Hazardous Guesses

In his Chicago Sun Times column, “Hazarding A Safe Guess on the Supreme Court, William O’Rourke confidently makes several provocative predictions (Link via Howard Bashman):

• that Justice O’Connor will retire before Rehnquist
• that her “swan song” will be an opinion narrowly preserving affirmative action, approving the Michigan law schools “narrow tailoring” while rejecting the undergraduate “numbers-based method”
• and that she will do this out of recognition and appreciation of the fact that her own appointment was President Reagan’s “act of affirmative action”

Maybe. But then, O’Rourke seems frequently to outrun his headlights. He says, for example, that the Bush administration has a “taste for serving up judicial nominees with very extreme views, such as the three that Democrats are trying to block: Priscilla Owen, Miguel Estrada and Charles Pickering.”

I thought Estrada was the “stealth candidate” whose views were unknown. If O’Rourke knows what they are, he should call Sen. Schumer’s office immediately, since he doesn’t seem to know. Not that it matters.

O’Rourke doesn’t seem capable of seeing very deeply into the views of those he finds distateful, such as all critics of affirmative action.

Affirmative action is a phrase the right wanted to change into “racial quotas”; its detractors managed to turn it from a positive notion to a negative one. Affirmative action was meant to increase the supply of applicants, especially of women and nonwhites, for all positions; those who want it to end want the supply restricted.

In my view, it was the practitioners and defenders of affirmative action who converted it from its initial positive position — taking affirmative steps to insure that everyone was judged without discrimination — into a set of practices that often were indistinguishable from quotas. It was those practices that changed the meaning of affirmative action, not conservative language marauders.

Finally, O’Rourke’s charge that critics of racial preferences want to restrict the supply of minority applicants is no more than a slur. I hope Justice O’Connor reads his column.