public institutions.

The justices said in a 6-2 ruling Tuesday in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action that Michigan voters are allowed to change their state constitution to ban public institutions such as colleges and universities from taking race into account during the admissions process. The justices overturned a lower court decision in the process.

Justice Anthony Kennedy said nothing in the Constitution or the Supreme Court’s case history allows courts to undermine the election results. Kennedy was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito in a plurality opinion.

“This case is not about how the debate about racial preferences should be resolved. It is about who may resolve it,” Kennedy said. “There is no authority in the Constitution of the United States or in this Court’s precedents for the Judiciary to set aside Michigan laws that commit this policy determination to the voters.”

Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas in a separate opinion, compared the pro-affirmative action arguments in the case to the Plessy v. Ferguson decision from the Jim Crow era.

“As Justice Harlan observed over a century ago, “[o]ur Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” Scalia said. “The people of Michigan wish the same for their governing charter.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor read her dissent aloud in the courtroom Tuesday. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sided with Sotomayor in dissent. Justice Elena Kagan didn’t take part in the case because of her past role as solicitor general.

“To know the history of our Nation is to understand its long and lamentable record of stymieing the right of racial minorities to participate in the political process,” said Sotomayor. “The Constitution does not protect racial minorities from political defeat. But neither does it give the majority free rein to erect selective barriers against racial minorities.”

The decision will effectively allow as many as eight states to pursue affirmative action bans, but it doesn’t force 42 other states to eliminate pro-affirmative action policies.

The Schuette case was about a challenge to Proposal 2, an amendment to the Michigan Constitution that voters approved in 2006 banning affirmative action in the state. The question in Schuette was whether the state of Michigan violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause when it amended its state constitution to ban affirmative action programs in its universities and in the public sector.

The Schuette case gave the Court the opportunity to examine affirmative action in a very different way than it had in the Fisher case decided last June and in the Court’s best-known affirmative action decisions—including its seminal 1978 decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (which first approved the use of affirmative action to achieve diversity in higher education) and its 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger (which upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s affirmative action policies).

Last term, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s decision in Fisher sent the case back to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which the Supreme Court held had not properly applied the strict scrutiny standard of review to the University of Texas’s affirmative action program.

Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.

Hilariously, Ginsburg and Sotomayor's position is that when a state says "We will not allow race to be a factor in deciding admissions" that is equivalent to the majority "erecting selective barriers against racial minorities."

Even Breyer, a Clinton appointee and reliable lefty, voted with the majority on this one.

Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan are just complete delusional leftist ideology embracing kooks.

This is a good thing.

What Race Preferences Hide

By Mona Charen 6 hours ago

Sonia Sotomayor is a wonderful role model. Truly. Through hard work, brains and rare self-discipline at an early age, she was able to overcome poverty and family dysfunction to become what she is today. She was diagnosed at the age of 7 with Type 1 diabetes, and because her father was an alcoholic and her mother a full-time nurse, it fell to her to manage the daily insulin injections and testing that are part of the required treatment. The image, in her memoir, of a small girl dragging a chair to the stove so she could sterilize her syringes before school is poignant indeed.

Any person attempting to overcome hardship can look to Sotomayor for inspiration. But as she demonstrated in her long, impassioned dissent in the case of Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, the experience of benefiting from race preferences has left her prickly and defensive on the subject. As others, including her Supreme Court colleague Justice Clarence Thomas, have argued, that kind of gnawing insecurity is one of the consequences of preferences. Others are never sure if you've achieved your position entirely on merit, and neither are you.

Sotomayor's argument rests entirely on a fallacy — that lowering admission standards for certain minority applicants is the only possible response to concerns about racial and ethnic disparities in American life. "Race matters," she scolded again and again in her dissent. Actually, she went further and argued that a Michigan constitutional amendment that explicitly forbids racial discrimination amounts to racial discrimination.

The contention that white, Asian and other students should be disadvantaged because of discrimination against blacks that ceased decades before they were born is facially unjust. Under the regime of preferences, the white child of a poor waitress from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who would be the first person in her family to ever attend college, will have to get SAT scores about 300 points higher (depending upon the school) than the black daughter of a dermatologist from Beverly Hills, California. An Asian student would have to score even higher, because that minority is, according to those who insist on counting by race, "overrepresented."

Admissions officers at selective schools pretend they are offering opportunity to "underserved" minorities, but in reality, they are simply lowering standards for already-privileged students with the preferred skin tone. Ninety-two percent of blacks at elite colleges are from the top half of the income distribution. A study a decade ago at Harvard Law School found that only a third of students had four African-American grandparents. Another third were from interracial families. The rest were children of recent immigrants from Africa or the West Indies.

Should mixed-race students get half a preference? Should their scores be 50 percent higher than students with two black parents? These are the kinds of absurdities our current system presents.

Racial and ethnic preferences are unjust — reason enough to abandon them — but there are other reasons as well. They serve to perpetuate, rather than combat, racial stereotypes. They encourage gaming the system (as when Elizabeth Warren claimed to be Native American). They permit students from certain groups to coast in high school knowing they will get an automatic golden ticket to college. They encourage intergroup resentment. They result in what Stuart Taylor Jr. and Richard Sander have rightly called "mismatching" students — so that all but the very top minority students wind up attending schools that are a little out of their league. This, in turn, causes more minority students to abandon demanding majors like science and technology (so necessary for the economy's flourishing), and to drop out in numbers far higher than other students. Black students are about a third more likely than similarly qualified other students to start college, but less likely to finish.

When California outlawed racial preferences in 1996, preference advocates predicted apocalyptic consequences. Instead, as Taylor and Sander reported, "Black and Hispanic students improved their academic performance, stuck more successfully to (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) majors, and graduated at stunningly improved rates."

Dropping preferences is not harmful to minority students; it's beneficial. It should not be the end of the story, though. The gap in achievement between some minority groups and others can and should be addressed. Contra Sotomayor, it's not so much that "race matters" as that schools matter. The shame of the nation is that poor children continue to be so trapped in terrible schools. That is the disgrace that race counters cloak.

Good article, and I like the summary point that basically money and the divide between rich and poor is what really matters, as it always has, and as it always will.