The distant rumble of revolution grows louder by the day. Our Supreme Court has now taken up three landmark issues; abortion, the 2nd Amendment, and race preferences, a trifecta of political third rails. The Railer recounted his lived experience with racist anti-racism here, and welcomes these long overdue judicial reviews.
This new affirmative action challenge combines two cases from Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Justice Robert’s Court, finally, appears poised to clean up the legal and philosophical messes left by liberal, “living constitution,” jurists. The Railer’s train of truth is barreling down the line. Six originalist jurists may finally demolish that broken semi-truck full of liberal legal flotsam that is stuck on the tracks.
Let’s start with basics. The Supreme Court is not infallible. They endorsed slavery in Dred Scott v. Sanford. They imprisoned innocent Japanese Americans in Korematsu v. U.S. They blessed racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson. They prohibited private (gay) sexual relations in Bowers v. Hardwick. In Kelo v. New London the Court said it was fine to take your property, by force, for a private developer’s profit. The Supreme Court is not all wise, nor all knowing. Flawed humans with personal and political agendas often get it wrong. When libs cry “but this is now precedent, stare decisis, we can’t change it,” The Railer counters that slavery was also Supreme Court precedent.
Maise Hirono, D-Senator Hawaii, one of the dimmest libtards in Washington will help pick our next Supreme Court Justice. Here’s her deep thought:
But I’d like a justice who also will take into consideration the real-life impact of the decisions he or she will be making.”
That’s a very dangerous standard but typical of the left. Who decides what “real-life impacts” are good and which are bad? In our system, those decisions belong in the legislative branch. Justices once thought slavery and racism were beneficial “real-life impacts.” The Railer wants a Justice who will follow the law, as written, as understood by the founders, and expanded by elected lawmakers. We don’t want unelected black robed fools weighing “real-life impacts,” especially when they’re as uninformed as affirmative action token Justice Sonya “Pinocchio” Sotomayor.
Outcome-based judging at all levels has created a mess, one often contrary to our founding ideals. Liberal justices are the worst because they live by the Machiavellian-cum-Marxist maxim that the end justifies the means. DimJoe supports the Marxist/Progressive approach and said “The Constitution is always evolving…” That’s just wrong. It evolves when The People pass Constitutional Amendments, a process our Founders deliberately made difficult. A liberal’s Constitution is whatever they say it is, whatever they want. They find magic emanations and penumbras, channeling Joseph Smith with his “seer stones,” to support their desired outcome.
Problem is, once you do that, the words and intent of law and the Constitution lose all meaning. Lower Courts are obliged to follow muddled missives from higher courts, applying created fictions in unanticipated spheres. Caselaw chaos spreads. Law and precedent turn sour fruit of a poisoned tree. Natural rights require government permission. That’s the place we find ourselves on racial discrimination today.
The Railer remembers the promise of the 1960’s, the hope for a new era of equal opportunity. MLK said:
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
The Railer embraced that ideal. It felt right, it is right, and Americans agreed overwhelmingly. Then what happened? Democrats flipped their discrimination script, from oppression of people-of-color to arbitrary promotion. Racism still, but oppressor and victim trade places.
The Supreme Court put their seal of approval on this new, “good,” racism. Their 1978 ruling in California v. Bakke admitted that the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause forbids explicit racism and quotas. Good so far. Five justices then added that race “as a factor” was permissible. Could race be a 100% factor? Nope. But 99.9% might be fine. Decades of arguments were sure to follow, and they did.
In 2005’s Grutter v. Bollinger, a slim majority reaffirmed that race could be a “plus” factor to increase diversity in college admissions. Concurring Justice O’Conner said, “we expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” Such tortuous illogic screams for redress. If it would be unconstitutional in 25 years, it is unconstitutional today.
In 2013’s Fisher v. University of Texas, the Supremes added a nuance, that racial discrimination must be “precisely tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest.” While again acknowledging the 14th Amendment, the Court offered an opaque standard to negate it.
Along this long, pot-holed road, a few Justices vented their disgust:
Chief Justice Roberts: “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” And: “The way to stop discriminating based on race, is to stop discriminating based on race.”
African American Justice, Clarence Thomas: “[E]very time the government places citizens on racial registers and makes race relevant to the provision of burdens or benefits, it demeans us all.”
Justice Antonin Scalia: “[D]iscrimination on the basis of race is illegal, immoral, unconstitutional, inherently wrong, and destructive of democratic society.”
Let’s consider a familiar example. Why should Obama’s daughters, taught in exclusive private schools, the two most privileged girls in America, automatically move to the front of the education and employment lines? Is it fair that colleges gift up to 400 points to their SAT scores solely because of their dark’ish skin? Why should they receive special treatment to serve on a corporate board, win government contracts, land a promotion, or receive preferential health care? What about that poor white boy from say, a holler in West Virginia? Why does “white privilege” always send him to the back of the bus?
The Railer isn’t the first to pose this very question. In DeFunis v. University of Washington no less than uber-liberal Justice William Douglas recommended a race-neutral admissions policy that would not prefer a wealthy black applicant over:
“… a poor Appalachian white or a second-generation Chinese [American] in San Francisco, or some other American whose lineage is too diverse as to defy ethnic labels, may demonstrate similar potential and thus be accorded favorable consideration by the Committee.”
If the Court finally overturns anti-white, anti-Asian discrimination, liberal Harvard Constitutional Law Professor Larry Tribe isn’t worried. His words echo the Democrat Party’s work-arounds that followed Brown v. Board of Education. That’s the landmark ruling that ended segregated public schools.
“Universities as intelligent as Harvard will find ways of dealing with the decision without radically altering their composition,” Tribe said. “But they will have to be more subtle than they have been thus far.”
You can imagine DimJoe Xiden’s ole’ segregationist buddy and fellow Democrat, George Wallace, saying those same words in 1954. Whatever the court says, Harvard will keep right on discriminatin’ by race. Don’t you love it, a law professor openly calling for lawlessness.
And sorry Professor Tribe, Harvard hasn’t been subtle. Harvard deliberately downgrades Asian applicants through a subjective “personal rating.” Looking at their numbers, Harvard says that most Asians rank low on courage and likability. Harvard can’t reject Asians on merit, so they created a rigged game. Socialists everywhere love caste systems. At Harvard, Asians are the untouchables.
Preferences may open doors for some, but at a price for all. Affirmative action shades all minority achievement. Is your African American doctor a surgeon by talent or skin color? You, the patient, need the answer. Your life may depend on it. But you can’t be sure. Medical schools achieve diversity by lowering standards, replacing higher qualified students with lower ones. Yes, those graduates met the license requirements, passed the tests, but are they the best doctors from the available pool? Are ya feelin’ lucky?
Next time you’re landing in bad weather in the crowded skies of New York City, you can relax. In 2014, the Obama administration ordered the FAA to “move away from merit-based hiring criteria” for flight controllers. Taking a page from the Harvard playbook, they created a subjective measure that lowers the value of objective criteria. Are ya feelin’ lucky?
Are you an employer? Suppose that you have two applicants, equally qualified, one white and one black. You know that circumstances change, that you may have to promote, fire, reward, punish, relocate, or layoff that employee in the future. Change is inevitable. The white employee is at-will. But any controversy with a black employee invites the full weight of the EEOC, state officials, federal officials, third party groups like the NAALCP, BLM, … Who do you hire? Are ya still feelin’ lucky?
Like so many liberal shibboleths, affirmative action often hurts the very people it purports to help. Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal relates devastating facts from a Duke study of its own black science and econ majors.
Mr. Arcidiacono and his co-authors found that among incoming freshmen at Duke who reported a major, more than 76% of black males intended to major in economics or the hard sciences, a higher percentage than among white males. Yet only 35% of black male students went on to obtain a degree in one of these majors, a drop of 41 percentage points. In contrast, the difference between initial and finishing proportions among white males was only 5 percentage points.
These numbers betray several ugly truths. Duke aggressively recruited minorities to these difficult and competitive programs. More than half flunked. Whites, who gained admission by their better-than credentials, did just fine. Duke’s postmortem revealed the obvious. Blacks with sub-standard entrance scores didn’t make it. Minority students admitted on merit however, graduated at the same rates as whites. Duke’s affirmative action programs “gifted” underqualified minorities lost opportunity, student loans, and a stigma of failure. Instead, they could have had success on a campus and program aligned to their abilities.
A bombshell study of American Law Schools showed the same results. Affirmative action admission policies produced fewer black lawyers. Black intellectuals Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Star Parker, and countless other conservatives of all stripes have been screaming these truths for years. But facts can’t overcome elite white liberal’s virtue signaling need for black mascots.
Consider the question from another angle. Suppose a man dons a dress and self-declares as a woman. “Science” is not pliable, he’s still a man. Men and women are biologically different; different organs, brains, muscle, bone, behavior, … Every cell of our body betrays the unalterable truth. Liberals, nonetheless, browbeat us to endorse this farce, that men and women are the same. They claim that sex is merely a “social construct.” Inexplicably, libs have a lesser appetite for gender-based preference programs these days, and transgender crusades will soon make those moot.
Racial differences, however, are subtle; melanin and a few visible tweaks. It recalls an old phrase, “we’re all the same on the inside.” There’s no absolute, definitive, racial yardstick. We fall on a spectrum. Look back far enough and we’re all multi-racial.
Consider Barrack Obama. Flip a coin because he’s 50/50. His mother was a white woman with a fetish for foreign men, his father an alcoholic bigamist communist from Kenya. Obama’s white ancestors were slave owners, his black half rounded them up and sold them. Should Obama pay or reap reparations? He grew up in a wealthy, over-educated white family. Doesn’t he enjoy white privilege? Obama admitted that he “undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action” on the road to becoming our first token-half-black President. Again, is Obama white, or black? Why did he need to elbow aside nameless whites and Asians on his way to the White House?
Here’s a parting, devilish, suggestion. What will the Court do when a presenting white or Asian person declares as transracial? What happens when they say, straight faced, “I’m black,” and demand all due special rights and privileges? The Railer expects that inevitable supernova singularity will bring this whole tangled mess crashing down. That is unless this court does the right thing first, and finally ends government backed racial discrimination.