Academia, Constitutional Law, Politics, Society

Supreme Court Declares States Can Bar Racial And Other Preferences In University Admissions

Supreme CourtI was just on CNN discussing the decision in Schuette v. BAMN, reversing the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and declaring that the citizens of Michigan have the constitutional authority to prohibit racial and other preferences in university admissions. We addressed this case this term in my Supreme Court class and the students voted not only in the same way as the majority today but predicted this result. What was surprising was the vote — 6-2. Only Justice Sotomayor and Ginsberg voted to upheld the Sixth Circuit.

This is clearly a breakthrough decision for those who have opposed racial and other preferences in admissions. In the past, these issues have inevitably ended up in the courts as the final arbiter of the constitutionality of affirmative action programs. Now, the Supreme Court is saying overwhelmingly that citizens can make these decisions for themselves. It creates a clear avenue by which affirmative action could be curtailed by direct action of the voters — bringing clarity that many have sought for decades of conflicted judicial rulings. Seven states have similar rules but this decision is likely to encourage others to follow suit.

Justice Kennedy wrote the main decision, which limited the political-process line of cases represented by Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District. Kennedy stressed that “This case is not about how the debate about racial preferences should be resolved. It is about who may resolve it.” In the view of the majority “[t]here 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. . . Democracy does not presume that some subjects are either too divisive or too profound for public debate.”

Justice Scalia wanted to go even further and get rid of much of that jurisprudence. However, this decision is potentially sweeping enough for most of the justices. Chief Justice Roberts and Alito joined Kennedy though Roberts filed a concurring opinion. Thomas joined with Scalia in his concurrence in arguing to go all the way in gutting the political-process line of cases. Justice Breyer concurred in the judgment while Justices Sotomayor and Ginsburg dissented. Justice Kagan probably would have joined in that dissent but recused herself. Even with Kagan however the vote would still have been lopsided at 6-3. Instead, it stands at 6-2. That is a sharp departure from the historically razor thin margins in cases like Grutter, Gratz, and others.

Sotomayor wrote a 58 page dissent (longer than all of the other opinions combined) and objected that the Court needed to limit voters because “without checks, democratically approved legislation can oppress minority groups.”

At 58 pages, Sotomayor’s dissent was longer than the combined length of the four opinions in support of the outcome.

In our vote, the Supreme Court seminar voted 11-4 in favor of reversing the Sixth Circuit and 11-4 in predicting that that “other Supreme Court” would also reverse. The United States Supreme Court (while producing multiple opinions) proved less ideologically divided in the outcome than the Sixth Circuit. On the lower court decision upholding the dismissal of the action, the eight judges in the majority were nominees by Democratic presidents while the seven judges in dissent were appointed by Republican presidents.

Here is the opinion.

689 thoughts on “Supreme Court Declares States Can Bar Racial And Other Preferences In University Admissions”

  1. Guest, I like her also. We all have biases. I copped to one on the child porn post yesterday. I give her a pass because this is part of her life story. You can’t forget that when you put on the black robe. I grew up a Yankee fan in Ct. But, I became a hater when I moved to KC and lived through those classic playoffs in ’76-78 and 1980. Ah, the sweep of those Yanks in 1980 and the camera catching King George in a hissy fit. Remember Brett taking the Goose into the upper deck? You will never know just how joyous that was in KC. I had some good friends from Jersey who were there. They told me when Brett came up a chill went through the crowd. He was a Yankee killer and NO ONE could throw a fastball passed him.

  3. Hi Feynman:

    Blocking the Keystone Pipeline will not keep tar sands oil off our land. We already buy 20% of our oil from Canada, much of which is tar sands oil, which we refine here. So tar sands oil is already trucked across our land and shipped across our water. The pipeline was simply a statistically lower risk means to do so.

  4. Nick-Very true. If you read Sotomayor’s dissent (I like her by the way; she’s a die hard Yankees fan!), it’s very impassioned, but the legal reasoning is weak. In some ways it reminded me of the Prosecution’s closing in the Trayvon Martin case: All emotion, but not a lot to back it up.

    1. keebler – in arizona you can make good money paying other peoples taxes. They have 3 years to pay you back, with interest. Your cite only kicks in if no one pays the taxes.

  6. keebler – maybe it works that way in your state, but it is a little different here.

  7. Guest, Great point. But knee jerkers don’t have the ability for complex reasoning. They dig in their heels and scream, “RACIST.” Obviously, Breyer is as racist as Thomas and Scalia.

  9. See, you missed the point. If the government decided that they wanted the property you live on, they could take it. You really have no say, except for compensation. If you don’t pay your taxes to the taxing authority, it can be posted for sale for tax liens. You have a right of redemption, but, you’ve lost it until you pay them. If you don’t pay the taxes the new owner can demand possession and then evict you.

    You really own nothing if you think about it, just a better right to its possession than someone else.

  11. An excellent article by Jeffrey Rosen (not exactly a right wing extremeist) on this issue: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117484/schuette-decision-supreme-court-supported-precedent

    “Liberal defenders of affirmative action should embrace Breyer’s reasoning, rather than reluctantly tolerating it. The framework provides a principled reason for criticizing conservatives when they resort to judicial activism to strike down state policies that permit affirmative action. As Breyer wrote: the Constitution “favors decisionmaking though the democratic process. Just as this principle strongly supports the right of the people, or their elected representatives, to adopt race-conscious policies for reasons of inclusion, so must it give them the right to vote not to do so.”

  12. Paul S spent some significant number of years teaching. I’ll assume that was all in AZ. Of course, any connection between that and that AZ has a surplus of citizens with……ummm…..unusual ideas is simply coincidental.

  13. Remember those killing machines in the movie “The Terminator”? They were probably owned by the Corporations before the became sentient. Just saying.

  14. Ah yes, I forgot the push to humanize corporations and give them more rights than flesh and blood humans do.

  15. IPCC latest report finds cost of going clean energy, i.e. rejecting pollution as a way of life, is not much at all:

    But there is one piece of the assessment that is surprisingly, if conditionally, upbeat: Its take on the economics of mitigation. Even as the report calls for drastic action to limit emissions of greenhouse gases, it asserts that the economic impact of such drastic action would be surprisingly small. In fact, even under the most ambitious goals the assessment considers, the estimated reduction in economic growth would basically amount to a rounding error, around 0.06 percent per year.

    What’s behind this economic optimism? To a large extent, it reflects a technological revolution many people don’t know about, the incredible recent decline in the cost of renewable energy, solar power in particular.

    (NYT).

    What is very deadly expensive is dirty oil, dirty coal, and dirty nuclear. It costs millions of lives annually AT THIS VERY MOMENT.

    Got murder?

    1. Dredd – you got figures to back up those millions of deaths you are claiming?

  16. We appear to be going back to the bad old days as quickly as those on the right can make it happen. Stripping of abortion rights, resegregation, insertion of religion into our laws, voter suppression, destruction of the social safety net, while tax loop holes abound for corporations, armed insurrectionists fight for squatters rights for their cattle on federal land, the forcing of dead women to be used as an incubater. When critical mass gets hit, it won’t end well.

  17. Paul Schulte

    Read the article and then read the stand the Bundy’s are taking against the US government. Texas has warned the BLM to slow down in its state and there is talk in Arizona of restarting “The Sagebrush Rebellion”
    =========================
    They, like the others who do not know they are racists, are making the same stand based upon ignorant imagination about what symbolic racism is and is not:

    “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

    “And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

    (Bundy Spreads The News). Hmmm, the book comes to mind: “WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” …

    “Some people … are corporations.”

    1. Symbolic racism is another artificial construct for liberals to feel good about themselves.

      Arizona gave the nation Janet Napolitano.

  18. Elaine – someone else had linked to the NYT and I was complaining about them at the same time. 🙂

  20. “Segregation Now: The Resegregation of America’s Schools”

    by Nikole Hannah-Jones
    ProPublica, April 16, 11:01 p.m.

    http://www.propublica.org/article/segregation-now-the-resegregation-of-americas-schools/#intro

    “Sixty years after the Supreme Court declared an end to “separate but equal” education, many schools have moved back in time, isolating poor black and Latino students in segregated schools. ProPublica investigates Tuscaloosa schools, among most rapidly resegregating in the country.”

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