Redstate

ask me if I regret my vote, I can honestly say "no" and Roberts and Alito are two prime examples of why-those two men alone on the court are enough to keep me satisfied. Bush will be gone in about a year and half, but Roberts and Alito will be on the court until they decide to retire.

If only Bush could get one more crack at a liberal seat-although I am convinced any nomination he made would turn into Bork part II, III and beyond.

How close we came to having *Harriet Miers* instead of Alito?

Remember, that took a full-court press that was the forerunner of this last one.

what the outcome would be with a DNC controlled senate, so another Harriet Miers type nomination could happen, although if I was Bush I would rub the DNC's noses in it, and nominate the best no matter what the record or opposition. I suspect the dems would be shooting themselves in the foot with repeated borkings.

I peeked over there, hoping to seem some specific reaction to the racial quotas case. What I found instead was a recommended diary, or maybe a front paged one, that was in cyber sackcloth and virtual ashes over the SCOTUS and its rightward slant.

The diarist delved into the statistics over which judges voted with which others, with the majority, with the majority on 5-4 decisions, etc. Interestingly, Kennedy was 27-0 with the majority on 5-4 votes this term -- in other words, he was the deciding vote every time.

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Gone 2500 years, still not PC.

Envisioning when all that is Left is the Right.

I was always told that the brethren vote in order of reverse seniority (the Chief Justice is always considered the most senior).

...a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right...

---Thomas Paine---

I scanned an article at DKos entitled "Segregation Now, Segregation Forever?" I didn't realize how much libs idolized Breyer - after all they called his dissent "majestic." Nonetheless, it is interesting to note how liberals see this ruling not only as a setback for "diversity," see Kowalski's posts below, but also as tacitly "gutting" Brown v. Board. I fail to see how ensuring that a State not discriminate on the basis of race (regardless of how benevolent the intentions), is actually discriminating on the basis of race. It is one of those things that my poor little conservative mind will never know.

righteous, and therefore of necessity constitutional, whether the actual constitution supports the meddling or not.

"During my lifetime, all our problems have come from mainland Europe, and all the solutions from the English-speaking nations across the world." - Thatcher

The "actual" constitution, as opposed to their fantasy one.
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Gone 2500 years, still not PC.

I think Kennedy's argument does have some merit, and while I agree wholeheartedly with Roberts and Thomas, I'm surprised that there hasn't been a bit more support of the Seattle/Louisville school districts from the loyal federalist side. True, I believe these race-based policies are abhorrent, but I think there is a palatable argument that (1) these criteria weren't that extreme, (2) that no unelected court was forcing these policies on the school districts, and (3) the local school districts should be able to make these placement decisions without interference from the courts.

Still, I think Roberts and Thomas are spot on in their analysis, particularly Roberts' conclusion (the best way to stop discrimination ....) and Thomas' statement that racial imbalance is not the same as racial segregation.

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The truth is, the more you tax profits, the more you undermine the American work ethic and the incentive structure that goes along with it. In fact, you demoralize the very system that has made this country great.

Nice point, and it's a little bit of a separate issue but I see this decisison not so much in legal or even public-policy terms but epistomological and even religious terms. If you look at the way this ruling is being reported, it's being portrayed as a blow to "diversity" -- which has essentially become a new secular religion of its own in America, which everyone must believe in, even though nobody can say what it means. It's a purely political term, not a legal term, and yet it has been used (and is being used) as though it carries the force of law.

"Diversity" is another liberal code-word, like "Community", which has also become debased of its meaning and paradoxically is used to justify everything from ending the Iraq war to raising taxes to selling cars. What the court did today was to strike a blow against that utter debasement of meaning, wherein virtually anything you want to do can sound laudable as long as you couch it in the language of "diversity."

I'm very glad to see it. It's about time.

"During my lifetime, all our problems have come from mainland Europe, and all the solutions from the English-speaking nations across the world." - Thatcher

And this is an appropriate time for another one of my past-life vignettes. I remember these because they were so striking that it was impossible not to recall how strangely I felt at the time:

When I worked for DePaul College of Law (which prides itself on being a "diverse" Vincentian, urban Catholic university where bi/gay/transgendered groups can have their parties on campus and more faithful Catholics are told to keep their objections to themselves because that's what modern Catholics are supposed to do) several years ago I was given a little assignment by the Dean:

Use my digital camera to take some photographs of the student body for use on their website and in their "sweeps" publications. I enthusiastically agreed to do it, and I was just about to set out to take the pictures when the Dean sternly reminded me: "And remember, they have to be DIVERSE pictures." For a few minutes, that didn't even register, since DePaul is already one of the most "diverse" law schools in Chicago in terms of its student body -- but that wasn't what she meant:

At the time, DePaul was still paying Michael Eric Dyson as a member of the faculty and had just hired Maryam Ahmad as a "special assistant to the President on Diversity" and what that meant in terms of day-to-day life was that everyone from the highest reaches of the administration on down had to bend over backward to make sure everything they did was "diverse." And that includes taking candid photographs of an *already* diverse student body.

I never really thought to press the point and ask what she really meant by "diverse" although it was clear that she wanted to make sure that everyone in the photograph was "mixed n' balanced" in terms of race -- which I dutifully did: the pictures were diverse and beautiful.

Of course, I didn't photograph anyone handicapped, and I didn't photograph anyone speaking Farsi, and I didn't photograph anyone with a deviated septum, and I didn't photograph anyone who was a Holocaust survivor, and so my attempt to capture "diversity" was basically interpreted to mean: "take pictures that won't get us in trouble with the Diversity Police here at this school."

This was when the Left in this country started to lose me in a very important way: because I later learned that the reason my former boss felt it was important to "remind" me that I needed to take "diverse" photographs was that she had stereotypically lumped me in as a white male who wouldn't ordinarily do that.

Of course, that was without having ever spoken to me at the time, because at that point I was even more of a lefty than the Dean was, which was why I had agreed to work for her, natch.

She never bothered to really ask my political views. Instead, she simply assumed that white guy = closet racist (sexist, homophobe) who needed to be "corrected". After that I deliberately decided not to tell her my political views for about a year, to see how much longer she'd keep that up before ever asking what I really thought. By that time, she'd already proven that her own stereotypical thinking about me was much more powerful than anything I could have ever said.

And that's when I realized what a bunch of blockheads leftists can be.

Isn't the Seattle model the one that had a white girl being bussed over an hour away from her neighborhood in order to acheive diversity rather than attending one closer? I can't say that this is ever a good thing-I am not a fan of dragging kids far away from their communities in order to acheive some goal regarding diversity.

In NC we had a slightly different model, which was more of a voluntary busing thing. My daughters attended a predominately minority school-it was about 75% African American and hispanic, with the other 25% being white or some kind of other. Minority students in minority schools could voluntarily change to a predominately white school in the district and they would be bussed there, and white kids could voluntarily choose to be bussed to a minority school. But white kids that lived 45 minutes away from the school my kids attended weren't told they had to take the 45 minute bus ride, and black kids weren't sent 45 minutes away either. Some kids took advantage of the ability to change schools and opted for the bus ride, but honestly most kids opted to stay in their local/neighborhood schools.

But then I am more in favor of returning to small schools located in neighborhoods with local control of those schools-even to the point of nothing administrative above the school level. I think administrative costs of large or even midsized school districts end up sucking huge amounts of money to just pay for the administration that could be better spent, with small boards and direct, close at hand oversight by a local board.

I agree most with your last paragraph, and I also have to point out that the "diversity industry" in this country isn't helping any school district to educate their students or make more effective use of their limited budgets. What it has done, in my view, is create another level of bureaucrats and spawned a cottage industry to keep them in the pipeline.

We have diversity consultants, we have diversity workshops, we have diversity counselors, we have Special Assistants to the President on Diversity (who are paid six figures), we have lawyers who specialize in diversity law.

Harvard Medical School has an "Office for Diversity and Community Partnership" where they are actively seeking new job applicants in many areas and have managed to create an entire division of the University based on the two meaningless codewords "Diversity" and "Community".

If you really study it, one of the things you quickly come to realize is that "diversity" actually is a code word for "post-graduate money making opportunity using federal funds."

At Harvard, you can read about one of their initiatives, described thus:

Executive Council on Diversity
Established by the Dean in 1998 to find strategies to enhance diversity, in its broadest sense, in the student, faculty, and staff bodies, and to facilitate collaboration among the ongoing efforts in diversity in the Harvard Medical institutions.

What do these people do? Nobody knows.

I misspoke, there are actually some people who do know what they do, and I'm one of them. One of the things they do is to serve as unofficial "helpers" for people who would like to get into a college they couldn't otherwise get into.

You send an email to them, they talk with you on the phone, submit an application, the Dean closes her door in a meeting with the Special Assistant to the President on Diversity and presto! within a few months, there are a few people who would never have been accepted to the school that mysteriously wind up as freshmen, and bump a few other more highly qualified students out.

Now that's not "affirmative action" because nobody uses those words too much when it comes to the Admissions process any longer. Instead, they have closed meetings with Diversity consultants, followed up by closed meetings with the Admissions Committee, and finally concluding with a meeting in the Director of Admissions' office.

See?

industry, there is no way our country will be comfortably diverse enough, because the people that have banked their careers on diversity will have to look for new jobs.

Basically, they can't declare everything fixed, because they will then have no job (which is why O'Conner's "there won't be a need for preferences in 20 years is smoke and pipe dreams, because the diversity industry won't ever allow things to be better).

Liberals have figured out that there is a way to defy the laws of physics: perpetual motion machines *can* exist and actually *do* exist: if you have a sufficent number of people who will support them from one generation to the next, you can just make them keep working, and working and working.

It's easy!

I don't know how much a federalist argument would help these two school districts. After all, the Equal Protection Clause applies specifically to the states - whether the action is judicially imposed (points 2 & 3), legislatively enacted, or locally adopted. The pertinent provision states that "No State shall . . . deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of laws." 14th Amendment, Section 1. That amendment was specifically meant to deal with race based distinctions by States, no matter which branch of the State thought it was a good idea. The 14th Amendment altered federalism in this respect - so the federalism based argument doesn't work as well.

nt