Posted on 01/21/2003 11:55:21 AM PST by mrustow
We really think that the question of admission to a State University should be a matter for a State to decide. We opposed Federal intervention when the attack was on segregation and we oppose Federal intervention when the attack is on forced integration, for the sake of integration. The reason is that we do not believe that the 14th Amendment was ever validly ratified, and all of these cases on either side of the battle over racial patterns are brought under the assumption that it was. (See the comments on the same in Conservative Pot-Pourri.)
On the question of race and intellectual aptitude, the answers are not quite so simplistic as the discussion, here, would suggest. While there are unqestionably differences in the overall averages of the different tested performances of many racial and ethnic groups, there is considerable variation in areas of excellence, also. Because one has an overall high I.Q., does not mean that one is a master of all mental traits; nor does the fact that one has a considerably lower overall I.Q., mean that one is necessarily deficient in all important mental traits.
There is a great deal that may be done to help the individual child, regardless of his overall makeup, utilize his own particular aptitudes in the most advantageous way. What needs to be done, first, is to get the political and social dogmatists out of education; and to staff each school, regardless of its racial character, with teachers who will really care to address the needs of the individual children in that particular school. That is what needs to be done; but we are not so foolish as to hold our breath until it is done. Meanwhile, public education becomes more and more a waste of time for children of all races.
William Flax
Here is where he and many others make the fatal mistake. Bubba-2 is NOT a conservative. He doesn't even really claim to be one. He claims to be a "compassionate conservative" so that he can lay claim to being a leftist and a conservative at the same time. What he really is is a elitist/royalist. He is more comfortable with Teddy Kennedy that he would be with Ron Paul.
Of course. He is talking out both sides of his mouth,lying in a effort to convince people on both sides that he agrees with them. Why else do you think I call him Bubba-2?
Most conservatives are not fooled!
Sorry,I can't agree,here. Seems like there are a awful lot of Bush-Bots who worship the ground he walks on,and they consider themselves to be "conservatives". Of course,he is one blowjob away from losing their love. He can give America away to Mexico and China,and they don't give a damn,but let him get one blowjob and he would be history.
Here is where he and many others make the fatal mistake. Bubba-2 is NOT a conservative. He doesn't even really claim to be one. He claims to be a "compassionate conservative" so that he can lay claim to being a leftist and a conservative at the same time. What he really is is a elitist/royalist. He is more comfortable with Teddy Kennedy that he would be with Ron Paul.
I respectfully disagree with your charge that George W. Bush (aka Bubba-2) is "NOT a conservative." He certainly is a conservative. There is a little place in his brain that is clearly marked, "conservative." Right between the places marked "socialist" and "pragmatist," respectively.
Which is why the President got into Yale based upon its "legacy admissions policy."
As for the small part of his brain that is labeled as "conservative",I'd be willing to bet the part of Homer Simpson's brain that is labeled "Butterfinger" is bigger.
From the January 19, 2003 Dallas Morning News:
The president refuses to take a stand on affirmative action.
by Terry Eastland
01/20/2003 12:00:00 AM
ON WEDNESDAY, President Bush announced that his administration would file briefs in opposition to the University of Michigan affirmative action policies now before the Supreme Court. Bush apparently would be taking, as one news account put it, a "hard-line" position.
But then, late Thursday night, Solicitor General Theodore Olson filed the briefs. To be sure, they ask the court to declare the Michigan policies unconstitutional. But they do so in a way that hardly can be called "hard-line." In fact, by avoiding key issues in the litigation, the briefs would permit the illegal and immoral business at the core of the Michigan policies--using race (and ethnicity) to favor and disfavor applicants.
The administration argues that the race-based admissions policies (one is at the undergraduate school, the other at the law school) are unconstitutional for two reasons. First, they employ quotas. And, second, school officials resorted to race-based policies without first using "race-neutral alternatives."
The administration's arguments go only so far. If the court should accept the administration's advice, no one should be surprised if admissions officers at Michigan soon are back to admitting by race.
Consider the quota argument. Twenty-five years ago in the Bakke case, the court reviewed a California medical school admissions policy that reserved 16 of the 100 seats in each class for members of certain minority groups. The court judged that a quota and struck it down. The administration wants the court to see Michigan in terms of Bakke, advising that the school's policies use quotas that, though "disguised," are illegal under that landmark ruling.
When Bakke was handed down, David Saxon, then the president of the University of California, greeted the decision as a "great victory." He explained, "Any ruling that introduces restriction on the use of race is going to make it more difficult but not very much more difficult." Saxon could say that because, in Bakke, the court also permitted race-based admissions, provided they weren't quotas.
Saxon quickly was proved a prophet, as higher education officials continued to use race in admissions, sometimes with "disguised" quotas such as those the administration rightly deplores in the Michigan cases. But who can doubt that if "disguised" quotas now are struck down, such a "restriction on the use of race" again will "make it more difficult but not very much more difficult" to admit by race?
The question the administration studiously avoids--the question insistently raised in affirmative action litigation in no fewer than four different courts of appeals--is whether indeed a public university may reward or penalize prospective students on the basis of race.
Amazingly, the administration has no opinion on whether Justice Lewis Powell, who wrote the influential opinion in Bakke, was right to say that, under the Constitution, it is OK for admissions officers to regard race as "a plus" that can "tip the balance" in an applicant's favor.
Nor does the administration have an opinion on the constitutionality of the so-called diversity rationale Michigan asserts to justify its racial policies. Here again the administration avoids Powell, for it also was in Bakke that Powell said that achieving a diverse student body qualified as a "compelling interest" of the kind necessary under the Constitution to permit a state to draw distinctions--and discriminate--on the basis of race.
The administration's avoidance of Powell on this point may be regarded as ingenious, since it argues, fairly enough in light of the court's precedents, that regardless of the merits of a state's asserted justification for race-based policies, it may not use them "without considering race-neutral alternatives and employing them if they would prove efficacious."
But the argument, however creative, cuts only so deep. It says only what Michigan must do first. What if, the court having ruled as the administration suggests, Michigan were to use "race-neutral alternatives" but found they weren't "efficacious"? It then could use race-based policies.
A footnote in one of the briefs ponders that eventuality: "Then [but not now!] the question whether race could ever be a consideration would arise." To answer that question, of course, you would need to know, as the footnote says, whether Michigan had a truly constitutional compelling interest. Which is to say: whether the diversity rationale is constitutional. The footnote ends, "The court need not reach that question in this case."
But the court probably will reach that question. The courts of appeals are divided over diversity, and the court is unlikely to have taken Michigan only to punt the big issues - as, to its discredit, the administration has. Staying out of the cases would have been better than entering them with so little to say.
Terry Eastland is publisher of The Weekly Standard.
The are going to give reparations before Bush is done I fear..
I'm wondering if he read The Bell Curve, or alternatively what he thinks 'genetic evidence' is.
That's one of those 'two wrongs make a right' arguments, isn't it?
I only know that they act that way.
I'm not 'enlightened' enough to argue pro/con for this subject. I come from the 'dinosaur age', where college admissions/grades achieved/effort involved, did NOT come in different colors.
If Michael Jackson can check the "black" box (or would he be checking the "white" box?) then anyone can.
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