Affirmative Action Battle Moves on to the Military

By Daniel Greenfield July 25, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

One of the Biden administration’s big arguments for racially discriminating against white and Asian students in college admissions was the need for military diversity. More than half of the ‘national interest’ section in its amicus brief argued that the military “depends on a well-qualified and diverse officer corps” which requires that colleges select for diversity over merit.

“It is not possible to achieve that diversity without race-conscious admissions, including at the nation’s service academies,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the Supreme Court.

The Roberts decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard shot down affirmative action as a legal practice, but punted on the question of racial discrimination within the military and its service branch academies. A footnote briefly stated that, “no military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context. This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.”

The idea that racial discrimination should be illegal at colleges, but still legal at service branch academies like the Air Force Academy and the Naval Academy, is a loophole. Justice Sotomayor argued that the exception proves that “the Fourteenth Amendment does not categorically prohibit the use of race in college admissions.” And it’s hard to deny her reasoning. Either racially discriminating against students is legal or it’s illegal. National security can only go so far to justify an illegal practice especially when it’s a social element with an indirect effect.

Democrats quickly attacked Justice Roberts for seemingly leaving the carveout on military diversity that the Biden administration had demanded as a matter of national security.

“Adding insult to injury is that the Court exempted military service academies, like West Point and the Naval Academy, from its own ruling,” Rep. Elissa Slotkin complained. “So the majority on the Court does in fact recognize the inherent importance of a diverse military and that diversity makes our country not only more fair, but more stable and secure — but they refuse to allow our colleges and universities to hold the same values.”

“This decision is deeply upsetting but outright grotesque for exempting military academies. The court is saying diversity shouldn’t matter, EXCEPT when deciding who can fight and die for our country,” Rep. Jason Crow tweeted, inverting an illegal racial preference into a disadvantage.

Justice Roberts’ footnote and the outcry from Democrats and Republicans over the status of service branch academies suggests that affirmative action at service branch academies may have to be revisited at some point. Meanwhile some members of Congress are acting.

Senator Roger Wicker, a ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, plans to introduce his ‘Military Merit, Fairness, and Equality Act of 2023’ as an amendment to the defense bill which would “prohibit the Department of Defense from prioritizing the demographic characteristics of service members above individual merit and demonstrated performance.”

The senator has said that as part of that his amendment “would further prohibit our military service academies from engaging in race-based affirmative action.”

This legislation isn’t likely to advance in a Democrat Senate, but may be the beginning of an important conversation. Affirmative action did not arrive in the military yesterday, it has been around for far too long, but in recent years it has escalated to an alarming degree.

In May, an exclusive investigation by Front Page Magazine and the David Horowitz Freedom Center revealed that Air Force Chief of Staff Charles Q. Brown Jr., Biden’s nominee to succeed Milley as the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had signed off on a quota that would keep the number of white male officers in the Air Force down to only 43%.

Even before Senate hearings on Brown’s nomination get underway, the American Accountability Foundation filed a complaint against the Air Force boss on the grounds that “General Brown has made statements in favor of making hiring and promotion decisions in the Air Force based on race.” It notes Brown’s public statements such as “I hire for diversity” and “I purposely build my office, my front office, and my team with diverse” backgrounds.

Military officials have stated publicly that service academies “employ race as a factor in recruiting and admission policies and decisions.” This is illegal, but there’s a reason that it’s been the trump card of proponents of this form of systemic racism. Many things get a pass when national security is introduced into the equation. National security has been used by the Biden administration to argue that abortion and transgender procedures on children should be legal. The Biden military brass have chosen to halt confirmation of 150 nominees, including the new commandant of the Marine Corps, rather than abandon its allegiance to abortion.

While the Biden administration has no interest in winning any wars, it wants to fight its culture wars using the military. Service branch academies have become battlegrounds on issues such as BLM and the LGBTQ movement. The Biden administration has also led a purge of alumni and conservatives from boards, including from the Air Force Academy and the Naval Academy.

Chief Justice Roberts may have wanted to avoid addressing racial discrimination at service branch academies, but it is an inescapable question. Unlike Harvard and Yale, there isn’t a sympathetic high-achieving minority group in the crosshairs. Asians are seen as underrepresented in the military and especially the officer corps, but their numbers have been growing sharply.

Asian students and candidates generally suffer from racial preferences in academic settings, but the military is still a case where they are seen as statistically underrepresented and less likely to be impacted by affirmative action. That is another reason why the Left would like to take the battle over systemic racism in college admissions into the service branch academies.

A legal battle over racial discrimination in and around the military would have white people as the victims. And not only white people, but poor white people. As the Biden amicus brief notes, “West Point, for example, reports that its efforts to emphasize socioeconomic status have actually reduced racial diversity”. What that means is that providing special preferences to poor kids reduced ‘diversity’ by helping poor white candidates. The same people who form the backbone of the active duty combat military. Discriminating by race is required, the Biden administration implicitly admitted, to keep poor white kids down in the ranks.

Those are the same poor white kids taking jobs at an Amazon warehouse or a fast food place instead of risking their lives for a military brass that wants them to be ready to die without hope of rising in the ranks to a real career because they were born with the wrong skin color.

There is a compelling moral case to be made for ending racial discrimination in the military. And an even more compelling national security case. Senator Wicker noted that, “a recent survey found nearly 7 in 10 active members believe the armed forces are being politicized and that this would affect whether they encourage their children to enlist”. The Biden administration claims that it needs to racially discriminate for national security, but its racism harms national security.

The Supreme Court needs to have the courage to do to systemic racism in the military what it did to systemic racism in civilian higher education. A nation, a society and a system cannot endure half-slave and half-free, half-racist and half-equal. It’s time to end military racism. 

 Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. 
Thank you for reading.

Ten Reasons Why Affirmative Action Died

By Victor Davis Hanson July 12, 2023 @ American Greatness

The end of affirmative action was inevitable. The only surprise was that such intentions gone terribly wrong lasted so long.

First, supporters of racial preferences always pushed back the goal posts for the program’s success. Was institutionalized reverse bias to last 20 years, 60 years, or ad infinitum? Parity became defined as an absolute equality of result. If “equity” was not obtained, then only institutionalized “racism” explained disparities. And only reverse racism was deemed the cure.

Second, affirmative action was imposed on the back end in adult hiring and college admissions. However, to achieve parity, remediation early at the K-12 school level would have been the only solution. Yet such intervention was made impossible by teachers’ unions, the rise of identity politics and government entitlements. All were opposed to school choice, self-help programs, critiques of cultural impediments, or restrictions on those blanket entitlements,

Third, class, the true barometer of privilege, was rendered meaningless. Surrealism followed. The truly privileged Barack and Michelle Obama and Meghan Markel lectured the country on its unfairness—as if they had it far rougher than the impoverished “deplorables” of East Palestine, Ohio.

Fourth, affirmative action supporters could never square the circle of proving that racial prejudices didn’t violate the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the text of the Constitution. What they were left with was the lame argument that because long ago the 90% white majority had violated their own foundational documents, then such past bad unconstitutional bias could legitimately be rectified by present-day “good” unconstitutional bias.

Fifth, supporters never adequately explained why the sins of prior generations fell on their descendants who grew up in the post-Civil Rights era. Nor could they account for why those who had never experienced institutionalized racism, much less Jim Crow apartheid or slavery, were to be compensated collectively for the suffering of long-dead individuals. No wonder 70% of the American people in many polls favored ending affirmative action including a half of African-Americans.

Sixth, there never was a “rainbow” coalition of shared non-white victimhood—a concept necessary to perpetuate the premise of white privilege, supremacy, and rage, so integral to race-based reverse discrimination. More than a dozen ethnicities earn more per capita than do whites.

Asians have been subject to coerced internment, immigration restrictions and zoning exclusions. Yet on average they do better than whites economically and enjoy lower suicide rates and longer life expectancies. The arguments for affirmative action never explained why Asians and other minorities who faced discrimination outperformed the majority white population. As a result, affirmative action ended up discriminating against Asians on the premise they were too successful!

Seventh, no one ever explained when affirmative action was to apply. Blacks, for example, were vastly “overrepresented” in merit-based professional football and basketball. Yet no one demanded “proportional representation” to address such “disparate impact,” despite underrepresentation of all other demographics.

Yet if blacks were “underrepresented” in baseball, then reparatory measures were supposed to address that fact—even if Latino players were “overrepresented” and whites “underrepresented as well. No one in our race-obsessed culture, of course, objected that white males died at twice their demographics in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Eighth, in our increasingly intermarried mass-immigration society, few could adjudicate who was what, or much less what standard gave one racial preference. In lunatic fashion, pink, blond Senator Elizabeth Warren became Harvard’s first “Native American” law professor due to her “high cheekbones.” Light-skinned Latinos were considered marginalized while some darker Italians or Greeks were not.

Ninth, an odious wokism absorbed affirmative action and changed it into something even more abhorrent—as the original spirit of the Civil Rights movement was trashed. So Americans were asked to stomach a return to distasteful segregated dorms, “separate but equal” graduation ceremonies and racially exclusive workshops.

Tenth, and finally, affirmative action was insidiously destroying meritocracy. That hallmark American value of tribally-blind inclusivity had once explained why the nation outshone the world by discarding the old class prejudices of Europe. But increasingly this value seemed to have been abandoned.

When Stockton Rush, the late captain and inventor of the ill-fated Titan deep-sea explorer was quoted postmortem bragging that his company had no need of “old white guys” with long military expertise in submarining, Americans realized that woke racial discrimination was not just repulsive but could get you killed.

A nation whose pilot training, medical-school admissions, and military high command promotions were increasingly adopting racial, gender, or sexual-orientation essentialism was a country headed for the sort of Third World tribalism characteristic of failed states abroad.

In the end, the court finally stepped in to end this unconstitutional aberration, more like the old Soviet commissariat than our ideals of equality under the law.

The American people concurred. And the only regret seemed to be why not sooner? About Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump and the recently released The Dying Citizen.

Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Dog-Whistle

July 10, 2023 By Mychal Massie @ Daily Rant  

The easiest way to identify a hopelessly lost cause is to listen to the gurgitation of idiocy coming from those advancing and/or sponsoring said cause.  A prime example of same is/was, the outrageous claim written into her dissenting opinion by associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), Ketanji Brown Jackson in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.

In what appeared to be a last ditch effort to give a single digit salute to the other six Associate Justices of SCOTUS whose decision effectively ended melanin-coded affirmative action as consideration for admission Jackson threw everything at the wall hoping something would stick.

Her attempt to redeem an unfair, racist practice of disqualifying students based on the absence of melanin, was fair and realizes equality. She argued: “diversity saves lives” and is essential for “marginalized communities.”  She asserted that diversity is for the “betterment” of students and society at large beyond college campuses.

She wrote: “For high-risk black newborns, having a black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.”  A ridiculous opinion prostituted in an amicus brief filed by lawyers representing an association of medical colleges postulating that for “high-risk black newborns, having a black physician is tantamount to a miracle drug; it more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live,” (See: 2020 Study that examined mortality rates in Florida newborns between 1992 and 2015.)

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Attorney Ted Frank, a senior attorney at Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, destroyed Jackson’s poorly constructed dissent rightly observing: “So we have a Supreme Court justice parroting a mathematically absurd claim coming from an interested party’s mischaracterization of a flawed study. Her opinion then urges ‘all of us’ to ‘do what evidence and experts tell us is required to level the playing field and march forward together.’  Instead we should watch where we’re going.”

Knowing Jackson’s kind as I do, nothing dissuades me that her mischaracterization was intentional for the purpose of entrenching her bastardized narrative.  However, what has been omitted in the spate of op-eds condemning Jackson’s opinion was her pathetic attempt to craft and indemnify the falsity.

Jackson and those like her would have us forget and/or ignore the fact that the greatest cause of death and harm to so-called black infants are not a shortage of melanin visible doctors, rather it’s the unlimited number of crayon-colored doctors responsible for the murder of 25 million or more unborn crayon-color children.

Arguing from Jackson’s perspective, why isn’t she an outspoken supporter of pro-life causes?  Using her dissenting opinion, consider the following facts: “The aggregate number of melanin visible soldiers killed in military combat in the Korean War, The Vietnam War and every war since 1980 totals 18,515.”  Now, consider that doctors participating in the industrialized systematic extermination called abortion have murdered well over 20 million so-called black children.

Does Jackson know how many of the doctors participating in the satanic practice qualify as a color by her standard for being black?  My obvious point being according to her reasoning so-called black children should be paralyzed with fear and dread of both their mother’s and so-called black doctors.  Unless, she is prepared to argue that so-called white doctors are having abortion mill clinics intentionally set up in the urban neighborhoods for the express practice of being paid, i.e., employed by their mothers to exterminate them. If that is the case, shouldn’t the children be even more afraid of their mothers?

When one considers the juxtapositioning of my argument in conjunction with hers it is clear there are questions that demand answers.

Another thing: Jackson’s sinister and myopic dissent is intended to have this fallacious narrative entered in the SCOTUS public record as talking points for the left-wing lapdog media.  The verbiage of her dissent was nothing more than a “dog-whistle” to the leftwing-crazies.

One must ask why it is that the only way for color-coded liberals to have any hope much less opportunity of elevating their station in life, is to be an extreme zealot?  Jackson’s kind espouses immiseration and hopelessness.  They claim with straight faces: the only way to get ahead is through handouts and the bar of merit being lowered to the point that even rolling over it is viewed as a herculean effort.

There’s no fair way to institute supposed pigmentation-based affirmative action because; ultimately it all comes down to color of skin, which means those with the skin-pigmentation du jour are preferred over others regardless of their qualifications.

Take for instance ‘Joy-less’ Reid, the infamous-whatever-she-is employed by MSNBC.  She admits the only reason she got into Harvard was because of pigmentation-based affirmative action.  Her reward has been to be the face of hate-filled screeds that portray every as racist.  She’s MSNBCs in-house harridan who must forever view everything through a prism of aggrievement, animus, resentment and prejudice.

Even more egregious is that, as I’ve pointed out countless times heretofore, neither program nor country nor business entity can rise and sustain success by instituting policies of employing the least qualified.

 

 

About the Author Mychal Massie

Mychal S. Massie is an ordained minister who spent 13 years in full-time Christian Ministry. Today he serves as founder and Chairman of the Racial Policy Center (RPC), a think tank he officially founded in September 2015. RPC advocates for a colorblind society. He was founder and president of the non-profit “In His Name Ministries.” He is the former National Chairman of a conservative Capitol Hill think tank; and a former member of the think tank National Center for Public Policy Research. Read entire bio here

Affirmative Action: The Left’s Only Answer is to Repay Injustice with Injustice.

By Daniel Greenfield July 11, 2023@ Sultan Knish Blog

The Supreme Court’s decision ending systemic racism in college admission was supported by the vast majority of Americans of every race, color and creed. While the media tried to portray it as an assault by white conservatives and Asians on “diversity” and “people of color”, the number of black people who supported the Supreme Court ruling outnumbered those opposed to it.

84% of white people oppose basing college admissions on race, but so do 81% of Hispanics, 76% of Asians and 71% of black people. Asians rank behind Hispanics in opposing it.

Most Americans recognize the fundamental unfairness of using skin color to decide if a high school student should get into college or work at Burger King. Few leftists however do.

The leading arguments in defense of using racial discrimination in college admissions either reference events in the distant past or complain about ‘legacy admissions’. What these talking points really do is strike at the heart of what is intellectually and morally rotten about the Left.

The Left’s only answer to wrongness is more wrongness.

That is also the point that Justice Clarence Thomas, descended from sharecroppers and slaves, made in his opinion. “Must others in the future make sacrifices to relevel the playing field for this new phase of racial subordination? And then, out of whose lives should the debt owed to those further victims be repaid? This vision of meeting social racism with government-imposed racism is thus self defeating, resulting in a never-ending cycle of victimization.”

The Left proposes meeting one injustice with another. And that is what it has always done. A monarchy must be replaced with a “dictatorship of the proletariat”. It is not enough to end the firing squads of the past, they must be replaced with the progressive future squads of the future. Racial discrimination must be met with racial discrimination, one blow with another, and one evil with another until somehow this cycle of repression will usher in equity and social justice.

The Left’s shift from equality to equity is an inescapable part of this worldview. Equality would require, as Thomas wrote, to follow the path “charted” by the Fourteenth Amendment after the Civil War with “a colorblind Constitution that requires the government to, at long last, put aside its citizens’ skin color and focus on their individual achievements.”

These two pathways toward social justice have fundamental philosophical differences, but also very different roles for government power. Equality would only require as much government intervention as needed to eliminate legal barriers while equity creates an unlimited government with an equally boundless appetite for power fighting an endless war on statistics.

As Thomas writes, “there would seem to be no logical limit to what the government may do to level the racial playing field—outright wealth transfers, quota systems, and racial preferences would all seem permissible.” And indeed that is the system we’ve been living under. It has failed to achieve its stated goals because its true objective is the means, power, not the ends.

And this is inherently true of the Left. It envisions impossible ends to grant itself unlimited means. Its seductive promise of trading one injustice for another allows it to seize power even while making revenge seem like the right side of history. No matter what moralizing rhetoric it wraps its injustices in, they never amount to more than addressing one injustice with another.

These are the limits of the leftist moral imagination which cannot encompass concepts like forgiveness, unity or equality, no matter how much it invokes them, but leans heavily on nurturing grievances. The 1619 Project typifies the perpetual victimology which is concerned with inflating the scale of evils rather than remedying them, feeding off rage and resentment, while moving the goalposts of any proposed solution so far into the realms of the impossible that they can never be remedied and that any progress can be ridiculed as a foolish delusion.

Beneath all the soaring rhetoric, affirmative action was spawned from the same tribal imagination that can conceive of life as nothing more than a series of struggles between good and bad tribes, with no other proposed remedy than for the good tribes to subjugate the bad tribes in repayment for the wrongs done to them. It’s a worldview with thousands of years of history behind it, but there is nothing liberal, progressive or forward-thinking about it.

There is nothing deeper here than W.H. Auden’s “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.” Equity claims to offer a way forward when all it really does is determinedly repay one slap with another, one insult with another, and one form of repression with another. And all of it in a society in which the alleged wronged and the perpetrators have long since been transformed by waves of immigration that postdate not only the Civil War, but also segregation and even the faintest vestige of systemic racism by anyone other than civil rights activists.

At the heart of the Supreme Court case was the question of whether Asians should be made to suffer for what black nationalists and their white allies, who publicly bemoan ‘whiteness’ and ‘white privilege’, have explicitly framed as a racial conflict resolved with ‘tit-for-tat’ discrimination.

But beyond this particular case is the troubling reality that the country, its elite institutions and much of academia is run by men and women who can conceive of no resolution beyond racial warfare, who never reach Auden’s penultimate exclamation, “we must love one another or die.” Given a choice, they choose hate and death as the only possible answer to the sins of the past.

The vaunted moral imagination of the progressive left offers nothing more noble or visionary then the perpetrators of the Rwanda genocide. As an alternative to death, it offers a perpetual state of humiliation and submission, apologies that can never be accepted with no conceivable end in sight. Since the desired power scales to the outrage of the abuses, no matter how much matters improve, they must always be seen to be growing worse. If anything were ever good enough, the authoritarian abuses implemented to make things better would have to sunset.

Equity, unlike equality, is self-eliminating. Like all leftist totalitarian systems, including Communism, it would have to abolish itself if it ever succeeded. And so it never will.

Much like the downfall of segregation, the end of affirmative action revealed that the people in whose name these crimes were being committed were not especially enthusiastic about them. A tyrannical system hiding behind a racial hierarchy cannot compete with the promise of a society in which we are no longer the prisoners of the past, but can look forward to a better future.

Leftist promises of a better future are unconvincing because they are tethered to a racial pessimism. If white people are inherently racist and if, for that matter, as intersectionality contends, we are all oppressors, then what better future is waiting for us? Everyone can be subjected to DEI, unconsciousness bias training, Kendi tracts and struggle sessions, but all they have to offer is the same downbeat message that we are all bigoted down to our DNA, and that our bigotry infects everything, our values, our institutions, our art and even the foods we eat.

Even more than racism, despair is in the air that DEI breathes. Its only positive narrative is that oppressed people of color can find joy in recognizing and resisting the horribleness everywhere. The culture created by the DEI industries is alternately morose and deranged, deconstructing the past, along with any notion of an optimistic future, while venting endlessly about the present.

Americans moved on once and twice before, they’re ready to move on again. The Left’s vision of vengeance as progress, of trading one racism for another, does not appeal to most people.

Justice Clarence Thomas’ message speaks not only for most Americans, but most minorities, including black people. “The solution to our Nation’s racial problems thus cannot come from policies grounded in affirmative action or some other conception of equity. Racialism simply cannot be undone by different or more racialism. Instead, the solution announced in the second founding is incorporated in our Constitution: that we are all equal, and should be treated equally before the law without regard to our race. Only that promise can allow us to look past our differing skin colors and identities and see each other for what we truly are: individuals with unique thoughts, perspectives, and goals, but with equal dignity and equal rights under the law.”

Racialism cannot be undone by racialism, discrimination by discrimination, and abuses by abuses. And yet, whether on race or class, sex or any other division, that is all the Left has to offer. Affirmative action is not a moral hiccup, it is the defining characteristic of the Left. It has no no vision for moving us forward, all it offers is the promise of payback for those filled with rage, of oppression for those held back by mistrust, and power for those who want to repay in kind.

The only progress it can ever conceive of is of the evil variety, to do evil in return. 

 

 Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles.  Thank you for reading.

What is a Normal US Supreme Court?

Dear Mr. President, you just so happen to be wrong.

By: Leesa K. Donner July 02, 2023 Articles, Good Reads, Opinion, Politics @ Liberty Nation News

The left suffered a few critical blows this week at the hands of the US Supreme Court and unsurprisingly, they have begun to whine in earnest. Following a brief speech by the president regarding the landmark decision to end affirmative action, a reporter pitched a softball to Mr. Biden, wondering if the current judicial body is a “rogue court?” After an uncomfortable pause, the president answered, “This is not a normal court.”

It was an odd exchange to be sure. It’s as if he was asked his favorite flavor of ice cream and the president answered, “My favorite flavor is cold.”  Thus we are left to discern the meaning of “normal.” Was it about the work of the court – its output and decisions — or was it that this particular group is conservative and that is not normal?

One might surmise it is the latter because no two courts have been the same concerning output. Each court writes its own story painted by the decisions that reflect that time in American history. There have been so-called liberal (or progressive-leaning) as well as conservative courts throughout the history of the United States. Still, if one uses the conventional definition of normal as more frequent or typical, Mr. Biden is in error.

How so?

A brief review of US Supreme Court history reveals the court’s ideological leanings generally reflect those who nominate the justices. Since presidents make the initial selection and the people elect the commander in chief – the high court’s makeup most often mirrors the American body politic. Simply put, one must win presidential elections if one desires a more progressive court.

A deep dive study* into the composition of past Supreme Courts elucidates this assertion. Most often, US presidents appoint like-minded justices, though there are instances when a justice goes rogue – Associate Justice David Souter, for example. Nominated by 41, Republican President George H. W. Bush, Souter – who eventually resigned from the most significant judicial body in the land – definitely marched to the beat of a different drummer.

In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which prolonged Roe v. Wade until last year, Souter voted with the moderate wing of the court. Then in 2000, the New Hampshire-born associate justice voted in the minority to keep counting the famed “chads.” Still, Souter is an exception to the rule.

An examination of those who have served on the Court shows the longer justices sit on the bench, the more likely they are to deviate from the presidents who appointed them. But as a rule, presidents can extend partisan policy goals past their terms in office by carefully selecting Supreme Court justices. There is serendipity involved because presidents don’t receive an allotment of nominations; the opportunity must present itself either by a justice dying or, more rarely, resigning their august perch on SCOTUS.

Supreme Court Golden Rule: He Who Appoints Wins

It should come as no surprise that justices tend to adhere to the political philosophy of those who nominate them. Simple math shows more Republican presidents equal more conservative judges, and more Democratic presidents equals more progressive justices.

Liberty Nation calculated that from the turn of the 20th century, there have been 13 Republican presidents and nine Democrats. But this only tells part of the story because one must then calculate their years in office. Keep in mind the anomaly of Franklin Roosevelt, who served a (rounded down) 12 years in office and succeeded, together with a heavily Democratic Congress, in changing the number of sitting members from seven to nine. Nevertheless, this calculation reveals Republican presidents held the office for 64 years and Democratic presidents for 58 years since 1900. Now for the payoff: Our statistics reveal Republicans made 39 Supreme Court appointments, while 25 were nominated to sit on the bench by Democrats.

This is evidence of the old adage that elections have consequences. If we consider that sitting justices serve lifetime appointments, one can understand the Democratic frustration with the court. But they must recognize that this is caused by their inability to win the presidency often enough.

This leads one to the conclusion that Joe Biden is factually wrong in stating that this US Supreme Court is not normal because the facts show it is – and this has been the norm for the last 123 years. Of course, there is yet another meaning of normal that we have not explored– that being that this particular US Supreme Court has overturned two landmark decisions and delivered a blow to the Biden agenda.  If this is the reason Mr. Biden does not find it normal, then conservatives might happily find themselves in the unusual position of agreeing with the president.

Read More From Leesa K. Donner

All opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Liberty Nation.

Clarence Thomas, Affirmative Action and the Constitution

By Rich Kozlovich

 

Over the course of my 76 years I've seen a lot of Supreme Court Justices come and go, and most of them I found seriously wanting when it came to understanding what the Constitution said and meant.  Did they really not know? No, they knew, but they needed to find a way to social engineer from the bench so they created what's called Penumbras and Emanations of the Constitution. Neither of which anyone can find in the Constitution.  

 

 "In United States constitutional law, the penumbra includes a group of rights derived, by implication, from other rights explicitly protected in the Bill of Rights. These rights have been identified through a process of "reasoning-by-interpolation", (Interpolation - the insertion of something of a different nature into something else) where specific principles are recognized from "general idea" that are explicitly expressed in other constitutional provisions......." 

 

"In Griswold, Justice William O. Douglas explained that "specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance".

 

What a bunch of gobbledygook to justify their creation of a system of judicial overreach and abuse, abetted by cowardly Congresses that never put a stop to it.  The Constitution gives the Congress the authority to determine the jurisdiction of the federal judiciary,  not the Supreme Court, and it's long past time they started doing so.  They can start by passing a 28th Amendment.  More here on that.

 

The word penumbra originally was a scientific term "created to describe the shadows that occur during eclipses." And I think the word shadows is more than appropriate when its used in relationship with the Constitution.  

 

As for "emanations", that's even more intangible, as it means either:  the act of emitting; causing to flow forth; a theological concept of the origination of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. 

 

Well, I think the last one is the one SCOTUS embraced giving them a divine mission to alter society to their liking, because I don't see penumbras and emanations as anything except an excuse for outrageous judicial abuses of the Constitution and the separation of powers.  Nothing short of inappropriate rationalizations that seem more like mysticism than jurisprudence to me.

 

It was thought Justice Scalia was the real conservative brain and Constitutional scholar of the court, and  Clearance Thomas was merely his cats paw.  I knew better.  I read his book, My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir.  I can honestly say I think Clearance Thomas is the most  illustrious Supreme Court Justice in my lifetime.  The reason why is he's so illustrious?   He adheres to the basic concept of definition.  Definition leads to clarity.  Clarity leads to understanding.  Understanding leads to good decision making.  

 

By defining the issue clearly he avoids convoluted thinking and twisted rationalizations that force more twisted rationalizations down the road.  In short, the Constitution is what is says, not what political hacks in black robes want it to say.

 

Mark Levine's book, Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America, does an excellent job outlining these excesses and twisted reasonings and the problems they cause.

In the article, Clarence Thomas: I’ve Heard Similar Arguments for Affirmative Action in Favor of Segregation, asks for a definition for diversity in college admissions, and the benefits, as Asians are being restricted in admissions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill over Affirmative Action, only they don't call it that any longer, but that's what it is.  The answers aren't impressive, definitive or provable.

There was a reader's comment worth reviewing by an Unknown Author.

Most people don't know it but the road to discriminating against whites began 60 years ago, with President Kennedy's Affirmative Action. I am retired, but was a VP (worked my way up from the bottom) in a billion dollar mainstream Company for 30 years and was constantly told by HR that if the applicants I interviewed were "equally qualified"; hire the Black, the Woman, the Minority candidate, etc., etc.

Then shortly before I retired a dozen years ago the Company hired a Diversity "officer" at the VP level. I was shocked. It usually took people ten to fifteen years to get to that level. Now every Company has one. The Democratic mantra of DEI; Diversity (anti-white), Equity (Socialism) and Inclusion (Trans rights) has become Affirmative Action on steroids and is destroying the whole idea of achievement and advancement through merit. In fact, the whole idea of "Meritocracy" is now considered "racist" and DEI is leading to actual written policies hiring whites last and firing whites first.

Of course it's blatantly illegal and unconstitutional but nobody seems to care. Now they are talking about admissions to college or even medical school being based on race and sexual identity, not standardized test scores. Ditto for hiring Pilots, EMT's, Firefighters, etc., etc. That should work out well. The Supreme Court needs to stop this insanity or our country will become totally run by incompetent bureaucratic ideologues (picked for race, sex, sexual preference or sexual identity) like those that now populate the entire Biden administration.

It appears Clearance Thomas is finally being recognized for the brilliant jurist he is, and is being supported by justices such as Justices Alito and Kavanaugh, who like him actually believe the Constitution is the law of the land and not these mystical indefinable concepts of penumbras and emanations created by people who have no right to do so.  

A small sign of panic at Harvard over pending SCOTUS affirmative action case?

October 17, 2022 By Thomas Lifson

Renu Mukherjee of City Journal noticed what Sherlock Holmes would call a dog at Harvard that didn’t bark. In this is the clue derived from the absence of what ordinarily is expected to happen looks like a sign of panic over the arguments being heard by the Supreme Court in the case brought against the nation’s oldest university by Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff in the case attacking racial preferences in admissions to Harvard College. SFFA argues that Harvard’s policies limit the number of Asians admitted, allegedly over personal characteristics, as opposed to academic qualifications like grades and test scores.

Here is the Crimson canine that didn’t bark:

Every year since 2013, usually during the first week of September, the Harvard Crimson publishes survey results profiling the incoming freshman class, including their political and social orientations. These feature-length reports have consistently shown that a dominant majority of Harvard’s incoming students identify as politically and socially progressive, with ever-fewer students identifying as conservative. This year, however, the Crimson didn’t publish the feature and didn’t reply to my inquiry about whether they would do so.

Why would the Crimson want to stop proving data on the characteristics pof Harvard’s freshman class when the SCOTUS is deliberating the case?...........Evidently, the allegation that racial diversity yields viewpoint diversity is not true now, if it ever had been. Thus, the argument supporting racial preferences is built on sand, and the left-leaning  Harvard Crimson presumably understands this.............To Read More..

My Take - This was just one of the more obvious unconstitutional rulings by SCOTUS legislating and in effect overturned the very foundational principles of the Constitution. 

If you touch these precious leftist concepts, you'll get a screaming fit

October 7, 2021 By Mark C. Ross

Affirmative Action: Obviously a euphemism for institutionalized racism.  Apparently, it's OK to discriminate against people of European descent rather than blindly consider merit.  And in the absence of merit, mediocracy becomes more prevalent.  This is the left's preferred remedy, rather than allow the "clients" of this practice better access to quality education so they can have more marketable skills.

Minimum Wage: Based on the myth that standards of living can be elevated by government edict rather than increases in productivity.................. 

Homelessness: Another euphemism, this time for conspicuous vagrancy.  Now they're using the term "unhoused," while I prefer "street bums."  The explanation proffered for this sacred cow is a shortage of affordable housing.  It just so happens that all housing is affordable, or else it's vacant.  What good is a vacant property to its owner?  Taxes; insurance; and, often, debt service are still being charged..............

Redlining: Politically motivated misrepresentation of homeownership statistics.   A while back, it was discovered that the inner cities, home to the less affluent, had a much lower rate of homeownership than, say, the suburbs.  Duh...................

Organic Produce: Not all that political, but a fair measure of gullibility and the absence of critical thought among its adherents.  The theory behind the nutritional superiority of organic produce is that chemical growth enhancements such as fertilizers and pesticides are toxic to humans.  How?  Why?  Bruce Ames, a biochemist at U.C. Berkeley, developed a test for minute traces of carcinogens in food sources.  He also discovered that when insects bite a fruit or vegetable, the plant naturally produces alkaloid toxins to protect itself from further attacks.  

Nicotine is an example of one of these alkaloid toxins.  Also, "organic" farming relies on animal manure instead of chemical fertilizers — and e. coli contaminations are a particularly common problem as a result.  Might as well also touch on genetically modified produce.  Almost all food is genetically modified — not necessarily in laboratories, but by centuries of selective breeding.  For example, take a cabbage, or Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, or broccoli.  They're all the same plant, just carefully cultivated variants of the original source............To Read More.....

 

Obama: The Affirmative Action President

August 18, 2011  By Matt Patterson @ American Thinker

Years from now, historians may regard the 2008 election of Barack Obama as an inscrutable and disturbing phenomenon, a baffling breed of mass hysteria akin perhaps to the witch craze of the Middle Ages.  How, they will wonder, did a man so devoid of professional accomplishment beguile so many into thinking he could manage the world's largest economy, direct the world's most powerful military, execute the world's most consequential job?

Imagine a future historian examining Obama's pre-presidential life: ushered into and through the Ivy League despite unremarkable grades and test scores along the way; a cushy non-job as a "community organizer"; a brief career as a state legislator devoid of legislative achievement (and in fact nearly devoid of his attention, so often did he vote "present"); and finally an unaccomplished single term in United States Senate, the entirety of which was devoted to his presidential ambitions.  He left no academic legacy in academia, authored no signature legislation as legislator. 

And then there is the matter of his troubling associations: the white-hating, America-loathing preacher who for decades served as Obama's "spiritual mentor"; a real-life, actual terrorist who served as Obama's colleague and political sponsor.  It is easy to imagine a future historian looking at it all and asking: how on Earth was such a man elected president? 

Not content to wait for history, the incomparable Norman Podhoretz addressed the question recently in the Wall Street Journal:

To be sure, no white candidate who had close associations with an outspoken hater of America like Jeremiah Wright and an unrepentant terrorist like Bill Ayers would have lasted a single day. But because Mr. Obama was black, and therefore entitled in the eyes of liberaldom to have hung out with protesters against various American injustices, even if they were a bit extreme, he was given a pass.

Let that sink in: Obama was given a pass -- held to a lower standard -- because of the color of his skin.  Podhoretz continues:

And in any case, what did such ancient history matter when he was also articulate and elegant and (as he himself had said) "non-threatening," all of which gave him a fighting chance to become the first black president and thereby to lay the curse of racism to rest?

Podhoretz puts his finger, I think, on the animating pulse of the Obama phenomenon -- affirmative action.  Not in the legal sense, of course.  But certainly in the motivating sentiment behind all affirmative action laws and regulations, which are designed primarily to make white people, and especially white liberals, feel good about themselves.

True, Obama himself was never troubled by his lack of achievements, but why would he be?  As many have noted, Obama was told he was good enough for Columbia despite undistinguished grades at Occidental; he was told he was good enough for the US Senate despite a mediocre record in Illinois; he was told he was good enough to be president despite no record at all in the Senate.  All his life, every step of the way, Obama was told he was good enough for the next step, in spite of ample evidence to the contrary.  What could this breed if not the sort of empty  narcissism on display every time Obama speaks?

In 2008, many who agreed that he lacked executive qualifications nonetheless raved about Obama's oratory skills, intellect, and cool character.  Those people -- conservatives included -- ought now to be deeply embarrassed.  The man thinks and speaks in the hoariest of clichés, and that's when he has his teleprompter in front of him; when the prompter is absent he can barely think or speak at all.  Not one original idea has ever issued from his mouth -- it's all warmed-over Marxism of the kind that has failed over and over again for 100 years.

And what about his character?  Obama is constantly blaming anything and everything else for his troubles.  Bush did it; it was bad luck; I inherited this mess.  It is embarrassing to see a president so willing to advertise his own powerlessness, so comfortable with his own incompetence.  But really, what were we to expect?  The man has never been responsible for anything, so how do we expect him to act responsibly?

In short: our president is a small and small-minded man, with neither the temperament nor the intellect to handle his job.  When you understand that, and only when you understand that, will the current erosion of liberty and prosperity make sense.  It could not have gone otherwise with such a man in the Oval Office. 

But hey, at least we got to feel good about ourselves for a little while.  And really, isn't that all that matters these days?

See also: The Era of Confronting Obama at Public Events

Update:

Author's Note.  A lot of readers have written in asking me how I came to the conclusion that Obama was an unremarkable student and that he benefited from affirmative action.  Three reasons:

1)  As reported by The New York Sun: "A spokesman for the university, Brian Connolly, confirmed that Mr. Obama spent two years at Columbia College and graduated in 1983 with a major in political science. He did not receive honors..."  In spite of not receiving honors as an undergrad;Obama as nevertheless dmitted o arvard Law. Why?

2) Obama imself as written e was a poor tudent s a young man. As the Baltimore Sun eported, in:

"'Obama's book 'Dreams from My Father,'....the president ecalled a time in his life...when he started to drift away from the path of success. I had learned not to care,' Obama wrote. '... Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it.' ut his mother confronted him about his behavior. Don't you think you're being a little casual about your future?" she asked him, according to the book. '... One of your friends was just arrested for drug possession. Your grades are slipping. You haven't even started on your college applications.'"

3) Most damning to me is the president's unwillingness to make his transcripts public. If Obama had really been a tellar tudent with impeccable grades as an undergrad, is there any doubt they would have been made public by now and rumpeted n he ront page of the New York Times as proof of is rilliance?  To me it all adds up to affirmative action.  

Mattpattersonline.com

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The Left's Latest Battleground Is Your Neighborhood

March 1, 2021 By Linda R. Killian 

The progressives running the Biden administration are planning a two-pronged strategy to attack traditional suburban families where they live — in their homes and schools.  The Biden campaign platform, largely written by Bernie Sanders and his supporters, called for initiatives for equity in housing and education.  Going forward, these will translate into actions by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to assert its policy to Affirmatively Further Fair Housing (AFFH) and for the Department of Education to impose Critical Race Theory (CRT) to attack both real and intellectual property.  The strategy got underway with the new president's executive order on equity that calls for "an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda."

Their primary weapon is the concept of disparate impact, a conveniently squishy theory that there needs to be no factual finding of discriminatory zoning or racism in schools to conclude that a community is racist.  All disparate impact requires is for a bureaucrat to declare an imbalance of race or income among the residents of a local community or in its school's Advanced Placement courses.

To understand the seriousness of the assault, it is necessary to understand the philosophical origins of the left's positions on private property and the class struggle.  The first tenet of Marxism is the abolition of private real property.  The second is the class struggle between the oppressed proletariat and the oppressing bourgeoisie...........To Read More....

How Affirmative Action Screwed Up Michelle Obama

July 14, 2020 By Jack Cashill

In 1985, Michelle Obama presented her senior thesis in the sociology department of Princeton University. Although Michelle drew no such conclusion, the thesis is a stunning indictment of affirmative action. Those who benefited from it, Michelle most notably, may never recover from its sting.

Her thesis reads like a cry for help. "I have found that at Princeton no matter how matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me," she writes, "I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as I really don't belong."

She didn't. Michelle should never have been admitted to Princeton. Thanks to the "numerous opportunities" presented by affirmative action, however, Princeton is where she found herself. "Told by counselors that her SAT scores and her grades weren't good enough for an Ivy League school," writes biographer Christopher Andersen, "Michelle applied to Princeton and Harvard anyway." Sympathetic biographer Liza Mundy writes, "Michelle frequently deplores the modern reliance on test scores, describing herself as a person who did not test well."

She did not write well, either. She even typed badly. Mundy charitably describes the thesis as "dense and turgid." The less charitable Christopher Hitchens observed, "To describe [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be 'read' at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language."

Hitchens exaggerates only a little......To Read More....

My Take - Go to the comments section.  You might find it interesting to see what readers thought.

The ’64 Civil Rights Act and the Origins of Political Correctness

The Civil RIghts Act of 1964 is a textbook example of unintended consequences

By Nicholas J. Kaster

In his new book The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, Claremont Institute scholar Christopher Caldwell explains how the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark legislation designed to end segregation in the South, gave unprecedented power to Washington and ended up dividing the country.

To be sure, Caldwell recognizes that Jim Crow was immoral and needed to be eradicated. But in doing so, he contends, the law enacted permanent emergency powers that vastly increased federal control over the private lives of Americans. The law created new crimes, outlawed discrimination in almost every aspect of public and private life and exposed nearly every facet of American life to direction from bureaucrats and judges.

What had seemed in 1964 to be merely an ambitious reform revealed itself to be something more. Caldwell writes:

“The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible--and the incompatibility would worsen as the civil rights regime was built out.”

This seems like extreme language today, but there were prominent figures at the time who pointed out that the civil rights laws were on a collision course with the Constitution. Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and law professor Robert Bork both pointed out that the Act created conflicts with the constitutional protections accorded to private property and freedom of association.

“Those who opposed the legislation,” Caldwell observes, “proved wiser about its consequences than those who sponsored it.” .............To Read More

Affirmative Action and NASA

By Joshua Foxworth September 20, 2019

In the 47 years since the last man set foot on the moon, the space program has changed a great deal.  One of those changes has been incorporating mandated affirmative action policies.  These policies have had an incredibly negative effect on both the progress in the space program and the engineers whose careers have been destroyed by them...............To Read More

Washington Lawmakers Pass Initiative 1000, Ending a 2-Decade Ban on Affirmative Action

Joseph O’Sullivan, Seattle Times, April 28, 2019

In a last-minute move, the Washington Legislature Sunday night passed Initiative 1000, a measure that overturns the state’s 20-year-old, voter-approved ban on affirmative action. By Monday morning, a group opposing the initiative had already filed a referendum seeking to put the measure to a public vote.

The development sets up a possible clash over views on race and equity this November at the ballot box — the place where the debate began.  I-1000 repeals Initiative 200, a measure approved by Washington voters 20 years ago. I-200 blocked the government from giving preferential treatment to, or discriminating against, people and groups on the basis of sex, ethnicity, color, race or national origin............To Read More....

Affirmative action ruined Iran's education system, too

By Majid Mohammadi February 12, 2019

In 1982, when Iranian universities and colleges opened their doors to students after the so-called Cultural Revolution, a new group of students was admitted based on affirmative action.  They were coming from very low-income families and from families who had a "martyr" during the 1979 Revolution. Almost all of them failed in STEM courses in the first semester.  In a class of 40, all of them got zero scores in Physics 101.

To cope with these students, faculty members lowered the level of the courses.  As the academic level plunged, more and more of these students occupied university and college seats.  Some years later, the family members of killed soldiers, the veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, and Basij members were added to the list of groups who could benefit from the affirmative action policy.  These groups became the counter-movement to any anti-authoritarian and anti-totalitarian movements in the universities and elsewhere.

Academia down the toilet.........When I came to the U.S. for my Ph.D., I witnessed another show of affirmative action and its consequences.  During my graduate school years, experienced faculty members were replaced by members of minorities who could not teach or write and were not able to do research.

Area studies (women studies, Latino studies...), which offer no basic knowledge to the students, replaced core studies in my department (sociology) and the generation of experts in analytical and theoretical sociology was replaced by identity-oriented faculty members who were mainly activists and not scholars.  In only a decade, the whole department's curricula and quality were bombed into rubbles...............To Read More.........

Asian Plaintiffs Threaten the ‘Rainbow Coalition’,

November 5, 2018 Commentary by Gregory Hood 86 Comments

Ending race preferences would benefit whites.  In August, the Justice Department gave its support to a lawsuit from a group of highly qualified Asian-American applicants rejected by Harvard because—they claimed—they were Asian.

The trial has just ended, and a final ruling will almost certainly come from the Supreme Court. Though the case is ostensibly about the welfare of Asian students, affirmative action’s defenders are worried that if Asians succeed in abolishing race preference, whites would benefit.

The American Civil Liberties Union warned about this in a recent tweet:............This sentiment isn’t surprising given the ACLU’s recent Twitter history. In August 2017, the group tweeted what it thought was a harmless promotion, with an adorable little girl holding an American flag..............The ACLU’s followers accused it of promoting something that looked like “KKK propaganda.” The ACLU groveled and thanked its followers for reminding it that “white supremacy is everywhere.”
...........To Read More.......

 

Affirmative Action Has Failed. It Never Had a Chance to Succeed

College admissions committees can’t repair the damage caused by family dissolution.

David French

This morning the New York Times published an extraordinary, data-rich article examining the outcome of diversity efforts at colleges and universities from coast to coast. The results, quite frankly, are sobering.

After decades of affirmative action, billions of dollars invested in finding, mentoring, and recruiting minority students, and extraordinary levels of effort and experimentation, black and Hispanic students are “more underrepresented at the nation’s top colleges and universities than they were 35 years ago” (emphasis added). White and Asian students, on the other hand, remain overrepresented as a percentage of the population, with Asian students most overrepresented of all.

 

On the one hand, these statistics represent a staggering failure. It’s difficult to overstate the modern campus obsession with diversity............however, one wonders whether failure was inevitable. Not even the most aggressive of affirmative-action programs can find students who don’t exist.......Read more

My Take - There's a lot of leftist babble about racism and it's legacy in this article but I've posted it anyway because there's one incontrovertible fact represented here.  Affirmative Action is a failure!  Why?  Because Affirmative Action is designed to promote those who are a failure as a society.  Black America has a 70 percent illegitimacy rate.  No one can fix a society that irresponsible.  Who forced them into that irresponsible behavior?  Whites?  That's not even an argument leftists attempt to make.  Blacks made that choice.  How can any society be fixed if that society refuses to act in a way that promotes success?  You can't. 

My message to black America is this:

• Stop blaming everyone else for your failures
• No one can force you to be irresponsible, that's a personal choice 
• Stop blaming America because if Black America was a country it would be the 15th richest country in the world
• Stop whining
• Fix yourself and everything else will fall into place
• Recognize "you" are the problem and "you" are the solution 
• Get rid of this attitude of being a good student is "acting white". If that's what creates a successful life - then start acting white
• Learn how to read, write and do arithmetic
• Get a job
• Go to work everyday
• Go to work on time everyday
• Do your job without giving the boss five hundred pounds of attitude
• Don't steal from your boss
• Marry the woman before you make babies with her
• Stay with that woman
• Raise your children with that social ethic

Then and, only then, can Black America be a successful society.