Rich Lowry has a terrific column today on what, in other circumstances, the Democrats would be describing as disparate impact discrimination. (And I say that, really, not simply because Lowry’s column echoes points I’ve made here, here, and elsewhere.)
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This doesn’t make Democrats racist, sexist, or any other -ist.
Au contraire that is exactly what it makes them. The mistake Lowry makes is to use the dictionary definition of racism, i.e., one who thinks his race is superior to other races. However, if you look up the
Wow, Richard, that definition is indeed awfully broad, especially the “purpose or effect” part. (“Purpose,” sure, but “effect”?) Read literally, it would seem to define as “racist” nearly every tool of international activism, including “divestment,” boycotts of particular nations’ exports, refusing to visit particular countries on principle, scholars’ refusing to establish relations with scholars in particular countries (cf. the latest dimwitted boycott of Israeli universities by British ones), &c. Is not all this obviously national-origin discrimination? Or is there a subsidiary clause saying that you can disparage people from other countries, harm them economically and culturally, &c. as long as they haven’t taken up residence in your own, at which point you are now a racist?
In fact, by this definition, Castro is an obvious racist, discriminating on the basis of national origin: if you are anything but Cuban (a Canadian tourist, an American filmmaker, whatever), you can freely leave the country, but if you are Cuban, you can’t. I confess I hadn’t quite thought of that particular tyranny as “racism,” but there you are; you learn something new every day.
Yes Michelle, I agree with you. It does define almost any action that has a disparate effect on different racial groups as racism. But what else would you expect from the UN? However, it does have what I assume to be an unintended effect of defining affirmative action as currently practiced to be racism since affirmative action clearly is a
Richard,
It does define almost any action that has a disparate effect on different racial groups as racism. But what else would you expect from the UN?
Well, not something that, on its face, makes the constitutions and systems of law of many member nations officially racist. I mean, good Lord, think of India, think of Malaysia. (And don’t let’s get started about Uganda.)
But the thing is that something like a racial/caste divvying-up of everything from college scholarships to seats in the parliament is not going to be deemed to infringe this, because the intent is to put disadvantaged castes “on an equal footing,” rather than to deny others the “equal footing.” The same argument will go for affirmative action wherever practiced.
Re the stalled judges, I just can’t see this as racism. It’s just very obvious cold political calculation. Owen, as Lowry correctly says, doesn’t seem to be an “extremist” of any kind, and the repeated mention of her votes on the long saga of Texas parental-consent law is only a way of hinting not-so-subtly that she wants to overturn Roe. Maybe she does, for all I know; but she could hardly do it by herself.
Miguel Estrada is an even sadder case, because there seems to be no evidence at all that he’s a conservative “extremist” beyond his membership in the Federalist Society (i.e., he bears the Number of the Beast on his forehead). The problems with him are that he is young, extremely smart and articulate, “has no paper trail” (and you have to know that they must have looked hard for one; if they found no damaging cases to wave, there were likely none to find), and last but not least is a Honduran immigrant who started here basically from scratch.
Janice Rogers Brown is just a little different in that she has said some provocative things, not in her judicial opinions so much as in speaking engagements. In particular, she has more or less implied that a lot of the New Deal ought to have been struck down as unconstitutional under the then-current understanding of the Interstate Commerce Clause.
The weird thing is that I know the same argument has come from the Left end of legal academia. I don’t remember who it was who coined “Constitutional moment” — Mark Tushnet, maybe? — but the gist of the phrase was that at certain historical crises, the Court would radically reinterpret the Constitution, the people would acquiesce in the reinterpretation, and therefore we had, de facto, an amended Constitution, although the words had not changed. The New Deal cases were one such crisis.
In other words, unless I’m much mistaken, the only difference between Janice Rogers Brown (who called the line of New Deal cases she was disparaging “our own Socialist revolution”) and the lefty side of legal academia is that they approve of what happened and she doesn’t. Neither side disputes that a radical change in interpretation happened then. (FDR proposed adding a bunch more judges to the Supreme Court; the existing Justices changed their minds about a lot of things with alacrity. It’s not known who first called this the “Switch in Time That Saved ‘Nine’.”)
We democrats will never allow conservatives to place qualified women and/or minorities on high courts. We are the voice of women and minorities, not conservatives. The pubbies had better withdraw those uppity women and minorities from nomination. Otherwise we democrats and the democrat controlled media will roast them over a slow fire.
Michelle,
The reason you can