More Wreckage

You have law and then you have ideology, which trumps. As a result you have the  U.S. Supreme Court decision knocking down Seattle's school racial-balancing plan. Nicholas Lemann lays this out in The New Yorker this week. The long national nightmare - George Bush's perversion of not only Iraq but social justice and common logic - has gotten approval in the one place it can, the friendly conservative high court, where a majority sees red. Lemann cites, as we did in an earlier post, Chief Justice John Roberts' simplistic statement, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." Snap, it's done. The reality is the Seattle (and Louisville) school-assignment plans were implemented because discrimination isn't going to come to a sudden wishful end. Justice Clarence Thomas' assertion of a color-blind Constitution is an equally grandiose concept that, when used to justify dismantling beneficial integration programs such as Seattle's, is itself an injustice. As Lemann writes:

Justices Thomas and Stephen Breyer [the latter wrote the long dissent in the Seattle case], argue for two clashing ideals: a ‘color-blind Constitution' and integration. Neither of these ideals has been more than briefly and episodically descriptive of reality, or has served, except momentarily, as the principle around which the politics of race was organized, because, alas, not many realms in American life have been either truly color-blind or truly integrated...

The country, Lemann adds, "has slowly ratcheted back a host of policies aimed at the twin goals of black advancement and racial harmony, but it has not abandoned them - and, until now, neither has the Court. In the legislative branch the Administration's preference for simple, moralistic formulations is foundering. In the Supreme Court it is alive and well. The Court would do well to contemplate the landscape of the Administration's wreckage before it considers any other radical solutions, and sweeps away an accumulated body of law and experience."