Posted on 01/24/2003 7:06:10 AM PST by Uncle Bill
HILL OF BEANS
New York Press
By Christopher Caldwell
January, 2003 - Volume 16, Issue 4
No Action
Last week, President Bush submitted two amicus curiae briefs to the Supreme Court, regarding the University of Michigan’s affirmative action program. The controversial admissions program ranks applicants on a 150-point scale, and awards a 20-point "bonus" right off the bat to blacks and selected other minorities. The admissions regime once had two tracks–one for whites and one for targeted minorities–and it protected those minorities from direct competition with the wider pool. The Bush administration, quite correctly, held that this made it a de facto quota system, and thus "plainly unconstitutional."
Supporters of the president have hailed the briefs as inaugurating a new era of race-blind, quota-free aid to the nonwhite. It would replace a bean-counting reverse racism with "what the Army has done," as Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander hopefully put it. But Democrats went berserk. According to Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, the administration has proved itself willing to "side with those opposed to civil rights and opposed to diversity in this country." University president Mary Sue Coleman complained, "It is unfortunate that the president misunderstands how our admissions process works at the University of Michigan."
Alexander, Daschle and Coleman are–in their different ways–completely wrong. The Bush memos are the most important substantive defense of affirmative action ever issued by a sitting president. If the Court accepts the president’s reasoning, it will have rescued affirmative action from what appeared to be a terminal constitutional illogic. More than that–it will have secured for this rickety program an indefinite constitutional legitimacy.
Affirmative action has been fragile since Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978). Back then (if I may simplify), the Court ruled that race-based quotas were illegal, but permitted race to be taken into account as a "plus factor" in admissions. Increasingly over the last two and a half decades the rationale for that plus factor has been "diversity." Diversity, in fact, is the stated rationale behind the University of Michigan’s modus operandi. Unfortunately for proponents of affirmative action, "diversity" has always been a vague concept–and it has never been clear whether, as a matter of law, it was sufficient grounds for flirting with racial discrimination against majorities. In Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education (1986), a plurality found against an affirmative action program justified on the grounds of diversity. And in the current controversy over the University of Michigan, many conservatives–including Florida Gov. Jeb Bush–have taken Wygant as a starting point for rejecting the diversity rationale. In an amicus curiae brief of his own, filed last week, the Florida governor noted: "This Court specifically indicated that such a theory has no logical stopping point, and would allow discriminatory practices long past the point required by any legitimate remedial purpose… Racial diversity is no more compelling a goal in the higher education context than in the context of other institutions or areas of state decision making."
That is not the view of our president. One of his briefs specifically endorses the diversity criterion. It runs: "Ensuring that public institutions, especially education institutions, are open and accessible to a broad and diverse array of individuals, including individuals of all races and ethnicities, is an important and entirely legitimate government objective. Measures that ensure diversity, accessibility and opportunity are important components of government’s responsibility to its citizens." It would be difficult to find a more hardline defense of the doctrine of diversity-for-its-own-sake anywhere in the Democratic Party. It would also be difficult nowadays to name a school that violates these ideals, aside from maybe Bob Jones. (Didn’t the president campaign there once?)
This is where the president’s brief gets tangled up in either its own illogic or its own dishonesty. The White House, again, is appalled by "quotas," and it has a smoking gun to prove that Michigan was using them. From 1995-’98, Michigan had an actual, explicit quota system. And in discussing the program that replaced it after 1998, the university admitted openly that it wanted, in the brief’s words, to "change only the mechanics, not the substance, of how race and ethnicity were considered."
The problem is, this is precisely what the administration wants to do itself. Nowhere does it express the slightest gripe about the demographic or academic outcomes generated by Michigan’s race-focused policies. Indeed, it promises solemnly to replicate them. It merely wants to obtain those results without saying the dirty word "race." So it recommends a set of bogus procedures that lead to exactly the same end. "[U]niversities may adopt admissions policies that seek to promote experiential, geographical, political or economic diversity," write the President’s Men. Universities can also "modify or discard facially neutral admissions criteria" [in other words, board scores and grades] "that tend to skew admissions results in a way that denies minorities meaningful access" [in other words, admission] "to public institutions."
"The government," according to the brief, "may not resort to race-based policies unless necessary." It sounds like Bush is arguing that race-based policies are always necessary–since elsewhere in his brief he says that diversity is "an entirely legitimate government objective." That is indeed what he’s arguing for, but more disingenuously than, say, Bill Clinton would have.
Bush, to let him make the case in his own words, wants to use "race-neutral alternatives" to achieve exactly the same race-conscious results that Michigan has been obtaining for years. And he has a "race-neutral" model in mind: the "affirmative access" program he initiated while he was governor of Texas. Under this program, the top 10 percent (by grade point average) of students in every high school in Texas are automatically admitted to any state university they choose. This tends to produce college-admissions results that mirror the ethnic composition of the state. But the reason it produces affirmative-action-compatible results is that the state’s schools are so heavily segregated–if they were integrated you would have the same problem of whites being disproportionately represented in that "talented tenth." (Other problems include overcrowding and plummeting academic standards at the state’s flagship Austin campus, but that’s another article.) As Terrence J. Pell of the Center for Individual Rights argues, such programs are not really race-neutral; rather, they involve "reverse engineering the admission system to get a certain racial outcome."
The fancy, legalistic way of describing what Bush’s Texas program possesses and what Michigan’s lacks is "narrow tailoring." Old-fashioned affirmative action, the Bush reasoning goes, uses the broad-brush criterion of race. "Because it operates much like a rigid, numerical quota," the brief says, the university’s "policy imposes unfair and unnecessary burdens on innocent third parties." Bush-style "affirmative access," by contrast, directly attacks the real problem, which is kids who are for socioeconomic reasons stuck behind the eight ball, regardless of what race they belong to. But on closer examination, Bush’s policy imposes just as many burdens; it merely makes those aggrieved innocent third parties harder to identify and help. The working-class black kid who finishes 29th in a class of 300 at a lower-class school full of dropouts may not be a rocket scientist, but he’s got it made–he’s off to Austin. The identical working-class black kid whose parents have made the fatal mistake of enrolling him in a challenging school full of overachievers and who finishes 31st in a class of 300…well, he’s destined to a life working at the car wash.
"In light of these race-neutral alternatives," the president complacently concludes, the University of Michigan "cannot justify the express consideration of race." This sounds like it’s anti—affirmative action, but the "express consideration of race" that Bush pretends to deplore is a synonym for frank consideration of race. And that is all the difference between affirmative action and Bush’s phony alternative. The Bush plan achieves everything affirmative action does, only less honestly. In so doing, it manages to give affirmative action not just a new lease on life, but a good name. "In light of these race-neutral alternatives, respondents cannot justify the express" (in other words, honest) "consideration of race."
Bush to Propose Funds for Black, Hispanic Education
Bush Administration Defends Affirmative Action
Rush Limbaugh says the affirmative action brief still keeps promoting race preference and its bad
"In other words, more color-coded government"
Bush's affirmative action ambush: Ilana Mercer contends president clings to faulty logic
Condoleezza Rice Partly at Odds with Bush on Race Case
Powell Says He Disagrees With Bush on University of Michigan Affirmative Action Case
Affirmative Action Faces a New Wave of Anger
Bush Adviser Backs "Use of Race" in College Admissions
Affirmative action: Its time is long past
Two More Myths About Affirmative Action (Almost Clintonian approach) Cornell Review
Bush: My Quotas Are Better Than Yours!
Bush's Affirmative Action Briefs Walk Fine Line
Bush brief to high court doesn't tackle affirmative-action ruling
Bush administration skirts key legal question in affirmative action case
Same caste, different plantation.
It's a lot harder, especially over the last few weeks, to discern the difference between the two parties. It was like the Democratic and Republican DNA went through some kind of strange political meosis and what resulted was a rush to expand spending while cutting taxes while not questioning the long-term impact of combining both. Someone please kill this political Frankenstein with an axe.
This is why L's will never exceed 1%.
You are the friggin' freak.
The only thing that will dislodge GWB as the GOP nominee in 2004 would be tapes of he, Cheney and Rumsfeld concocting false tales about WMDs. Since everyone else believed the Iraqis had them for years, that ain't gonna happen. It's pointless to talk about replacing Bush - but it's highly productive for the conservative base to tell Bush in NO uncertain terms that he and the elected GOP members of Congress screwed up over the last two weeks, and they better work to undo the damage and quit pretending that cutting taxes while increasing spending is no big deal. And it needs to be made clear that they cannot automatically count on the conservative vote - otherwise, they will take us for granted and kick our principles around like an old can.
And isn't that exactly what we're doing?
In my history, Bush is easily the 3rd most conservative candidate for President -- trailing only Ronaldus Magnus and Barry hizzelf. There is no #4 worthy of mention.
That he is not as conservative as I might like does not mitigate that rather profound development.
Similarly, the current Congress is easily the most conservative Congress I can recall. Comparatively speaking, the GOP-controlled Congress in Ike's first two years was probably more liberal. Sure, it's flawed, way less than perfect.
But, remember, Congressmen are politicians -- not ideologues.
By this little political biography, you can discern that over the past fifty years, our national politics (and the federal government) have travelled a long way...in the wrong direction.
We're not going to change the direction of the national political discourse by abandoning the more conservative alternative, thereby giving the liberal alternative license. That kind of thinking is counter-productive. But we can only change it by steadily deflecting the conservative alternative further and further to the right.
And the only way to accomplish that is to work from within. I.e., in exactly the same way the radical leftists took control of the Democrat party...
Jim Rob is right.
As long as we say we will remain faithful GOP voters and pull the elephant lever every election no matter what the GOP does to us, why will they give us anything more than lip service when we bitch about the last few weeks? They know we'll be back next election, like battered wives who can't say no and leave.
I think it is mistake to take off the table the threat to bolt the party if things get bad enough. Black Dem voters did that and now the Dems take them for granted. We should learn from that mistake instead of emulating it.
Take out your angst in the primaries -- support the conservative candidate. Then, support the GOP candidate in November. Because, even if he's a RINO, he's bound to be more conservative that the 'Rat.
Keep turning right.
Never help the left. Ever.
There ain't gonna be a presidential primary this year.
Keep turning right. Never help the left. Ever.
I wish Bush would take your advice.
Don't you have any local or state primaries? If not, go down to the local committee and raise hell. Beat up an alderman, body slam a district chairman or something...
"I wish Bush would take your advice."
I'll tell him. Soon as he asks...
Sorry, but I don't believe in kicking the dog when I'm mad at someone else. Bush and the GOP Congress did this, they will be the target of my ire.
I'll tell him. Soon as he asks...
He doesn't need to get it from you. There are millions of fiscal conservatives who are all screaming at the moment. Rush Limbaugh, hardly a radical right winger, is aghast at this approach. He's gonna lose his base if he ain't careful.
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