David Broder, the Mr. Establishment columnist at the Washington Post, is neither moderate nor subtle in his defense of racial preferences. Nor, I might add, does he seem to understand them, or the argument against them, very well.
Last week he reported that he was “stunned” by a question from Justice Scalia during oral argument in the Michigan cases.
If diversity is so important to you, Scalia told the university’s lawyer, lower your standards to the point that more minority applicants can qualify. Not only is that derogatory in its implications, but it is strikingly inappropriate from anyone who purports to believe in pure meritocracy. Today neither Michigan nor The Post lowers its standards to admit minorities. They look for minorities within the large pool of qualified applicants.
Broder was appalled that anyone would think preferences require lowering standards, implied that the only basis for opposing them is a committment to “pure meritocracy,” and found the thought of abandoning them “contemptible.”
Lower the standards? And deprive this country of the quality that a great university (or, if I may say so, a great newspaper) can contribute? That is a contemptible alternative.
Broder is certainly entitled to his opinions. There is no obligation for columnists, or the pages on which they appear, to be fair and balanced, or even to represent fairly the viewpoints they condemn. And indeed, his screed is useful because it does reveal and reflect the self-congratulatory morally superior sanctimoniousness that drives the attachment to preferences in what used to be called (and was called here in my first sentence) the “establishment”: leading universities, big media, Fortune 500 companies, the upper ranks of the military. Broder, you see, is a leading light, and thus anything that causes a “light bulb to flash above [his] bald head” — as being exposed to those of different races and genders in the newsroom often has — must be good, even if requires giving the state and employers the privilege of engaging in racial engineering.
Broder’s views on the desirability of promoting “diversity” by racial engineering understandably color his views on judges and judging. In his column yesterday, for example, he contrasted the quick approval of Judge Edward Prado of San Antonio to the 5th Circuit with the resistance to Miguel Estrada. “The story of why one Latino Republican has such an easy time while another creates such controversy is an instructive tale,” Broder writes, “and one with hopeful implications.”
Despite the fact that Prado, appointed to the district court by President Reagan, has frequently issued conservative rulings, the Hispanic Caucus sent a letter supporting him. Listen to Broder’s favorable comment about their support:
Rep. Charlie Gonzalez, a Texas Democrat and co-signer of the letter, told me that he had known Prado for almost 40 years and “he has everything you want in a judge — he’s smart and articulate, he’s not arbitrary, and he really understands people. Some of his rulings I would take issue with, but when the caucus interviewed him, he talked honestly about cases that have impacted minorities and he made it clear he knows how important the courts have been to us. It was so different from our hour’s conversation with Estrada, who conveyed no sense of what we would think a Latino should appreciate about the historical role of courts in bringing us to where we are today and where we need to be tomorrow.”
It sounds as though Prado was better at smoothing feathers (kowtowing? groveling?) than Estrada, but what is most striking here is Gonzalez’s, and presumably Broder’s, view that Hispanics owe their past and future progress in this country to the courts.
If courts are the engine of progress for minorities, then of course judges are really political representatives and leaders. Sure enough, Broder concludes:
But the lesson seems obvious. Conservatives can be confirmed for the courts when they are well known in their communities and a broad range of their constituents have reason to think them fair-minded.
How quaint that we used to think, before we knew better, that judges had no “constituents” and that the community they were to serve was everyone. That was back in the old days. But this is now, so how do we know what the “constitutents” of these judges in “their communities” believe? Luckily, we have interest groups and caucuses to tell all the Broders, and all the Broders to tell us.
Lucky us.
If you carry this idiocy to its illogical conclusion, then every court nominee must be “approved” by the ethnic or racial group to which he or she “belongs” (in the sense of being owned by the supra-organism of the group) to ensure that they are not race traitors. If this is true, then are Lithuanian American judges, for example, required to go before the Lithuanian American Board of Ethnic Solidarity to be stamped “loyal to the group”? And if whites (or Asian Americans) are unduly harmed by affirmative action that should necessarily be opposed? Or should they be required to be race traitors?
I was waiting for someone to blog on Broder’s idiotic column from last week. Thnx.
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