“Activist Judges”

Funny how the Right is always bloviating about “activist judges” whenever issues like gay marriage are on the table…

But there’s deafening silence from them when the conservative majority on the Supreme Court rips the guts out of Brown vs. the Board of Education.

Sure, they didn’t actually overturn the landmark anti-segregation decision — that would be a scandal even the Corporate Media couldn’t ignore. So instead, they merely made it irrelevant by their new decision.

Again, 5-4. Get used to that number, kids. It’s going to be the sound you hear repeatedly as more and more of the cornerstones of this nation are blown away….

6 Replies to ““Activist Judges””

  1. I know one thing: I can’t get enough of the word “bloviating”. Even if one didn’t know its precise definition, the mere sound of reading that word tells volumes about the subject to which it’s applied.

    5-4 seemed to come about before the Roberts/Alito era. Hell, 5-4 blocked the Y2K election recount. Scary.

  2. Man, today is just full of crap news, isn’t it. I’ve already written my representatives about the REAL ID thing being slipped into the immigration bill (another No Child Left Behind-style unfunded federal mandate requiring the states to pick up the tab for a projected $30 Billion mandatory national identification program… can anyone who has seen the effects of NCLB or had to deal with the *passport* mess really support this stuff?!) and the White House ignoring congressional subpoenas.

    We’re fucked.

  3. This case actually has little to do with the principle set forth in Brown (which prohibited states from segregating schools on racial lines and in the process overturned Plessy’s separate but equal principle). This case found unconstitutional two districts’ programs that used race as a determinative factor in achieving a targeted racial balance designed to roughly reflect, in each school, the overall demographics of the entire district.

    Importantly, in the case of the Seattle district, there was no history of past segregation in the district. And in the case of the Kentucky district, the district had been found by a district court to be “unitary” some years ago (meaning, it had been operating under a consent decree to desegregate and the decree was lifted when the court found that the vestiges of segregation had been eliminated). That takes away one of the two recognized “compelling state interests” for race-baced admissions — namely, remedying past discrimination in the district. That leaves only creating a diverse student population as a legimate compelling interest, and the majority ably demonstrates why that doesn’t fly with these programs.

    My sensibilities are with the democratic party and I’m convinced Clarence Thomas is a buffoon, but the majority got this decision, on these facts, exactly right. Breyer’s dissent is, candidly, embarrassing.

  4. Well stated, sir. I agree. Chief Justice Roberts also put it well: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

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