More worthy than Justice John Paul Stevens's long-winded rant dissenting from Parents v. Seattle School District was Chief Justice John Roberts's one-sentence aphorism: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." In the name of Brown v. Board of Education, which eliminated a government-devised racial formula for schools, Stevens endorses the idea of government-devised racial formulas for schools. There and then, in Topeka, Kansas in 1954, the formula was black children go here, white children go there. In Seattle in 2007, the formula is more complex than Topeka's in 1954, but it still obsesses over race to produce a desired outcome for a classroom's racial make-up.
Maybe this will stop the traveling circus of white parents moving from place to place to escape the black school districts.
"Oh, the schools are really good there".
TRANSLATION: "The schools are good because we're so far away from any of the poor black areas, they can't bus them in here. The only blacks we have here are rich blacks, and they pretty much behave."
So what's the problem? Isn't that their choice? Gee, wouldn't want to live anyplace where people behave.
Roberts is a genius.
It's so simple, it's brilliant.
Stevens seems to have a "difficult relationship"* with the obvious.
*I heard Carl Bernstein say today
that he wouldn't call Hillary a liar but she
had a "difficult relationship with the truth".
I almost choked on my Diet Dr. Pepper.
This issue really highlights how, when it comes to race, the liberal gang of four on the court will always place liberal ideology before the rule of law. Only a strained, ideologically skewed interpretation of the law could allow the view that the liberals embrace--despite the plain requirements in the constitution and civil rights act for color blindness, race can be considered to promote the vague, undefinable and legally unworkable concept of "diversity". To the extent this term has any meaning, it appears to mean some optimum racial balance in our schools that liberals are comfortable with. Meanwhile the liberal elites in this country hole up in their suburban enclaves and send their kids to private schools. Yet they continue to preach to us about the "resegregation" of America.
Breyer, Stevens, Ginsburg and Souter are more ADVOCATES/LAWYERS than judges. They advocate policy positions in line with the liberal political and social agend REGARDLESS OF WHETHER THESE POSITIONS ARE SUPPORTED IN THE TEXT OF THE LAW, HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY, OR THE COURT'S PRECEDENT. Judges are supposed to evaluate a dispute dispassionately and without any ideological predispositions.
The media went out of its way to report Justice Breyer's pretensious decision to read his dissent from the bench, as if we're REALLY supposed to pay attention now. Memo to Justice Breyer: your Cambridge, Massachusetts Constitution is an ideologically tainted imitation of the real thing.
The Dem's panderfest/"debate" at Howard University this week shows what's at stake in '08. Each candidate denounced the Court's decision in robotically similar terms.
I love love love John Roberts.
Breyer's dissent is a doozie too. It really highlights the arrogance and apparent unconcern of the Court for the Constitution, the separation of powers, and indeed the rule of law.
