In his “Full Court Press” column in today’s Washington Post, Charles Lane, perhaps inadvertently or under the pressure of deadline, describes the upcoming Seattle and Louisville racial assignment cases accurately and hence in a manner favorable to the plaintiffs challgenging those policies:
At issue are programs in Louisville and Seattle, which seek to ensure that the student bodies of public schools reflect the cities’ ethnic composition. White parents have challenged the policies in court, arguing that their children were denied admission to their preferred schools because of race.
Lane is correct. The policies in both cities are designed to achieve “racial balance” of a sort (Louisville would require schools to be composed of no less than 15% nor more than 50% minorities), and in both the fig-leaf of “diversity” is either absent, skimpy, or painfully transparent. For the purpose of school assignment even multi-racial, multi-ethnic Seattle simply divides all students into “white” and “non-white,” with no interest in the varied composition of the “non-white” component.
If the Supreme Court agrees that these policies implement nothing more than naked racial balancing, the plaintiffs will almost surely win, for, at least in the past, the Court has emphasized time and again, as the U.S. Solicitor General’s brief makes abundantly clear, that “outright racial balancing” is “patently unconstitutional.” The conclusion that “outright racial balancing” is “patently unconstitutional” was reaffirmed, believe it or not, in Grutter. As the Solicitor General explains,
Absent the need to remedy a prior constitutional violation and the kind of diversity identified in Grutter, a goal of “assur- [ing] within [a] student body some specified percentage of a particular group merely because of its race” cannot justify the use of race in making student placement decisions. Bakke, 438 U.S. at 307 (opinion of Powell, J.). Indeed, as this Court has repeatedly admonished, “outright racial balancing” is “patently unconstitutional.” Grutter, 539 U.S. at 330; Croson, 488 U.S. at 507; Bakke, 438 U.S. at 307 (opinion of Powell, J.). As the Court explained in Freeman: “Racial balance is not to be achieved for its own sake. It is to be pursued when racial imbalance has been caused by a constitutional violation.” 503 U.S. at 494; see Missouri v. Jenkins, 515 U.S. 70, 118-123 (1995) (Thomas, J., concurring).
The swing vote on these cases is likely to come from Justice Kennedy, and as he wrote, dissenting in Grutter: “‘to extend offers of admission to members of selected minority groups in proportion to their statistical representation in the applicant pool’ is ‘racial balancing.’”
The Solicitor General’s brief also provides a much-needed reminder of how far American race policy has veered away from the principle enunciated in Brown, and by implication he calls upon us to return to that principle:
In Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) (Brown I), the Court held that intentionally classifying students on the basis of race violates the Equal Protection Clause, and declared the ultimate remedial goal in eliminating such de jure segregation to be “achiev[ing] a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis.” Brown v. Board of Educ., 349 U.S. 294, 300-301 (1955) (Brown II).
Finally, the U.S. has filed an excellent brief in a race case.
I have a suspicion that there may be some political considerations stiffening their resolve on this latest quota issue.
They may see that the blue collar white vote is a swing vote, unlike that of the disadvantaged minorities.
Likewise the ‘soccer moms’ in the literal sense are parents of white male schoolchildren, who have tendencies to go republican for family reasons, and democratic through some influence of their education, or whatever makes them prefer soccer to the sports of the multitude. The close races are mainly in that industrial belt from NE to the upper midwest, where minority means black.
It could be that the administration wants to avoid watergate type investigations, more now than they want to make a splash with some tranzis’ conferences in Europe.