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
Yeah, we want to make sure that the gains made by the GOP Congress in the mid 1990s are not lost. No more new entitlements. No more federal education spending. Welfare reform. Balanced budgets. Yep, if the GOP loses in 2004, we'll lose those gains.
Wait a minute, they're gone already. What gives?
I certainly wouldn't want to see some psycho RAT elected in '04 to go around with crazy enviro exec orders and nominating judicial pinkos, but for God's sake I don't know what to do anymore. We're really in bad shape here. This really, really sux and is hard to deal with. Insufferable even.
We're literally getting beating into the ground by those we trusted and supported. This might sound stupid but I was crying this morning when I read this post, from a poster I don't even know. It hit me like a ton of bricks.
I'm literally sick and tired and see no solution. I really feel as if we're f***ed, in a bad way. It's like an avalanche lately.
JimRob, after this week, I don't know if your concept of first electing the GOP to power and then trying to change them from within can work. We're taken two steps forward on your plan, and all we have to show for it is a deficit approaching a half trillion dollars, and a GOP Congress and a President who can't say no to the Democrats.
Any more the only choice seems to be between a bigger frying pan or a bigger fire...
"Nature will take it's course."
Did you make a mistake or delete the wrong post? If not, why on earth did you delete that?
So what are we getting going this route? Expansion of Medicare and the de facto gutting of welfare reform with the expansion of the child tax credit to those who don't pay taxes? All in two weeks? And all made possible with the support of the GOP? What do we have to look forward to next week? This is getting absurd. Clinton won elections by stealing issues from the GOP. Bush seems to be trying to do the same by stealing Dem issues - but he already is in control of the House and Senate, HE DOESN'T FRIGGIN' NEED TO BE DOING THIS TO WIN!
We gotta start yelling really loudly or else there won't be anything left to restore except the smoking ruins of a failed welfare state.
What are you going to do if the Liberals implement Universal Health Care and the massive tax increase it will take to fund it? What did those who cried when Bush reneged on his Read My Lips promise do after Clinton showed them what a real tax increase looked like?
Clinton and the Left were enabled when Bush 41 took economic conservatives for granted.
I don't understand the particular compulsion to rationalize that fact away, but I don't deny it's attractiveness to many in this forum.
What did those who cried when Bush reneged on his Read My Lips promise do after Clinton showed them what a real tax increase looked like?Recall out loud the aid and comfort given to their efforts by President Bush 43's prescription drugs vote-buying scheme.
Bush 41's lost constituency showed up at the polls in '94 to demonstrate to the go-along/get-along RINOs why they shouldn't be taken for granted.
The thought of having Rangle in charge of ways and means or a Gore-like goon empowering enviro-freaks is a horrid thought. The alternative is to continue to eat it and get to the same point with the GOP, just a little bit slower. Or maybe even faster by the looks of things lately.
Tell you the truth I don't have the answer, neither do you or JimRob, despite his attempts to provide leadership. He's just as confused and frustrated as the rest of us.
As you know, that's wrong. It was the Ideologically Correct Conservative who dropped the ball big time in '92 when they put ideology over country. When Conservatives screw up, everybody gets hurt.
Sure there is, appeasing the Left isn't the only option for the GOP.
Jim is right.
There are no magic bullets.
The next step is to squash the Democrats like cockroaches at the polls.
Then, we start on the RINOS.
All the while keeping a close eye on what emerges from the ashes of the left -- which might actually be turned to our favor. A triumphant GOP will never buy into term limits. But a renascent (and reconstituted) Democrat party might buy into the concept...
The GOP is effective when they provide conservative leadership, as Reagan did and as the takeover in '94 showed.
This person we have in the Whitehouse is no leader and no conservative. He's given the liberals and socialists more than they ever could have dreamed.
Don't even get me started on his useless punk brother. God help us if THAT jackass moron ever gets anywhere near the Whitehouse. The Bushes care about their asses first, everything else comes second, just as all blueblood Rockafellers do. This is fact.
OK then, I'm with you. We go to work now and remove GWB in the primaries. Perfect solution, I'm dead serious too.
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