THE US SUPRME COURT CONTINUES TO MAKE A BAD NAME FOR THEIR LEGACY

…The conservative high court continues to decide against most of America.

 

Affirmative Action could be in real trouble at all the public universities.

 

If anybody thinks that the current US Supreme Court is going to go down in history as an insignificant high court, they haven’t been paying attention.

 

First, we got the second ever black justice, Clarence Thomas, who tends to go to sleep on the bench and seldom has anything to say but “no”. 

 

His wife Ginni. an American attorney that had previously founded the conservative advocacy group Liberty Central, and she had previously worked at the right-wing Heritage Foundation.  Her lobbying activities have occasionally been raised as a conflict-of-interest problem for her husband.  (You can expect for her to start causing even more problems when the 2016 elections get closer.)

 

Today, Justice Thomas is so lazy, he seldom does anything but mimic the conservative Justice Scalia’s votes, and then Clarence just goes back to sleep.

 

The latest Chief Justice has also been ostracized by other conservatives for actually agreeing that the Affordable Care Act was not unconstitutional.  But Chief Roberts did get these conservative’s approval by supporting the Citizens-United 5-4 decision which is today blamed for the massive negative changes in America’s elections.  This was the conservatives in the court’s decision that made it even more clear that “those with the most money will win the most elections”.

 

The high court has also decided 5-4 that there is no longer such a thing as racism in America, therefore they proceeded to emasculate the Voting Rights Act.

 

Both the conservative Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito have more than once done and said things that fortunately for them, their appointments to the bench are “life-time” appointments.  Had they done and said some of the things they have said as elected officials, they would have been tarred, feathered and ridden out of town on a rail.

 

Well, now it’s happened again as the Supreme Court is considering the charged topic of “affirmative action in US colleges”.  In this discussion, it seriously exposed the deep chasm between the reality of race relations on campus and the out-of-touch perspective of these old, conservative justices.

 

As was recently stated by a course counselor from a major mid-western university: “Minority students too often feel like intruders on majority white campuses, unwelcome and disrespected. They have too few student peers and even fewer faculty role models.”

 

This statement has been the explanation given by some for the current wave of college protests. It’s true that minority students have sometimes been uncivil in their campus debates and they have overreacted to perceived slights.  But the justices have totally discounted the importance of open debate on campuses.  These debates have been determined as the past foundations of academic college success.

 

Last week, the high court heard oral arguments in a case that challenges the affirmative-action program at the vast University of Texas.  If the challenge is successful, it could remove affirmative action for allowing minorities entrance into public universities nationwide.

 

For some background, The University of Texas was totally segregated until 1950.  But it has continued to  grapple with segregation issues for decades. After an earlier affirmative action program was invalidated in 1996, African American enrollment dropped from 309 students in 1995, to only 190 in 1997.  That was out of a total freshman class of 7,085.

 

The Texas answer to this was that the legislature adopted a program to grant automatic admission to those in the top 10% of their high school class.  This was supposed to be a race-blind approach that relies for its effectiveness on the state’s past questionable pattern of residential segregation. Even so, the program’s success was debatable because only 3.4% of the 2002 freshman class was African American.

 

This latest brouhaha in Texas all started when Ms. Abigail Fisher, a white woman who did not qualify for admission under the top 10% program, sued the state, .  She claimed that the race-conscious admissions violated her constitutional rights.

 

Ms. Fisher has since graduated from Louisiana State University and is working as a financial analyst, which raises the legal question of, “So, how were you so injured by this process?

 

Unfortunately, the liberal Justice Elena Kagan is recused from the case because she was previously involved as the solicitor general in support of affirmative action.  The four conservatives on the bench do not agree with affirmative action.  So as usual, Justice Anthony Kennedy is once again torn between his dislike of affirmative action and his aversion to causing social upheaval.  Needless to say, if Kennedy goes with the other conservatives, the three remaining liberal justices will once again be overwhelmed by the conservatives and college affirmative action will be in serious trouble.

 

To the conservative justices, they see the white students as the aggrieved parties.  Justice Scalia, has asked colleges to “stop disadvantaging some [white] applicants because of their race.” All the conservative justices hate the benefits of a diverse university campus.  As an example, Chief Justice John Roberts asked, “What unique perspective does a minority student bring to a physics class?”   It appears that all of the conservatives want out of having to deal with this issue.

 

However, the stuff really hit the fan last week when Justice Scalia made a highly disgusting comment.  What was so alarming is that he made the statement as if he thought his thinking was a reasonable way to look at someone of a different race.  It was like hearing what we have read in history books about how the past slave owners thought of the slaves as being less of a human being than a white person.

 

Scalia had the gall to suggest that minority students would be better off at “a slower-track school where they could do well.”  This was instead of the minority student having to compete against better-credentialed white students at more elite universities. “I’m just not impressed by the fact that the University of Texas may have fewer [minorities],” Scalia offered. “Maybe it ought to have fewer.”

 

What in the hell does an un-elected judge have to do in pronouncing social policies from the bench of the US Supreme Court for a public university?  Since when does a sitting high court judge, that decides about the constitutionality of laws and acts, have anything to do with this kind of issue?

 

The Texas university’s lawyer, Gregory Garre, has responded with, “Now is not the time and this is not the case to roll back student-body diversity in America.”

 

The decisions on this case will not be announced most likely until next June.  But a lot of people are seriously concerned that if Kennedy goes with the conservatives, this nation could erupt in student protests and riots all across the country.

 

This court has already caused too much damage to this country with stupid decisions such as Citizens-United and by messing with the Voting Rights Act.  Do we really want to add to the turmoil and hate-speech that will be the result of a decision that probably should not even be decided by this group?   Do these conservatives really want to be responsible for making the ability for minorities to obtain something that has become highly essential, that much more difficult to attain?

 

Apparently, they do.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2015